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Noted critic and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn never knew his uncle Shmiel, who died in the Holocaust, but family members who did never forgot him, and they spoke about him to Daniel, who was moved enough to begin a search to learn of the fate of his uncle, his uncle's wife, and their four daughters. Beginning with letters written by Shmiel to his American relatives, Mendelsohn's decades-long search takes him far, including Israel, Ukraine, and Australia, where, along with his photographer brother Matt, he meets with people who knew his uncle and who provide pieces of the story of his life and clues to the circumstances of his death. Mendelsohn's telling of his search is deepened by his commentaries on Biblical tales and classical references. In his search for the lost life of Shmiel Jager, Daniel Mendelsohn recaptures the past in the story of the inhabitants of the town of Bolechow, many of whom perished and a few, all non-Jews, who survived to bear witness to history. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 2006.

Ariel Sabar grew up ashamed of his idiosyncratic father, Yona, a Kurdish Jew from a tiny Iraqi village. Impelled by a mid-life desire to understand him, Sabar investigates the lost world in which his father grew up, retracing the family's expulsion from Iraq, their abysmal period in Israel, and their subsequent life in America. Yona's gradual realization of his linguistic talents and rare knowledge of Aramaic is exhilarating, and his heroic efforts to preserve this dying language are as poignant as the personal story of loss, exile, and reconciliation told so poetically by his son. MY FATHER'S PARADISE won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for best autobiography.

Perhaps no historical figure has come to embody 19th-century European colonialism better than explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who made a name for himself with his long, dangerous expeditions into the heart of Africa--his most famous being his search for the "lost" Scottish missionary Doctor David Livingstone. His exploits, including his brutal treatment of the natives, made him a grand figure in Victorian society, though in subsequent years he has been pilloried as a racist brute. Tim Jeal, in his fascinating biography of Stanley, shows that neither view is precisely true: Stanley frequently exaggerated his adventures, particularly his clashes with the native Africans, to appeal to his audiences at home. Indeed, Jeal paints a remarkable portrait of a man--the poor bastard child of a teenage Welsh woman--who was constantly changing his identity, his story, and even his name in order to rise above the shame of his childhood. Not only does STANLEY: THE IMPOSSIBLE LIFE OF AFRICA'S GREATEST EXPLORER set the historical record straight, it also delves deeply into the psychology of a wonderfully dramatic figure.

It is difficult to believe that this unflinching, candid, and occasionally shocking biography of Nobel-Prize novelist V.S. Naipaul is indeed an authorized one, since it reveals Naipaul's willingness to cast aside friends, lovers, and wives; his brutal sadomasochistic sexual desires--at times beating his mistress until she could not appear in public; and his towering arrogance. These dark revelations were only possible, however, because Naipaul gave biographer Patrick French full access to his papers, including the diaries of his wife, who suffered greatly as he openly cavorted with his long-time mistress, and was only in the grave for days before Naipaul remarried (not to the mistress, who had been also abandoned). Though morally repugnant, Naipaul will still appear as an admirable character to many for the sheer force of his will, his brutally frank observations on culture and personality, and his relentless dedication to rising from his humble Trinidadian roots to become a monolithic figure of post-colonial literature. In 2008 THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS was selected as one of the New York Times 10 Best Books and won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in the Biography category.

Joyce Johnson, a noted writer and critic, describes her time among the Beats in the 1950s.

A biography of the famed Victorian poet, playwright, literary critic, and aesthete, whose career was destroyed by his conviction and imprisonment in 1895 on vice charges. Ellmann, a professor of English at Oxford University, spent more than a decade researching and writing this study, which remains the definitive account of Wilde's life to this day.

In PATRIMONY, a true story, Roth watches as his 86-year-old father, a man famous for his vigor, his charm, and his repertoire of Newark recollections, battles with the brain tumor that will kill him. The son, full of love, anxiety, and dread, accompanies his father through each fearful stage of his final ordeal, and, as he does so, discloses the survivalist tenacity that has distinguished his father's long, stubborn engagement with life.

A literary biography of the intensely intellectual McCarthy, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award when it was published.

Through interviews with lovers, friends, and publishers, and using new material drawn from letters, White explores the perverse extremes of Jean Genet's life as thief and literary celebrity, and examines the myths--many of them self-perpetuated--that evolved around him. Photos.

When Gary Gilmore was convicted for a double homicide in 1977, his execution--by firing squad--was the first in the United States in over a decade, and particularly noteworthy because Gilmore refused his right to appeal. Here Gary Gilmore's brother recollects his visits to death row and the meditations on his family life that they inspired.

The first comprehensive biography of the author of "The Grifters" and "The Killer Inside Me" includes 40 photographs. This book traces Thompson's involvement in the Wobblies and the Communist party; the "true crime" magazines and pulp fiction houses where Thompson's work was initially published; and his experience in Hollywood with Stanley Kubrick and others. In 1977, Thompson died a poverty-stricken alcoholic. Most of his books are now back in print, and four of them have recently been filmed.

After years of teaching creative writing, Frank McCourt published his first book, thus obliging his many friends who had been urging him to write about his childhood--a subject they knew from the many uproarious and affecting stories he told about it. ANGELA'S ASHES traces the tortuous path of his life from his days in abysmal poverty in Limerick, Ireland, to his arrival in New York as a teenager, eager to start a new life.

A biography of the celebrated American journalist and war correspondent. Pyle was perhaps the most famous of the overseas correspondents during the Second World War, and his death under fire in 1945 was mourned by Americans all across the globe. James Tobin, a prize-winning reporter for the Detroit News, provides a large selection of Pyle's published columns along with his biography.

This biography analyzes how Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash's eccentric personality helped him to develop revolutionary mathematical processes, and chronicles the transformation of this prolific eccentricity into a 30-year bout of paranoid schizophrenia and eventual recovery in 1990. Nasar provides insights into this illness and its devastating effects through Nash's letters, interviews with his colleagues, and her own compilation of research in the field. A New York Times Notable Book for 1998.

Undoubtedly one of the most inventive and unorthodox memoirs ever written, A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS became an instant bestseller, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and made Dave Eggers's name as a brilliant, risk-taking young writer. Orphaned in college when his parents both died of cancer in the span of 32 days, Eggers and his kid brother Toph moved to San Francisco and set up a delightfully unorthodox life together, a mix of carefree adolescence and the unexpected responsibilities of adulthood. In between enrolling Toph in school, finding a home, juggling various romances, and auditioning for THE REAL WORLD, Eggers founded MIGHT, an independent magazine featuring a potent blend of commentary, cynicism, and comedy--the same raucous style that would fuel his memoir. Though AHWOSG turns the memoir genre on its head and teems with self-mockery and postmodern trickery, beneath the cleverness it is a remarkable story of youthful hope and zeal, a story that became an instant classic for the youth generation at the dawn of the 21st century.

Describing how James Boswell (1740-1795) undertook the mammoth project of compiling the life of Dr. Samuel Johnson, Sisman has drawn a poignant portrait of one of history's most important literary friendships. Sisman describes their companionship, which grew over a 21 year period, and led them on many excursions including their famous 1773 journey to the Hebrides, during which both Boswell and Johnson kept journals. Much of BOSWELL'S PRESUMPTUOUS TASK covers the seven years between Johnson's death and the publication of Boswell's celebrated biography of him. A New York Times Notable Book for 2001.

Drawing upon a huge array of sources, including previously unpublished material, the author brings us Darwin's childhood years; his long scientific apprenticeship at sea aboard the Beagle; his triumphs and travails as a husband and father, and as a dogged researcher contending with almost continuous ill-health. This volume illuminates how this great figure of 19th-century science gradually refined the ideas that would fall upon the world like a thunderclap in "The Origin of Species." A New York Times Notable Book for 2002.

A definitive biography of Virgil Thomson, the distinguished American composer and music critic. One of the most influential figures in the American arts of the 20th century, Thomson was an intimate of Gertrude Stein, Orsen Welles, Lincoln Kirstein, and Paul Bowles, and--as a critic for the Herald Tribune, the New York Review of Books, and other journals--he helped shape public tastes to a degree that still persists.

This collection of essays includes Vidal's noted pieces on Theodore Roosevelt, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, and on the need for a new constitutional convention and ranges across a wide spectrum of social, political, and literary matters.

In this collection of literary essays by the great American novelist, Updike's subjects range from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Don DeLillo, from folk tales to Lévi-Strauss.

These twelve essays about language and the art of writing view the creation of literature as the supremely civilized act, one in which observation of the world is transformed by the artist into a work of art to which anyone can have access.

In this landmark collection of essays, which Brodsky wrote in English, he contemplates poets and poetics, as well as his own autobiography, ethics, politics, and tradition. His favorite poets--Auden, Cavafy, Walcott--and others are explored.

Collects a variety of articles on dance by influential New York journalist and master critic Edwin Denby which he wrote for Dance Magazine, Modern Music journal, and the Herald Tribune.

'America's most renowned cultural anthropologist...analyzes the literary forms of several anthropologist notables.'-Richard A. Scweder, The New York Times Book Review

Since 1984, when he became art critic for The Nation, Arthur C. Danto, one of America's most inventive and influential philosophers, has also emerged as one of our most important critics of art. As an essayist, Danto's style is at once rigorous, incisive, and playful. Encounters and Reflections brings together many of his recent critical writings -- on artists such as Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and Robert Mapple-thorpe; and on the significance of issues like the masterpiece and the museum. The result is a spirited brief from the front lines of current aesthetic and philosophical debate.

Shows how oral Holocaust memories complement historical studies by confronting the human dimensions of the catastrophe.

Historian Wills provides a close reading of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address--including commentary on various editions. He provides the historical context for the speech, and explains why he thinks it was such a visionary statement.

Winner of the 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.

"The Culture of Bruising" is a collection of essays on race and culture. The sport of boxing is at the heart of the book because the author regards it as a metaphor for the way a culture can bruise the individual. Topics covered discussed in the pieces include multiculturalism, baseball, Malcolm X, and Black History Month.

The best-selling books in France during the waning decades of the ancien regime were not the outlawed works of great philosophers such as Voltaire and Rousseau, but other books, also banned by the government, written and sold "under the cloak." These formed a libertine literature that was a crucial part of the culture of dissent in the ancien regime. Robert Darnton explores the cultural and political significance of these "bad" books and introduces readers to three of the most influential illegal best-sellers, from which he includes substantial excerpts.

Gass's first collection of essays in eight years concerns art, writing, culture, and nature. Specifically, he looks at the relationship of a writer's life to the writer's work. Gass also writes about history, the avant-garde, minimalism, the use of the present tense in contemporary fiction, biography as a form, and exile. Through these issues, he is always examining language and its relationship to consciousness.

As Vargas Llosa puts it: "A writer has no better way of serving his country than by writing with as much discipline and honesty as he can.... If he writes better in his country, he must stay there; if he writes better in exile, he must leave." The topics of these essays range from memories to Madrid to the Lorena Bobbitt affair to Faulkner and Joyce to Latin American politics.

Gary Giddins' idiosyncratic series of essays on key figures in 20th-century jazz doesn't pretend to be an all-inclusive guide to the key players in the first century of the music's history; his introduction makes plain that, aside from obvious inclusions like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, he regards generally unsung candidates like Bert Williams, who wrote and performed in the first all-black musical on Broadway, and pioneering early jazz vocalist Ethel Waters, among a host of others, as equally worthy of attention, as much for their "inventiveness, irreverence, and canny involvement with other musics and life as we live it" as for their musical contributions. Consequently, VISIONS OF JAZZ contains a plethora of lively and engaged jazz writing, with chapters on the little-known Cuban composer and arranger Chico O'Farrill, who worked with Benny Goodman, Machito, and Count Basie, and the blind saxophonist Rahsaan Roland Kirk, who played three horns simultaneously and sampled liberally from idioms ranging from Dixieland to free jazz, among dozens of others. In its celebration of the adventurous and experimental spirit of the music, VISIONS is a superlative primer in jazz appreciation.

In this collection of her magazine pieces, Cynthia Ozick writes about such varied topics as her adolescence, Jane Austen, the Unabomber vs. Dostoevsky, selfishness in the artist, and the misuses to which Anne Frank's diary have been put. A New York Times Notable Book for the year 2000. Winner in 2001 of a National Book Critics Circle Award.

In this comprehensive collection of essays, Martin Amis tackles such diverse subjects as Elvis, Margaret Thatcher, Andy Warhol, the Guinness Book of Records, Abraham Lincoln, poker, chess, and American movies. He also comments pungently on a variety of literary works, including PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, DON QUIXOTE, ULYSSES, LOLITA, and the writers Philip Larkin, John Updike, Elmore Leonard, and Gore Vidal.

Fourteen essays by novelist and philosopher William H. Gass, about literature, society, and politics. A New York Times Notable Book for 2002.

Alex Ross, the wonderfully erudite and insightful music critic for The New Yorker, traces the shifting currents of classical music from the 1906 premiere of Richard Strauss's SALOME to the end of the 20th century. Along the way, he provides vivid portraits of classical composers, brings to life pivotal moments, and shows the role history played in shaping the evolution of the genre. Though his knowledge of both music and history can be quite astounding, Ross never allows himself to become excessively technical, and his ambitious and scintillating book should be exciting for layman and classical aficionado alike.

This overview of literature for young people thoughtfully examines the importance of children's stories throughout Western history. Seth Lerer places such classic works as ALICE'S ADVENDURES IN WONDERLAND, THE GIVING TREE, and the Harry Potter series in the context of their times in order to explain how these tales for children reflect the ever-changing mores of "family life and human growth." Furthermore, Lerer also introduces readers to such influential authors as Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, and Laura Ingalls Wilder and explains how they, "despite their divergent styles and subject matter, have all resonated with generations of readers." The book won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for best criticism.

Updike's third novel (after RABBIT, RUN and RABBIT REDUX) about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom follows the Pennsylvania car salesman's passage into middle age in the turbulent 1970s. Rabbit has achieved success as a salesman at Springer Motors, but his life is not without problems, including the return of his recalcitrant son Nelson, the return of an old flame into his life, and the ever-volatile relationship with Janice, his wife. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1982.

Doomed by a thousand-year-old curse to serve important personages throughout the centuries, George Mills loves and follows various lieges, from a stableboy ancestor in the First Crusade to a modern-day furniture mover. Reprint. LJ.

This is the third novel in Kennedy's Albany Trilogy. Set in the 1930s, it explores the world of vagabonds through Francis Phelan, former baseball player turned hobo. Although the trilogy has recurring characters, one need not have read the previous two novels--LEGS and BILLY PHELAN'S GREATEST GAME--to appreciate this beautiful story.

Macon Leary, the middle-aged author of a series of books for armchair travellers, has recently had his grief over the murder of his son compounded by the breakup of his marriage. He begins to descend into obsessive behavior and must soon take refuge with his unmarried sister, who is already occupied with the two other Leary brothers, both of whom are also divorced. Macon's unlikely rescuer is Muriel, an eccentric dog trainer who tames Edward, the increasingly obnoxious corgi left to Macon by his son. Macon transcends his own social class prejudice to find that he has a lot to offer Muriel and her disabled son Alexander, and that they have much to offer him as well.

Narrated by a woman who has lived a long and tumultuous life, this novel won the National Book Critics Circle Award when it was first published in 1986.

In this 1986 novel, Roth's perennial antihero and alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, travels to Israel (among other places) and discovers that a price must be paid if he is going to fulfill the dream to change his life--to find for himself a "counterlife" that will be more fulfilling and vital than the one he leaves behind. Roth plays with the idea of identity in the lives of Nathan and his dentist brother Henry, in a five-part novel that takes the characters through a series of illuminating changes.

In these tales told by immigrants trying to make new lives in various American cities, their true search is for empowerment and dignity. Mukherjee's second collection was the winner of the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

On Bathgate Avenue in the Bronx of the Great Depression, Billy spends his boyhood being groomed as an apprentice thug working for the notorious gangster Dutch Schultz. When he falls in love with Drew, his boss's girl, he begins to think that the life of a mobster may not be the glamorous world he expected, and he resolves to take Drew away from it all.

Updike's fourth "Rabbit" novel presents the human condition as personified by Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. The fat, aging, ill Rabbit must also cope with his son's drug addiction, his wife's troubles, a former girlfriend who turns up suffering from lupus, and the world in general, with which Rabbit has always had a love-hate relationship. In this last work of his tetralogy, Updike dissects the horrors and failures of American society, while still managing to find hope, if not for Rabbit, then perhaps for the rest of us. RABBIT AT REST won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1991.

The first volume in McCarthy's Border Trilogy, ALL THE PRETTY HORSES begins with the death of John Grady Cole's grandfather. John Grady, age 16, has lived with his grandfather for much of his life, and when the old man dies and the family home--a ranch in Texas--is sold, John Grady and his old friend Lacey Rawlins take off for Mexico, looking for a place in a world that seems increasingly hostile. Almost immediately, they encounter trouble, and the trip is studded with death, loss, violence, stolen horses, and thwarted love. By the time John Grady returns home--alone--he is irrevocably changed.

A story of injustice and redemption set in rural Louisiana during the late 1940s. Grant Wiggins, a backwoods schoolmaster, is asked visit a young black prisoner on death row. Jefferson, the prisoner, was falsely accused and convicted of murder and is sentenced to hang, and Wiggins' job, once he realizes the impossibility of overturning the verdict, is to prepare the boy for death. Although, as a nonbeliever, Wiggins at first finds himself in competition with the minister for the boy's attention, he eventually comes to see that the cultivation of any instinct of love--human or religious--is the essence of salvation, both for Jefferson and himself.

This novel chronicles the life of a Canadian woman, born in 1905 out of love and tragedy, and follows her life through marriage, motherhood and widowhood as she ages with the century.

Dorothy Bliss, having buried her husband Ted, spends her remaining years in a condominium overlooking Florida's Biscyane bay. Her character is illuminated not with action and plot twists, but rather with the mundane quotidian details of her life as an 80-year-old widow in the final stages of her own existence. This was Elkin's last novel before his death in 1995.

A collection of 35 spare and concise stories, including 10 heretofore uncollected. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1997.

In eight new stories, a master of the form extends and magnifies her great themes--the vagaries of love, the passion that leads down unexpected paths, the chaos hovering just under the surface of things, and the strange, often comical desires of the human heart.Time stretches out in some of the stories: a man and a woman look back forty years to the summer they met--the summer, as it turns out, that the true nature of their lives was revealed. In others time is telescoped: a young girl finds in the course of an evening that the mother she adores, and whose fluttery sexuality she hopes to emulate, will not sustain her--she must count on herself.Some choices are made--in a will, in a decision to leave home--with irrevocable and surprising consequences. At other times disaster is courted or barely skirted: when a mother has a startling dream about her baby; when a woman, driving her grandchildren to visit the lakeside haunts of her youth, starts a game that could have dangerous consequences. The rich layering that gives Alice Munro's work so strong a sense of life is particularly apparent in the title story, in which the death of a local optometrist brings an entire town into focus--from the preadolescent boys who find his body, to the man who probably killed him, to the woman who must decide what to do about what she might know. Large, moving, profound--these are stories that extend the limits of fiction.

A private detective named Lionel "Freakshow" Essrog, who suffers from Tourette's syndrome, is the hero of Lethem's novel, set in a particularly colorful part of Brooklyn. Essrog must track down the murderer of his old friend, and boss, the big-time gangster Frank Minna. A 1999 New York Times Notable Book.

These poetic short stories, many of which meditate on death, involve fates that cross in the night but pause long enough to influence one another.

The narrator of Sebald's fourth novel meets Jacques Austerlitz in a railroad station, and from there their friendship continues, revolving around a series of conversations, ostensibly about architecture but soon expanding to include the details of Austerlitz's life. The narrator learns that he was separated from his true parents at the age of 5, when they were killed in the Holocaust, and raised in Wales with no knowledge of his past--a personal history he unraveled much later in life. The story is illustrated mysteriously with photographs of buildings and people. A New York Times "Editor's Choice" for 2001.

ATONEMENT, which Ian McEwan has called his "Jane Austen novel," is divided into three sections, reaching from the first chapter, set in 1935, to a startling coda in the early 2000s. In between is wartime Europe and a group of nurses tending to wounded soldiers; this section also describes the aftermath of the battle of Dunkirk, in which McEwan's father fought. (McEwan gives his father, who died just before ATONEMENT was published, a walk-on part.) The story revolves around a disastrous misunderstanding by a young teenage girl, which leads to a tragic series of events that culminate in a stunning surprise ending. ATONEMENT was short-listed for the 2001 Booker Prize. A New York Times "Editor's Choice" for 2002.

Oscar Wao is an overweight Dungeons & Dragons-playing geek living in a Dominican-American ghetto whose dreams are cut short by the 500-year curse that has plagued his family and his people, "The Curse of the New World." In his first novel since his universally revered collection of short stories, DROWN, Junot Diaz continues to distill the essence of the fractured second-generation experience. The rich tapestry of language in the novel (slang, Spanish, and the poetry of Homer) speaks volumes about the complicated and violent paths by which we find our place in the world. THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 2008.

Exposes the fatal flaws in the ranking of people according to their supposed gifts and limits by discussing the development of the theory of limits and by reanalyzing the data on which it is based.

The racial turmoil of late 1960s and early '70s Boston is expertly conjured in J. Anthony Lukas's COMMON GROUND, which explores the aftermath of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis in 1968. The book chronicles the attempts to bring the black and white communities together, both through simple experiments in social engineering--like televising a James Brown concert to prevent further rioting--and the more problematic method of busing black students into white schools, a practice that caused even more strife. But COMMON GROUND also delves into the complex mechanics of trying to carve out a life in a modern city. Lukas focuses on the efforts of three families--the black Twymons, the working-class Irish McGoffs, and the white, patrician Divers--to enhance, improve, and preserve their way of life against a background of huge social upheaval. He shows how well-meaning political decisions can become embroiled in corruption, how middle-class ambitions can destroy the delicate balance of a neighborhood, and how defending a way of life can swiftly degenerate into violence and brutality. Along the way, Lukas also lays bare the intricate societal relationships that make up a community, sensitively presenting the motivations of a dizzying array of characters from every social level. In addition to being a valuable history lesson, COMMON GROUND is an essential aid to understanding the convoluted interaction of political forces at work in any modern movement for social change.

Traces the development of the atomic bomb from Leo Szilard's concept through the drama of the race to build a workable device to the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima.

In this collection named after a phrase from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Shelby Steele addresses issues of race, identity, and social policy in a series of highly readable and thought-provoking essays.

Norman MacLean scrupulously examines the tragic events of August 5, 1949, when lightning struck and started a forest fire in the Rocky Mountains. Thirteen young airborne firefighters were killed trying to extinguish it, when a 200-foot high firestorm erupted into a vast wall of death. MacLean, who had been both a forester and a firefighter in his youth, left the manuscript of this monumental work unfinished at his own death in 1990, at the age of 88; he had spent 14 years writing it.

An account of the fate of Europe's great works of art in the Third Reich and the Second World War. Nicholas traces the Third Reich's war on European culture and the Allies' desperate attempts to preserve it. Covering the Nazi purges of 'degenerate' art, Goerings's shopping sprees in occupied Paris, and the reclamation of the priceless treasures of liberated Italy, "The Rape of Europa" is a gripping narrative peopled with such figures as Adolf Hitler, Hermann Goering, Gertrude Stein, and Marc Chagall. Ninety b&w illustrations and photographs.

In the midst of a raging snowstorm, a trial on Puget Sound in the 1950s pits the island's Japanese-American inhabitants against the local fisherman: a courtroom drama plus a study of conflicts between cultures and generations.

Jonathan Raban, an Englishman, explores the harrowing reality behind the dream of the American West. Using the accounts of homesteaders, he evokes the realities of their disappointments, exploding our idea of the West as a realm of stable, settled communities and revealing a much less wholesome landscape peopled by loners and sociopaths. This book was nominated for the 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction.

The author tells the story of the Lees, a family of Hmong refugees in California whose epileptic baby daughter, Lia, is taken in hand by the Western medical establishment. The Lees believe that Lia's condition is caused by spirits called dabs, who had caught her and made her fall down. Her doctors want to treat her condition with sophisticated drugs, which her parents refuse to give her. In this sad tale of cultural misunderstanding, two incompatible worlds collide, with heart-wrenching consequences. Nominated for the 1998 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction.

A history of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, in which longstanding enmity between the Tutsi and Hutu tribes resulted in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus by the extremist Hutu majority. Gourevitch contrasts horrific eyewitness accounts told by Rwandans with the muted responses of the rest of the world. He also assesses Rwanda's prospects for the future and contemplates what lessons humanity can learn from this hellish chapter in history.

This biography of the emperor of Japan examines his formative years and how they shaped his character, his deft grasp of both the imperial system and modernity, his wielding of power and influence within his country, and that country's conflicts with major powers such as China and the United States. Winner of the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography and a 2001 Pulitzer Prize.

This study of genocide in the 20th century examines America's pattern of reluctance to intervene--including in the Holocaust, in Cambodia, and in Bosnia. A New York Times Notable Book for 2002.

British historian Simon Schama provides a fresh historical perspective as he tells how and why many American slaves chose to fight on the British side during the American Revolution. Decrying the misinformation spread at the time by the American side, Schama explains the British views on slavery, including how the rule and protection of law was intended to apply to all. He tells how, when war broke out, the British offered incentives for slaves to leave plantations, which they did in large numbers, fighting with distinction. After the war, many slaves fled north to British Nova Scotia, only to be sent to Sierra Leone. ROUGH CROSSINGS puts forth a seldom told chapter in American history, and calls into question many generally accepted notions about slavery in America.

In this study of race, medicine, and history, Harriet A. Washington provides an in-depth account of three centuries of medical experimentation on African Americans by the medical community, and the ideas that lay behind it all. Carried out without the knowledge or consent of the subjects, this so-called research was legitimized as "scientific" inquiry into intelligence, sexuality, psychology, criminality, disease, and other topics. Often the experiments caused great harm and suffering, both physically and mentally. The most famous of these was the Tuskegee study, for which Washington provides new information, but in MEDICAL APARTHEID, she makes us aware that this brutality was more pervasive than is commonly known; that it occurred in prisons, hospitals, the military, and other institutions; and that it was often sanctioned by the government. MEDICAL APARTHEID won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle award in General Nonfiction.

Journalist Dexter Filkins provides a long view of the conflict with Islamofascism, before and after 9/11. Filkins reports on the rise of the Taliban in the '90s, the attacks of September 11, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and their aftermath. He covers a great deal of territory, reporting from many locales on the lives of everyday people caught up in the historical events. Selected as one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2008, and winner of the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for best general nonfiction book.

Poems explore a diversity of subjects including ballet, Japanese paintings, and a satirical view of vegetables.

A vast, sacred epic poem for a postreligious age. The poem was dictated by a ouija board over a period of twenty years, and it reveals the dangers confronting the human race--a work that combines narrative, drama, humor, and lyricism.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984, Olds's book of poetry considers her abusive past and her own children against a backdrop of international political violence.

This collection received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1985.

Brief, intense poems deal with nature, change, violence, longing, indolence, love, aging, death, city life, parenthood, work, greed, and war.

Hall celebrates his sixtieth birthday with the most powerful poem he has ever written, a book-length work that evokes the kind of public power associated with Hall's teacher Archibald MacLeish.

Winner of the third annual T. S. Eliot Prize.

A new poetry collection, concerned with themes of irony and temporariness.

The first book in seven years from the Poet Laureate of the United States. Nominated for the 1996 National Book Award, and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 1997.

A new collection of poetry from the author of COUNTRY MUSIC and THE WORLD OF TEN THOUSAND THINGS.

James Tate chose this debut collection for the 1999 Walt Whitman Award. Amid the squalor and violence of the subject matter, the beauty of language takes hold.

Rembrandt, Houdini, Barnum, and the Hardy Boys gather in this collection of poems by Goldberg in which the drive of his storytelling is met by the erudition of his imagination. Family, identity, and salvation are pondered in poems that are, by turns, witty and grave.

Noted Southern poet Fairchild follows up his award-winning ART OF THE LATHE with a series of lyrics and meditations on America and those who dream it. This collection won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2002.

Mary Jo Bang's fifth book of poetry features the same carefully off-kilter free verse and obsessions with the nature of art that preoccupied her previous collections, but in ELEGY, these techniques are no longer the central concern, and have been put into use to memorialize the life of Bang's dead son, and to track the unfolding nature of her grief. The fusion of her considerable poetic and intellectual gifts with her raw autobiographical subject results in a work of aching beauty--quite possibly her finest work up to this point. ELEGY was a New York Times Notable Book of 2008.

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