June 20, 2004

Paperback Highlights

ICTION | NONFICTION

Bay of Souls
By ROBERT STONE
In a departure from many of his earlier novels -- it's shorter, for one thing, and not as violent -- Stone tells the tale of an unhappily married Midwestern professor and his dangerous affair with a divorcee whose soul may have been stolen by her recently deceased brother in a voodoo rite. The lovers wind up on a politically unstable Caribbean island, where they try to recover family valuables and secure the return of her soul in a trance ritual. Last year our reviewer, Norman Rush, said this ''unnerving'' book illuminates ''subtle propositions about the human predicament and those extreme paths that purport to lead the seeker up and out of it.''

The Book Against God
By JAMES WOOD
The author, a literary critic from England with an affinity for the great novels of the 19th and early 20th centuries, tackles Big Things like theology, literature and faith in his own first novel, the tale of a shiftless intellectual whose spiritual crisis is linked to his difficult father, a parish priest with a suspicious resemblance to that other Father. Though the book is flawed by overreaching and pretentiousness, it is ''filled with pleasures'' (including witty sketches of English eccentrics), Daniel Mendelsohn wrote in these pages in 2003. ''Again and again . . . you come across sentences that have metaphoric glamour and potency.''

Brick Lane
By MONICA ALI
Set in the cloistered world of Bangladeshi immigrants in London's East End, this acclaimed first novel tells of an 18-year-old woman ''from the village'' who enters into an arranged marriage with a 40-year-old man who yearns to return home as a success. When his prospects sour, she becomes a garment worker and discovers her own desire: she falls in love with the man who delivers the clothes she works on. In her ''deeply rewarding'' tale, chosen by the editors of the Book Review as one of the best books of 2003, Ali displays a ''technical assurance and an inborn generosity that cannot be learned,'' Michael Gorra wrote in these pages.

Evidence of Things Unseen
By MARIANNE WIGGINS
This novel, which runs from World War I to the development of the atomic bomb, follows the lives of two American spirits: a practical small-town woman and her soulmate, a scientist and celestial idealist with a passion for all forms of natural light. The result is ''one of the most suggestively original love stories in our current fiction,'' Richard Eder said in these pages last year. ''Wiggins has written something approaching an epic.''

Heart, You Bully, You Punk
By LEAH HAGER COHEN
In this novel about the mysterious, unpredictable ways people's hearts interfere with their lives, a Brooklyn math teacher volunteers to tutor an injured teenage student and winds up falling for her middle-aged father. As it exposes the three characters' very different attitudes toward love, the book becomes ''a lively, thoughtful pleasure,'' Benjamin Swett said here last year.

Vernon God Little
By DBC PIERRE
Talk about audacious territory for tragicomedy: Vernon Gregory Little, at the tender age of 15, becomes the center of his town's lust for retribution after his best friend comes to school with a rifle and murders 16 classmates. Though innocent, he stumbles though his ordeal, harassed, victimized, abused and eventually jailed. ''Pierre renders adolescence brilliantly'' in this ''dangerous, smart, ridiculous and very funny first novel,'' Sam Sifton wrote here in 2003.

What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal
By ZOE HELLER
At the center of this darkly comic novel is a teacher in her 60's who befriends a 42-year-old colleague under attack for having an affair with a 15-year-old student. The older woman's diary, which challenges the outrage about the seduction of minors, reveals as much about the teller as the subject. Heller pulls off the story with ''wry grace,'' Lisa Zeidner said here last year.

FICTION | NONFICTION

Byron: Life and Legend
By FIONA MacCARTHY
Do we really need another biography of the 19th-century pop icon who spawned so many cultural cliches? This one breaks new ground by theorizing that Lord Byron was essentially gay and used women to distract him from his true desires at a time when homosexuality was a crime. Whether or not her premise holds up, MacCarthy's ''detailed chronicle of Byron's complicated romantic history'' brings us ''a little closer to the awe in which he was held by his contemporaries,'' Judith Shulevitz said here last year.

Creating a Life: What Every Woman Needs to Know About Having a Baby and a Career
By SYLVIA ANN HEWLETT
When it came out in 2002, "Creating a Life" caused a fuss by citing a survey that found that more than a third of highly paid professional women over 40 are childless, many because they waited too late to try to have babies. Beyond that, the book raises a vexed question: how do ambitious women balance work, marriage and motherhood? The result is ''an attempt to help women think about how to get what they want'' and ''a jumping-off point for a national conversation that is long overdue,'' Susan Chira said here.

Isaac Newton
By JAMES GLEICK
By teasing apart Newton's multifaceted interests (he discovered the laws of motion, universal gravitation and the optics of color, among other things) into separate chapters arranged with a chronological flow, the author brings texture, color and drama to a mostly reclusive life. The result is ''the biography of choice for the interested layman,'' Owen Gingerich wrote here in 2003.

The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn
By DIANE RAVITCH
In her study of bias and sensitivity panels set up to advise on textbooks and curriculums, the author argues that what began as an ''entirely reasonable'' effort in the 1960's to bring fairness to educational materials has evolved into a ''broad and increasingly bizarre policy of censorship.'' Last year our reviewer, Daniel J. Kevles, called this a ''revealing and important'' book.

Long for This World
By MICHAEL BYERS
A Seattle geneticist on the trail of a cure for a disease that causes rapid aging and early death in children is forced to choose between saving the life of a beloved patient or following protocols that would delay benefits for years. The result is a ''piercing scientific and familial romance,'' Kerry Fried said here last year.

Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal
By ZACHARY KARABELL
In 1869, a French dreamer named Ferdinand de Lesseps succeeded in building one of the most heralded and contentious artifacts in history, replacing a wide sand track with a waterway that allowed the Red Sea to mingle with the Mediterranean for the first time. In his ''entirely splendid'' book, ''Karabell writes with the authority and power of a gifted and fascinated Arabist,'' Simon Winchester wrote here in 2003.

Scout's Honor: A Father's Unlikely Foray Into the Woods
By PETER APPLEBOME
At the age of 49, Applebome, who writes the Our Towns column for The Times, joined a Boy Scout troop in Chappaqua, N.Y., with his son; before long he found himself hiking, camping and impaling his canoe on a rock. In his account of the scouting life, ''he accomplishes everything except tying knots and conveys his experiences with a delightfully self-deprecating humor,'' Diane Scharper wrote here in 2003.

The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood
By HUGO HAMILTON
Growing up with an Irish father and German mother in Dublin in the 1950's, the author was an outcast in matters of dress (lederhosen and Aran sweaters) and language, squeezed between bullying outside the home and tyranny inside. Last year our reviewer, James Lasdun, said ''the rare quality'' of Hamilton's ''painful, funny, densely beautiful'' memoir ''owes much to . . . his handling of the child's point of view throughout, with its luminously uncomprehending attentiveness to adult behavior.''

Travels With a Tangerine: From Morocco to Turkey in the Footsteps of Islam's Greatest Traveler
By TIM MACKINTOSH-SMITH
In 1325, a 21-year-old Tangerine (as residents of Tangier are called) named Ibn Battutah left home on a journey that took him some 75,000 miles over the next 29 years, to more than 40 countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The author, an Englishman hooked on Arab culture, retraces many of his steps in the Levant and elsewhere. The result is a ''civilized'' account by ''an intensely curious scholar who can write better than many novelists,'' Geoffrey Moorhouse said here in 2002.

Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress, 1903-2003
By DOUGLAS BRINKLEY
Synthesizing new information from the company archives with previous studies and historical and sociological data, Brinkley offers up a sprawling chronicle of the Ford Motor Company and especially its founder, whose one big idea -- cheap cars for the masses -- endures to this day. In 2003 in these pages, Richard Lingeman called it a ''first-rate corporate history.''