By David Ebershoff. ) THE LILY THEATER: A Novel of Modern China. THE YEAR OF JUBILO: A Novel of the Civil War. SEEING THROUGH PLACES: Reflections on Geography and Identity. THE MARRIAGE AT ANTIBES.
An intellectual and political biography of the politician and scholar who spent a lifetime confounding allies and enemies alike. Forebears of the author, the Langhorne girls embodied the Platonic ideal of Southern belle, collectively bagging more than 70 proposals of marriage (full disclosure: 63 were for one sister alone), a 55-carat diamond, 8 husbands and a Lady Astorship. Cell authority maybe crossword. THE HOUSE OF ROTHSCHILD: The World's Banker, 1849-1999. By Ring Lardner Jr. (Thunder's Mouth /Nation, $22. )
The companion volume to a forthcoming television documentary, richly illustrated, that gives the story of jazz through a biographical focus. The author, a professor of journalism at New York University, goes on the road to report how a range of black people are coping with the United States at the millennium. Eight essays about places she inhabited that illuminate the author's fiction, including a guilt-ridden household and an oppressive but grandly historical church. Nobody writes about the bad old days down South like Burke, whose obsession with the undead past digs up a half-buried domestic murder and draws his Louisiana sheriff's deputy, Dave Robicheaux, into a violent confrontation with two corrupt cops who seem to have killed his mother. A memoir of disintegration under the stresses of noncommunication, divorce and dumb decisions even while living in Sunnyvale, the ground zero of West Coast optimism. Cell authority maybe nyt crossword puzzle crosswords. By Scott L. Malcomson. ) STRANGE FRUIT: Billie Holiday, Cafe Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights. By Victor Klemperer. )
Kendall's examination of her own story and her family's story is illuminated by reflection on her mother, who left Vassar to bear and raise six children, a course now hard to imagine. A bold effort to erase the border between insider and outsider views of race, tracing the American invention of white and nonwhite categories as well as the racial histories of Indians, African-Americans, white Americans and Oakland, Calif., the author's hometown. Cell authority maybe nyt crossword. OBERAMMERGAU: The Troubling Story of the World's Most Famous Passion Play. Ages 8 and up) The blockbuster fourth volume about the young wizard at boarding school probably needs no further comment.
Reflections from the author of ''Death of a Salesman'' on drama, politics and the nature of evil. The second volume of Lewis's distinguished biography picks up Du Bois's life after World War I and pursues it through a series of trials and disappointments scarcely to be matched in the life of any scholar of any race. An antiromance, really, in which Overbye, the deputy science editor of The Times, applies recent discoveries about Einstein to examine both his scientific work and his emotional life; in the end, he portrays the great scientist as a rat with women and an irresponsible father. By Samuel G. Freedman. ) By Malcolm Gladwell.
This panoramic first novel about the stormy postcolonial history of Uganda covers 30 years of baleful activity as experienced by three generations of a single family. EQUAL LOVE: STORIES. WORDS ALONE: The Poet T. Eliot. DARKNESS IN EL DORADO: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon. By Theodore Sturgeon. KING DAVID: A Biography.
GREENE ON CAPRI: A Memoir. By Larry McMurtry. ) An oral history, compiled by the daughter and granddaughter of the formidably descended aristocrat who went into the decorating business in 1933 and lived a life characterized by robust frivolity and lots of hard work. An account of the Central Intelligence Agency's covert financing of cultural activities as part of the cold war. The Harvard musicologist reconstructs the shock of the new at the first performances of five musical masterpieces.
Applause Books, $40. ) In this bitterly funny first novel -- a perverse morality tale set in Wichita, Kan., in 1979 -- a corrupt lawyer tries to skip town on Christmas Eve with the cash he's been skimming from the pornographic enterprises he operates for two mobsters but learns that holiday sentiment has no place in the bleak world of noir fiction. By Maurice Isserman. HIROHITO AND THE MAKING OF MODERN JAPAN. University of North Carolina, cloth, $49. A breezy, famous-name-filled autobiography by the gossip columnist who still feels awed that she has known so many celebrities.
WEIRD LIKE US: My Bohemian America. The author continues the story of his own ''All Souls' Rising, '' energetically pursuing historical characters through the complexities of the Haitian slave revolt, particularly the great born general Toussaint L'Ouverture. PASSIONATE MINDS: Women Rewriting the World. An absorbing, though uncomfortable, history of a famous force that has always, periodically, suffered from brutality, incompetence and corruption; and is nevertheless one of the world's best, superior in crime control, technology, detection and, of all things, the management of violence. THE MAN WHO WROTE THE BOOK. In a series of essays, the author, who gets about enormously, addresses issues of worldwide displacement (including ''Indian Pakistani-style Chinese food'' found in a Toronto restaurant). Reconsideration, renunciation and migration, not only from beliefs and loves but also from the very tools of her art, are the themes of Graham's newest collection. Ages 10 and up) The hero is a good boy with no internal brakes; this novel about the lovable Joey's troubled summer with his father is insightful, without being preachy, about the problems a high-spirited boy faces today. By Jeffery Renard Allen. ) BETWEEN FATHER AND SON: Family Letters.