September 16, 2007
Browsing Books: NYTimes Editor’s Choice
BROTHER, I’M DYING, by Edwidge Danticat. (Knopf, $23.95.) Danticat’s cleareyed prose and unflinching adherence to the facts conceal an astringent undercurrent of melancholy in this memoir of her Haitian family.
HARD CALL: Great Decisions and the Extraordinary People Who Made Them, by John McCain with Mark Salter. (Twelve, $25.99.) Though never mentioned, McCain’s presidental ambitions form the unavoidable backdrop to these profiles in leadership.
SONS AND OTHER FLAMMABLE OBJECTS, by Porochista Khakpour. (Grove, $24.) A family copes with memories of Iran in Khakpour’s vibrant novel.
IN THE RUINS OF EMPIRE: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia, by Ronald H. Spector. (Random House, $27.95.) Iraq casts a long shadow over every page of this study of American blunders in occupied Asia after World War II.
THE ZOOKEEPER’S WIFE, by Diane Ackerman. (Norton, $24.95.) During World War II, the director of the Warsaw Zoo and his wife saved 300 Jews from the Nazis by hiding them on the zoo’s grounds.
SATAN’S CIRCUS: Murder, Vice, Police Corruption, and New York’s Trial of the Century, by Mike Dash. (Crown, $24.95.) The story of the only policeman ever to be executed for murder in the United States.
SONGS WITHOUT WORDS, by Ann Packer. (Knopf, $24.95.) A suicide attempt inflicts calamity on this novel’s placid, prosperous California family.
THE SCANDAL OF THE SEASON, by Sophie Gee. (Scribner, $25.) Gee’s clever historical novel centers on the events that culminated in Alexander Pope’s writing “The Rape of the Lock.”
GOD’S HARVARD: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America, by Hanna Rosin. (Harcourt, $25.) How Patrick Henry College trains evangelicals for politics.