NONFICTION - Dec. 4, 2005

No god but God

The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam

Reza Aslan

Random House

Aslan is concerned that Westerners know little about Islam and sees today’s Islamic extremists as part of an internal reformation -- one that he thinks will, in the end, reject fanaticism and return the religion to its authentic roots.

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Epileptic

David B.

Pantheon

In this memoir of his family’s struggle with his brother’s epilepsy, David B. has created a stark and painful record -- in a graphic novel format -- of what happens to families when chronic illness moves in.

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Edmund Wilson

A Life in Literature

Lewis M. Dabney

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

A thoroughgoing, authoritative and consistently engaging look at one of the giants of American letters by an acknowledged expert on his life and writings. Wilson’s trenchant literary criticism, his long career, his uproarious domestic life and his manifold friendships are all set down in enthralling detail.

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Collapse

How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Jared Diamond

Viking

Geographer Diamond examines several doomed societies (among them the Norse settlements in Greenland and the Easter Islanders) and analyzes the reasons for their demise. His absorbing study demonstrates that insufficient attention to climate, natural resources, even neighbors -- in short, to geography itself -- can prove fatal.

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The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion

Alfred A. Knopf

Didion’s account of the year following the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, is a searing evocation of bereavement. She depicts the experience as one of near hallucinatory intensity, yet her clinical eye renders it with clarity and nuance.

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The Great

Earthquake and

Firestorms of 1906

How San Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself

Philip L. Fradkin

University of California Press

Fradkin offers a soberly researched yet propulsively readable account of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. In examining this watershed moment in California history, he argues that many of its lessons -- seismic and otherwise -- remain unlearned.

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A Little History of the World

E.H. Gombrich

Yale University Press

Gombrich was a penniless scholar in 1935 when he was invited to write this world history for young readers. The book tells of cave men, ancient civilizations and the formation of Europe in a generous, anecdotal style.

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Defining the World

The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary

Henry Hitchings

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

When Samuel Johnson began to compile his dictionary of the English language, he was a little-known hack on London’s Grub Street. The resulting four-volume, 20-pound set, this masterful history argues, was the triumph of a singular genius.

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Bury the Chains

Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves

Adam Hochschild

Houghton Mifflin

The late-18th century abolition movement that ended the British slave trade claimed idealists and pragmatists of every stripe. Hochschild shows how it also laid the groundwork for future social revolutions, developing many strategies (such as boycotts and test court cases) still in use today.

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The Wounded Surgeon

Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets

Adam Kirsch

W.W. Norton

Kirsch suggests that the “confessional” bent of six major poets (Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz and Sylvia Plath) is overemphasized at the expense of other artistic virtues. His close readings enrich our understanding of these writers and their work.

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The Disappointment Artist

Essays

Jonathan Lethem

Doubleday

Don’t care about comics, the science-fiction work of Philip K. Dick or the woes of the writing life? You will after reading Lethem’s revealing collection of essays on these and sundry other cultural and autobiographical matters.

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The Tender Bar

A Memoir

J.R. Moehringer

Hyperion

Moehringer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times staff writer, has crafted a yearning, lyrical account of his fatherless youth and the companionship he found as a boy among the Dickensian characters at a neighborhood bar.

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The Assassins’ Gate

America in Iraq

George Packer

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Packer reconsiders his support for invading Iraq after seeing firsthand the chaotic aftermath. He shows how Sept. 11 shook the Bush administration and details the entrenched ethnic and religious differences roiling Iraqi society.

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If This Be Treason

Translation and Its Dyscontents:

A Memoir

Gregory Rabassa

New Directions

Rabassa lighted the fuse on the Latin American literature boom with his English renderings of works including Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” In this vibrant memoir, the author, now 83, offers insights into the challenges facing translators.

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Embroideries

Marjane Satrapi

Pantheon

Long before “Desperate Housewives,” Satrapi’s Iranian grandmother, mother, aunt and their friends gathered for tea and chatted about arranged marriages, tricks to “restore” virginity, infidelity and the advantages of being a mistress. Satrapi’s deceptively simple drawings highlight the power of graphic storytelling as a narrative art.

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A Great Improvisation

Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

Stacy Schiff

Henry Holt

Benjamin Franklin is one of America’s great renaissance men and Schiff shows us why -- not by focusing on kite-flying in a storm and other familiar details, but by looking at his experience, at age 70, as an envoy to France.

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Big Bang

The Origin of the Universe

Simon Singh

Fourth Estate/HarperCollins

Singh is that rarity, a journalist with a doctorate in particle physics (from Cambridge). As such, he’s a first-rate explicator of deep questions about the natural world and offers here a survey of all that’s known, to date, about how our 14-billion-year-old universe began -- and how we figured it out.

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Thirteen Ways of

Looking at the Novel

Jane Smiley

Alfred A. Knopf

Smiley, a voracious reader, frames an impassioned paean to the novel, suggesting that the genre’s importance stems from its interiority, its subjective point of view. This makes it a tool of empathy, one that exposes us to other perspectives and widens our understanding of the world.

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Matisse the Master

The Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954

Hilary Spurling

Alfred A. Knopf

The second volume of Spurling’s monumental biography captures Matisse at the height of his success, revealing an artist who continued to experiment and search for new ways of seeing until his death at age 84.

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Sky Burial

An Epic Love Story of Tibet

Xinran

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday

Journalist Xinran pieces together a haunting saga of a woman who spent decades searching for her husband, a doctor in China’s People’s Liberation Army who disappeared in Tibet. Years later, at a monastery, she learns about the cultural misunderstanding that led to his death.