Nonfiction
By Edward M. Kennedy
(Twelve, September)
Long in the gathering and making, and written with the help of Pulitzer-winner Ron Powers, this tells the story of an American life spanning, embracing, and causing some of the formative events of the 20th and 21st centuries.
The Evidence for Evolution
By Richard Dawkins
(Free Press, September)
Forget Dawkins' ill-fated God stuff. This is what he's best at. The news here is that Dawkins, with characteristic brilliance and wit, lays out the proof that evolution exists and is chugging away even now. In the process, he conveys his own wide-eyed wonder at the sheer glory of it.
Sisters in Conversation
Throughout Their Lives
By Deborah Tannen
(Random House, September)
Tannen, renowned sociologist of conversation, studies one of the most intense and burdened relations of all: that between sisters. "Love/hate" doesn't begin to describe the elation and heartbreak, the humor and perplexed contradictions revealed in this delightful book when sisters speak of and to each other.
By Jonathan Krakauer
(Doubleday, September)
Pat Tillman left the Arizona Cardinals of the National Football League to sign up for duty in Iraq in 2002, and died in friendly fire in 2004. Krakauer, author of In the Wild and swiftly becoming a poet of mavericks who die in pursuit of a worthy life, tells a tale of heroism, anger, and loss.
The Pleasures and Regrets
of a Husband, Father and Son
By Michael Chabon
(Harper, October)
Chabon, a very accomplished fiction writer, turns to this part memoir, part how-to, about how to be a man - and how being a man often entails messing up at being a man. As always in Chabon, it's full of piquant insights and unexpected moments.
And Other Adventures
By Malcolm Gladwell
(Little, Brown, October)
Among the most prominent and controversial of our public thinkers, Gladwell specializes in taking new looks at things we thought we understood: tipping points; first impressions; success, learning and genius. This book collects his lively essays for the New Yorker, on subjects ranging from police profilers to dog whisperer César Millan.
The Book, the Life, and the Afterlife
By Francine Prose
(Harper, October)
Anne Frank wasn't just an unusually verbal teen: She was a writer who shaped and revised her work as it progressed. It takes another fine writer, like Prose, to help us appreciate and reconsider all the art that went into Frank's heartrending diary.
By R. Crumb
(W.W. Norton, October)
