Book Reviews

So few book reviews, so many books. No, it hasn't started appearing on T-shirts yet, but wait. For the last half year, thanks in part to vigorous noisemaking by the National Book Critics Circle and its energetic president, Swarthmore grad John Freeman, the publishing world has done almost as much talking about the "book review crisis" as it has about the rectangular objects it sells. So far in September, no fewer than five panels in New York, at venues from Columbia Journalism School to Scandinavia House, have been devoted to some version of the "The Vanishing Book Review.

Carl Hartman, 95, an Associated Press correspondent in Europe during much of the turbulent mid-20th century and one of the news cooperative's longest-serving journalists, has died. The Morristown, N.J., native died at his Washington apartment, said Nancy Thompson, a friend who, worried that Mr. Hartman was not answering his telephone, opened his residence to police who found his body on Wednesday. There was no evidence of foul play. Mr. Hartman retired from the AP in 2006 after 62 years but continued writing book reviews.

Edward Weeks, 91, former editor of the Atlantic Monthly magazine and the Atlantic Monthly Press, died Saturday at his home. Mr. Weeks edited the Press from 1928 to 1937 and the magazine from 1938 to 1966, the longest tenure in its history. Under his guidance, the Press published such best-sellers as Walter Edmond's Drums Along the Mohawk, Charles Bernard Nordoff's and James Norman Hall's Mutiny on the Bounty and James Hilton's Goodbye Mr. Chips. He also introduced writings of unknown authors who later gained international fame.

Gadabout Harry Jay Katz is doing a little legwork for a Council candidate and he goes down to the basement looking for her photo and he finds the stuff from Ira Einhorn. Correspondence and book reviews from the hippie murder suspect, neatly printed nearly 20 years ago in capital letters on white, lined notebook paper or yellow legal pad, and mailed from Canada. (Einhorn, out on bail, knew no travel restrictions.) Katz, publisher of the now-defunct Center City entertainment weekly ELECTRICity, had hired Einhorn as book editor after his arrest because "he kind of needed a gig and he's brilliant.

I ran across a quotation the other day that struck me like a blow between the eyes, or maybe just above the eyes in the middle of the forehead. Anyway, up there somewhere. "Newspaper work draws people who like to cut corners, deal superficially with subjects, make generalizations without support and read book reviews rather than books. " My God, I thought, that's my autobiography. A critic named Carlin Romano said it and, although I'm not familiar with his work, he had us newspaper people down pretty good.

The corpse in the window won't know "whodunnit," but Norma Frank and Robert Nissenbaum will. They won't tell you, though. Proprietors of the new Mystery Books in Ardmore, Frank and Nissenbaum own the only store in the area where time after time a leisurely chill out leads to a rub-out. Personable, knowledgeable and well-read when it comes to the genre, the husband and wife team have been trading professionally in the cold hard facts of murder, mayhem and other crimes since they opened the store in May. "We opened the store because we like to read mysteries and were having trouble finding the books we wanted," Frank explained.

Damn you, Stephen Hawking. Damn you and your A Brief History of Time, which sits on the best-seller lists and which has been praised as a scientific book written for the layman - an important book about the beginnings of the universe, of time and matter and the "unified theory" that would explain everything: everything, that is, but how the layman can possibly be expected to understand this book. A theoretical physicist at Cambridge University, Hawking is famous both for his gifts and his misfortune.

People, People who read People, Are the most puzzled people in the world . . . . What are devoted readers to make of the latest issue of the celebrity gossip bible? "The 25 Most Irritating People of 1985"? Irritating? Nancy Reagan, Mary Lou Retton, Sylvester Stallone, Phil Donahue, Claus von Bulow (with a hypodermic syringe, no less) . . . enshrined together on a bright red cover? Really, People, is nothing sacred? Apparently not. The cover is just for starters.

I was born in Harlem 31 years ago. I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read. The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again. In those days my mother was given to the exasperating and mysterious habit of having babies. As they were born, I took them over with one hand and held a book with the other. The children probably suffered, though they have since been kind enough to deny it, and in this way I read Uncle Tom's Cabin and A Tale of Two Cities over and over and over again; in this way, in fact, I read just about everything I could get my hands on - except the Bible, probably because it was the only book I was encouraged to read.

In many ways, N.C. Wyeth, the Chadds Ford illustrator who is the patriarch of one of the nation's best-known art dynasties, is a biographer's dream subject. For one thing, the artist left behind what David Michaelis, author of the recently published and only biography of N.C. Wyeth, calls a "mountainous, voluminous" amount of correspondence. Then there are the scrapbooks, exhibit catalogs, diary accounts, studio journals and unpublished memoirs. Wyeth's paintings and illustrations helped Michaelis when he "got stuck" on the writing, as he put it, and needed inspiration.

Bill Veeck Baseball's Greatest Maverick By Paul Dickson Walker & Company. 448 pp. $28   Why did it take so long for the most colorful and perhaps most influential figure in baseball history to get a definitive biography? Probably because it took more than 20 years after Bill Veeck's death (in 1986) to put all the facets of his amazing life together. With Bill Veeck: Baseball's Greatest Maverick, Paul Dickson, author of several superb baseball books, has done more than write the best baseball biography so far this decade.

Transfer By Naomi Shihab Nye BOA Editions. 119 pp. $16   Naomi Shihab Nye is one of the most spirited voices in American poetry. The author, editor, and translator of more than 30 volumes, she is best known for her poetry collections Fuel (1998) and You and Yours (2005), and her award-winning anthology of international poems for young people This Same Sky (1992), which represents 129 poets from 68 countries. In her affirming introduction for that book, she writes, "Whenever someone suggests ‘how much is lost in translation!

Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War By Stephen R. Platt Alfred A. Knopf. 478 pp. $30 One of history's least-known conflicts for Westerners is also one of its bloodiest. China's Taiping Rebellion, from 1851 to 1864, is estimated to have killed 20 million to 30 million people, making it the most sanguinary internal war in human history. Americans, of course, tend to focus their historical attention during these years on the trauma of their own Civil War. Yet, as Stephen Platt observes in his well-researched, highly readable account of the Taiping movement, there are unsuspected connections linking the two conflicts.

Rights at Risk The Limits of Liberty in Modern America By David K. Shipler Alfred A. Knopf. 400 pp. $28.95 Best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize winner David Shipler believes America has "lost its way" since 9/11. "Constitutional rights are routinely overwhelmed," he says in his new book, Rights at Risk, "largely out of sight in criminal courts and interrogation rooms, in offices of prosecutors and immigration bureaucrats, and in schools. " While we talk about freedom and liberty a lot, there has been little opposition as the Patriot Act empowered the federal government to ask store owners what books we buy and what videos we rent, and to compile these and our political preferences in government files.

Anatolian Days & Nights A Love Affair with Turkey By Joy E. Stocke and Angie Brenner Wild River Books. 264 pp. $16.95 Toward the end of Anatolian Days & Nights, a 12-year-old boy, tour guide for a day to the two authors, encourages them to take shards of pottery that lie amid the rubble of the ancient Turkish city of Harran. "There are so many pots to choose from and all of them so very old, ladies. So old it makes my head hurt," he says. The honest, childlike remark seems to encapsulate the modern-day view of this intensely complex, richly fabled country.

Prague Winter A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948 By Madeleine Albright Harper. 488 pp. $29.99   Reviewed by Joelle Farrell When German soldiers occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939, a Czech diplomat and his wife scooped up their toddler daughter and fled to England. The child, who would one day become the United States' first female secretary of state, was forever changed by the failed diplomacy of "appeasement" that led her home country to become one of Adolf Hitler's first victims.

Roosevelt's Navy The Education of a Warrior President, 1882-1920 By James Tertius de Kay Pegasus Books, 312pp., $27.95 Reviewed by Paul Jablow In her classic Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin describes how Abraham Lincoln deftly molded his competitors for the Republican presidential nomination into an able cabinet that helped the country get through the Civil War. De Kay's book does not approach Kearns' work for scope, detail...

A Lovesong for India Tales From East and West By Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Counterpoint. 224 pp. $26. Reviewed by Madhusree Mukerjee If these 11 exquisitely crafted stories are indeed love songs, they sing not so much of India as of the vulnerability of the human heart. Now in her 80s, acclaimed novelist and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala sketches, with a few deft strokes, the longings and losses of people she encountered or perhaps imagined during her sojourns in India, England, and now America.

Heroes for My Daughter By Brad Meltzer Harper. 124 pp. $19.99 Reviewed by Jeff Ayers Brad Meltzer's follow-up to his amazing Heroes for My Son features more talented individuals who prove that one person truly can change the world. From the introduction of Heroes for My Daughter, where Meltzer delivers a personal message to his young daughter, the reader immediately understands how deeply personal this book is for the author. He wants his daughter to understand that anything is possible.