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Looking back, it's hard to imagine how Matt Prior could have been thinking. Did he really believe that a web site covering the financial scene in blank verse could be profitable? Of course, it wasn't, and now Matt is jobless, floundering in debt, marital problems, and indecision. Jess Walter's The Financial Lives of The Poets is a mid-life crisis painted on an almost surrealistic scale; a satire about what happens when the bubbles we build puncture and send us scurrying for cover. There's something winningly outrageous about the main characters in this novel and Walter's snappy black humor adds just the right spice to the mix. Five stars in my book.

 

 

If you spend a lot of time with poets, you know that many of them spend a lot of their time musing about poetry and other poets, rather than actually writing verse themselves. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; it might actually make their poems better. Whatever the case, Paul Chowder, the narrator of this novel, is definitely one such poet. At the moment, he's stuck between a hard place and stone cold silence. His girlfriend Roz has (not completely unwisely) deserted him and he's collided with a writing block that prevents him from writing a short anthology introduction that will bring him a big payday. Fortunately, his mind is moving at top speed, though not always in predictable directions. Like Nicholson Baker's previous novels, The Anthologist unfolds so idiosyncratically that it will never be optioned for the screen, which actually makes it that much winning as a work of fiction. His ruminations on poets past, present, and future are worth the price of the book, but it's the whole trajectory of Chowder's journey that makes The Anthologist the winning book it is.

 

 

There is something so graceful and neighborly about Katrina Kenison's writing that while reading this memoir, I often fell into thinking that I wouldn't mind living her life. When I snapped to, I realized, of course, that was sheer delusion: I didn't want to be the mother of two teenage sons; I didn't want to be suddenly fired; I didn't want to live with my husband's parents; and so on. What I did want to do was to live at the sane, perceptive pace of Kenison; to find a nesting place where troubles no longer distract me from being the person I can be. This sequel to Mitten Strings for God has a feel best understood perhaps by people who know first-hand what a changing experience mid-life can be.

 

 

I must admit that I approached this book with some hesitation. For one thing, I worried that it would be just a footnote to World War II military history or yet another account of Nazi misdeeds. Instead, I found a fascinating story about a war within a war; the not far behind the battle lines struggle to save European cultural treasures from plunder and destruction. Robert Edsel and co-author Bret Witter describe how a relatively small team of "Monuments Men," male and female curators, artists, and art historians raced to locate and preserve unique artifacts while bombs were still falling on European cities, even as Hitler's henchmen were working overtime to thwart them. To me, The Monuments Men possesses a cinematic vividness, capturing as it does real people becoming heroes.

 

There is something indisputably magical or incongruent about seahorses. These fragile ocean creatures have somehow survived for at least 13 million years, but in ways, they seem more at home in cartoons or myths. Marine biologist Helen Scales has composed a charming little book about these monogamous bony fish that are extraordinary in every aspect; from anatomy and natural habitat to courting and reproduction. Against every expectation, her attentive scientific descriptions show these sea-drifting enigmas to be even more wondrous than we previously thought. Because few seahorses can survive long in captivity, Poseidon's Steed probably represents the best chance we have to observe these rarely-seen little creatures up close.

Awista Ayub's peaceful revolution in Afghanistan began with little more than eight brave young women, a few soccer balls and her own strong will. When she returned to the country that she and her family had left when she was just two years old, Awista was determined to empower Afghan women through sports, but her efforts faced stubborn opposition. For many locals, especially those who had grown up under Taliban rule, female athletics were immodest and disgraceful. In this memoir, Ayub describes how the Afghan Youth Sports Exchange was born in strife and grew into a safe zone where women can be themselves. Ultimately, However Tall the Mountain is a thoroughly inspiring true story about sports, feminism, political change, and living out your dreams.

The car accident that killed the boy wasn't Alison's fault, but in a sense, that really didn't matter. That bloody knot simply exposed all the wounds in her, her marriage, and her friendships. She is devastated when she learns that Charlie, her husband and father of two, is in the sudden throes of an affair with Claire, her lifelong best friend from North Carolina. Claire is also married, though childless and less than perfectly matched with her architect husband Ben. The lives of these two couples have interlocked for more than a decade; but only now, with both marriages crumbling, do all the lies and underlying tension come into focus. Threading individual monologues, Cristina Baker Kline's Bird in Hand leads us down paths we would prefer not to go in real life, but her artistry and full-bodied portrayals make reading this novel of domestic dysfunction ultimately a fulfilling experience.

"Behind us lay Atlanta smoldering and in ruins, the black smoke rising high in the air and hanging like a ball over the ruined city." -General William T. Sherman

 

For most Americans, Atlanta blazed most memorably in Gone With The Wind, but the real-life Civil War siege and destruction of the Georgia city possessed far more drama and lasting significance than can be witnessed in any single movie or bestselling novel. Carefully written and adeptly written, Marc Wortman's narrative history of the "hundred days' battle" and the double burning of Atlanta presents its still controversial events from the points of view of their participants, albeit victors or victims; generals or slaves. Like the conflagration itself, The Bonfire cuts through to the marrow of experience. As Pulitzer Prize-winning author James M. McPherson writes, "Marc Wortman's vivid narrative proves that war is indeed hell."

For most of us, meteorites are simply ugly, misshapen rocks that have fallen from space. For geologists and other scientists, these dark objects conceal secrets to the origin of our solar system; for visionaries and poets, they are stony and metallic reminders of our primal connection with the universe. Christopher Cokinos' The Fallen Sky is not just a dull study of the composition of meteorites any more than his Hope Is A Thing with Feathers is a taxonomy of extinct birds. Instead, this intimate history approaches these celestial fragments through the eyes of the maverick scientists, meteorite collectors, and independent researchers who seek to discover their hidden meaning. Cokinos' own quest to track their story takes us from Polar Regions to the far expanses of space; from Iron Age ritual sites to post-modern laboratories. The Fallen Sky is a hybrid of science, poetry, adventure, and pure magic.

The first American bank robberies were crude affairs; fumbling, improvised attempts to wrest cash from downtown vaults. That all changed with George Leslie, the prime mover in J. North Conway's King of Heists. Leslie was no inside job bungler; he was a polished Gilded Age gentleman, the brilliant, successful architect son of a prominent Cincinnati brewer. Like his table manners, his bank work was meticulous: He spent three years planning the 1878 Manhattan Savings Institution robbery, the crown jewel of all his heists. This masterful break-in netted nearly three million dollars in cash and securities, approximately $50 million in today's currency, making it the most lucrative bank theft in history. But, as Conway notes, Leslie was no one-shot wonder; in the decade before the Manhattan Savings heist, he and his gang were responsible for eighty percent of the bank robberies in the country. More startling yet, Leslie never spent a day in jail. King of Heists presents this notorious criminal as a captivating antihero, an enigmatic robber who dared to steal from the robber barons.

Seventy-year-old Alec Malone, the protagonist in this novel, lives in Georgetown, at one remove, literally and figuratively, from the Washington political scene. His father, 95-year-old Erwin "Kim" Malone is a venerated national monument, a former nine-term U.S. Senator who has outlived all his critics. Though an only child, Alec has been careful to remain beyond the pull of strong Potomac currents. Instead of government, he chose photography as career. Maintaining his aesthetic purity, he even turned down a plum assignment to cover the Vietnam War. Now, abandoned by his wife, he contemplates the roads he has taken and rejected. Ward Just's Exiles in The Garden is not, however, a solitary meditation; Malone's musings are seasoned with his encounters with his Czech-American spouse and her émigré friends; his State Department official daughter; and his talented actress girlfriend. Former D.C. insider Ward Just has composed a Washington novel that escapes the confines of the genre.

Kirsten Holmstedt's Band of Sisters: American Women at War in Iraq spotlighted the female soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen who serve in Iraq; it also extinguished forever the fiction that U.S. women aren't fighting on the front lines in the Middle East. The Girls Come Marching Home isn't just the obligatory follow-up to that award-winning book. It is a standalone tribute to the courage, resilience, but also the hardships experienced by women warriors on their return to the States. As in her previous book (which is now in paperback), Holmstedt profiles individual women in the services, describing how these ordinary women cope with the extraordinary circumstance of combat and its aftermath. This isn't a pro-war book or an anti-war book; it's a book about real women who put their lives on the line and came back to tell about it.

In the Age of Oprah, there are dozens of engaging, feel good books about teachers and other school officials who have made a difference. There are also, thank goodness, a full bounty of helpful tomes to help anxiety-ridden parents find the right school for their offspring. What makes David Marcus's Acceptance special is that it interweaves those two functions and does it so artfully that the narrative never descends into schmaltz or "guidance speak." To research this book, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Marcus embedded himself for a year at Oyster Bay High, the small North Shore Long Island school where veteran counseling director Gwyneth Smith Jr. works his magic. For four decades, "Smitty" has learned to read the college application process like a savant, often finding success (and scholarships) in totally unexpected places. By focusing on seven students ranging from a free spirit to an overachieving valedictorian, Marcus demonstrates not only Smitty's merits, but also his own. I think of Acceptance as a stress-relieving device for every harried parent and nervous teenager.

The most important thing to know about Swiss-British writer Alain de Botton is that he is a philosopher of everyday life. In previous books, he has offered reflections on love, travel, architecture, and anxiety, making our experience of each more relevant and understandable. In The Pleasures & Sorrows of Work, he examines the working world, where many of us spend most of our lives. To discover what it is about the daily labors that so dominate our mental lives, he gleans observations from his encounters with factory workers, artists, career counselors, accountants, fishermen, and others. His insights about subjects such as what are the qualities that make works happy or sad; meaningful or mindless drudgery. Work is a topic we all think we know everything about; this insightful book proves us wrong.

The French Empire was at its height. Napoleon Bonaparte had vanquished most of continental Europe; now, in 1812, the self-crowned emperor set out to conquer Russia. Angered by czarist actions, he organized the best-trained, best-equipped land army ever assembled. With his aptly named, 700,000-man Grande Armee, he began his march towards Moscow. At that point, the grandeur stops and the terror begins. Stephan Talty's The Illustrious Dead etches a picture of war far different from standard Napoleonic histories. He demonstrates convincingly that the brilliant French military strategist was defeated not by enemy armies, but by typhus, tiny bacterium transmitted in the feces of fleas and lice. During the ill-fated campaign, he notes, more troops died from disease than from battle. This account is so gripping that like the best histories, it cuts across subjects.

Not one of a hundred Americans knows its name, but Exposition Universelle of 1889 stamped its imprint not only on Paris, but also on the world. Its wrought-iron centerpiece and entrance arch Eiffel Tower became the most recognizable icon on the continent, but as Jill Jonnes shows in this captivating history, Gustav Eiffel's engineering marvel was hardly the only attraction at the fair. Visitors, as she notes, were invited to gawk at the four hundred inhabitants of a hastily counterfeited "Negro village" or watch as Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley displayed their Wild West skills. Among the other artists and personalities present among the fair's 28 million visitors were Thomas Edison, Paul Gauguin, James Abbott Whistler, and Claude Debussy. In Eiffel's Tower, Jonnes walks us through all the exhibits and controversies, giving us a fresh sense of the bright, brave new world that our ancestors were entering.

I was first drawn to The Devil's Ticket not by its nominal subject, bridge, but by its endorsements. That the book had received such vibrant praise from Erik Larson, the author of The Devil in the White City, and Orchid Thief author Susan Orlean indicated that this book, like theirs, threaded its narrative through places we've never been through before. The "devil's tickets" in the title are the queens and aces of card decks, but in author Gary Pomerantz's hands, they are also instruments in an early twentieth century Battle of the Sexes and the calling-cards of self-promoting showmen and politicians. There's an anger spurred bridge spouse killing in this book, but that's only the first card of its well-dealt hand.

 

If there was ever a book to take to dinner, this is it. In Catching Fire, biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham proposes a startling new scientific theory, but he does it in such a lively, engaging way that you never once feel that you're in the presence of a ponderous "great thinker." Wrangham maintains that it was cooking that enabled our evolutionary leap from chimp-like primates into smaller gut, bigger brained humans. His theory is complicated and, of course, highly controversial, but he makes it with fascinating examples and a clarity that should make other scientists envious. And, let's face it; is there a more important subject than what makes us human?  

April and Oliver  are lifelong best friends, silently attracted to one another, but too close in other ways to become intimate. It's true, outsiders might see them as polar opposites: April is impetuous, haunted; her love life a trail of abusive relationships. Oliver, a law student and newly engaged, is more tentative and responsible. Brought together by the funeral of April's younger brother, these troubled soul mates try to soldier on with their own personal problems, but their deep affinity and unquenched yearnings draw them ever closer to one another. Tess Callahan has crafted a debut novel that reveals itself in exposition, not summary; that is, showing, not telling. I know that "I couldn't put it down" is a cliché, but in this case, it's true.