2007 Notable Nonfiction

Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.
From Publishers Weekly: "This autobiography by the author of the long-running strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, deals with her childhood with a closeted gay father, who was an English teacher and proprietor of the local funeral parlor."

Egan, Timothy. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl.
From Publishers Weekly: "Egan tells an extraordinary tale in this visceral account of how America's great, grassy plains turned to dust, and how the ferocious plains winds stirred up an endless series of "black blizzards" that were like a biblical plague: "Dust clouds boiled up, ten thousand feet or more in the sky, and rolled like moving mountains" in what became known as the Dust Bowl. But the plague was man-made, as Egan shows: the plains weren't suited to farming, and plowing up the grass to plant wheat, along with a confluence of economic disaster—the Depression—and natural disaster—eight years of drought—resulted in an ecological and human catastrophe that Egan details with stunning specificity."

Flannery, Tim. The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth.
From Publishers Weekly: "Much of the book's success is rooted in Flannery's succinct and fascinating insights into related topics, such as the differences between the terms greenhouse effect, global warming and climate change, and how the El Niño cycle of extreme climatic events "had a profound re-organising effect on nature." But the heart of the book is Flannery's impassioned look at the earth's "colossal" carbon dioxide pollution problem and his argument for how we can shift from our current global reliance on fossil fuels [...]. Flannery consistently produces the hard goods related to his main message that our environmental behavior makes us all "weather makers" who "already possess all the tools required to avoid catastrophic climate change." "

Greene, Melissa Fay. There Is No Me Without You: One Woman’s Odyssey To Rescue Africa’s Children.
From Publishers Weekly: "Not unlike the AIDS pandemic itself, the odyssey of Haregewoin Teferra, who took in AIDS orphans, began in small stages and grew to irrevocably transform her life from that of "a nice neighborhood lady" to a figure of fame, infamy and ultimate restoration. In telling her story, journalist Greene who had adopted two Ethiopian children before meeting Teferra, juggles political history, medical reportage and personal memoir."

Hessler, Peter. Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present.
From Publishers Weekly: "Hessler, who first wrote about China in his 2001 bestseller, River Town, a portrait of his Peace Corps years in Fuling, continues his conflicted affair with that complex country in a second book that reflects the maturity of time and experience. Having lived in China for a decade now, fluent in Mandarin and working as a correspondent in Beijing, Hessler displays impressive knowledge, research and personal encounters as he brings the country's peoples, foibles and history into sharp focus."

Horne, Jed. Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City.
From The Washington Post's Book World: "It is hard to imagine that, less than a year after the worst natural disaster in modern U.S. history, there would be much appetite for reliving the horrors of Hurricane Katrina -- manmade or otherwise. And it is equally difficult to imagine encountering anything fresh on a subject that's been so thoroughly dissected. Yet in this solid if somewhat detached recounting, New Orleans journalist Jed Horne has provided new insights into how a ferocious storm, governmental ineptitude and racially tinged inequities conspired to permanently jeopardize one of the nation's cultural gems."

King, Ross. The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World of Impressionism.
From The Washington Post's Book World: "In The Judgment of Paris, Ross King describes "Olympia" as "easily the most notorious painting of the nineteenth century," placing it at the center of his fluent account of the years that ushered in the age of Impressionism. With the solid craftsmanship that characterized his previous two popular histories, Brunelleschi's Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling, King's new book impressively synthesizes research on the culture, politics and personalities of an era that was anything but uncomplicated."

Kohlberg, Elizabeth. Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change.
From Scientific American: "In the 1990s the inhabitants of Shishmaref, an Inupiat village on the Alaskan island of Sarichef, noticed that sea ice was forming later and melting earlier. The change meant that they could not safely hunt seal as they had traditionally and that a protective skirt of ice no longer buffered the small town from destructive storm waves. Shishmaref was being undone by a warming world. To survive, the villagers recently decided to move to the mainland. Soon Shishmaref on Sarichef will be gone. Pithy and powerful, the opening of Elizabeth Kolbert's book about global warming, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, echoes that of another book that also originated as a series of articles in the New Yorker magazine. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring starts in much the same way, with a fable about a town that lived in harmony with its surroundings and that fell silent. "

Philbrick, Nathaniel. Mayflower: A Story of Courage Community, and War.
From Publishers Weekly: "In this remarkable effort, National Book Award–winner Philbrick (In the Heart of the Sea) examines the history of Plymouth Colony. In the early 17th century, a small group of devout English Christians fled their villages to escape persecution, going first to Holland, then making the now infamous 10-week voyage to the New World. Rather than arriving in the summer months as planned, they landed in November, low on supplies. Luckily, they were met by the Wampanoag Indians and their wizened chief, Massasoit. In economical, well-paced prose, Philbrick masterfully recounts the desperate circumstances of both the settlers and their would-be hosts, and how the Wampanoags saved the colony from certain destruction."

Phillips, Julie. James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon.
From The Washington Post's Book World: "If you lived in McLean, Va., in the 1960s and '70s, you probably ran into Alice B. Sheldon. You might have seen her shopping for dresses at Lord & Taylor's or buying gardening supplies at Hechinger's. But you would not have known that under the pseudonym "James Tiptree Jr.," she wrote works that were at the vortex of gender wars that raged in the world of science fiction.
Sheldon (1915-87) was the most important sf writer ever to live in the Washington area. She also was, in her varied career, a psychologist, a CIA officer and a chicken farmer. Her biographer, Julie Phillips, combines diligent archival work with more than 40 interviews to successfully portray one of sf's most brilliant -- and tortured -- authors."

Zoellner, Tom, The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit, and Desire.
From Publishers Weekly: After his fiancée dumps him and he's left with a diamond ring to unload, Men's Health contributing editor Zoellner crisscrosses the globe unlocking the mystique of this glittering stone "that brings misery to millions of people across the world." Zoellner probes how "blood diamonds" are used to fund vicious civil wars in Africa; how De Beers, seeing new markets to exploit, linked diamonds to the ancient yuino ceremony in Japan and played on caste obsession in India; and how India is pushing Belgium and Israel out of the gem trade.

2007 Notable Books--Outstanding Fiction

The American Library Association's Notable Books Council use the following criteria to select award winners. A book may be selected as notable for at least one, and preferably more than one, of the following reasons:

• it possesses exceptional literary merit;
• it expands the horizons of human knowledge;
• it makes a specialized body of knowledge accessible to the non-specialist;
• it promises to contribute significantly to the solution of a contemporary problem
  

Bigsby, Christopher, Beautiful Dreamer.
from Publishers Weekly "English author Bigsby unflinchingly explores a mushrooming tragedy that begins when a black man walks through the front door of a white-owned store in turn-of-the-century rural Tennessee."

Dean, Debra, Madonnas of Leningrad.
from Booklist "Her granddaughter's wedding should be a time of happiness for Marina Buriakov. But the Russian emigre's descent into Alzheimer's has her and her family experiencing more anxiety than joy."

Desai, Kiran, The Inheritance of Loss.
from Publishers Weekly "This stunning second novel from Desai (Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard) is set in mid-1980s India, on the cusp of the Nepalese movement for an independent state."

Doig, Ivan, The Whistling Season.
from Washington Posts' Book World "Ivan Doig writes about a vanished way of life on the Western plains with the kind of irony-free nostalgia that seems downright courageous in these ironic times. ... In pursuit of greater efficiency and rigor, the state has decided to close all its one-room schoolhouses."

Grenville, Kate, The Secret River.
from Publishers Weekly "Grenville's Australian bestseller, which won the Orange Prize, is an eye-opening tale of the settlement of New South Wales by a population of exiled British criminals."

Khadra, Yasmina, translated from the French by John Cullen, The Attack.
from Publisher's Weekly "Dr. Amin Jaafari is a man caught between two worlds; he's a Bedouin Arab surgeon struggling to integrate himself into Israeli society. The balancing act becomes impossible when the terrorist responsible for a suicide bombing that claims 20 lives, including many children, is identified as Jaafari's wife by the Israeli police."

Lansens, Lori, The Girls.
from Publishers Weekly "Conjoined twins Rose and Ruby Darlen are linked at the side of the head, with separate brains and bodies. Born in a small town outside Toronto in the midst of a tornado and abandoned by their unwed teenage mother two weeks later, the girls are cared for by Aunt Lovey, a nurse who refuses to see them as deformed or even disabled."

McCarthy, Cormac, The Road.
from Publishers Weekly "Violence, in McCarthy's postapocalyptic tour de force, has been visited worldwide in the form of a "long shear of light and then a series of low concussions" that leaves cities and forests burned, birds and fish dead and the earth shrouded in gray clouds of ash. In this landscape, an unnamed man and his young son journey down a road to get to the sea."

Meek, James, The People's Act of Love.
from Publishers Weekly "Set during the waning days of the Russian revolution, Meek's utterly absorbing novel (after The Museum of Doubt) captivates with its depiction of human nature in all its wartime extremes."

Mitchell, David, Black Swan Green.
from School Library Journal "Thirteen chapters provide a monthly snapshot of Jason Taylor's life in small-town England from January 1982 to January 1983. Whether the 13-year-old narrator is battling his stammer or trying to navigate the social hierarchy of his schoolmates or watching the slow disintegration of his parents' marriage, he relates his story in a voice that is achingly true to life."

Murakami, Haruki, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.
from Publishers Weekly "Murakami's new collection of 25 stories, many of which have appeared in the New Yorker and other publications, also describes these epiphanic instances. ...Murakami's stories are difficult to describe and one should, I think, resist attempts to overanalyze them. Their beauty lies in their ephemeral and incantatory qualities and in his uncanny ability to tap into a sort of collective unconscious. In addition, a part of Murakami's genius is that he uses images as plot points, going from image to image."

Savage, Sam, Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife.
from Booklist "In Savage's darkly comic debut, the titular metropolitan lowlife is a rat, albeit one with lofty literary ambitions. The runt of 13 siblings spawned in the basement of a shambolic Boston bookshop, Firmin survives his lean first weeks by munching on the edges of books. He quickly develops a predilection for actually reading them, too."

Coming soon--Notable Nonfiction