2007 Quill Award Winners

The 2007 Quill Award Winners

Winning authors in all of the categories, plus dozens of other bestselling authors, will be seen at the Awards Program on NBC Saturday, October 27, 2007.

Book Of The Year
Angels Fall
Written by Nora Roberts
Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons

Debut Author Of The Year
The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel
Written by Diane Setterfield
Published by Atria

General Fiction
The Road
Written by Cormac McCarthy
Published by Alfred A. Knopf

Romance
Angels Fall
Written by Nora Roberts
Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons

Audio
To Kill a Mockingbird
Written by Harper Lee
Read by Sissy Spacek
Published by Caedmon Audio

Religion/Spirituality
Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know - And Doesn't
Written by Stephen Prothero
Published by Harper One

Graphic Novel
Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels
Written by Scott McCloud
Published by Harper Paperbacks

Poetry
For the Confederate Dead
Written by Kevin Young
Published by Alfred A. Knopf

Cooking
Joy of Cooking: 75th Anniversary Edition
Written by Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, and Ethan Becker
Published by Scribner

Health/Self-Improvement
How Doctors Think
Written by Jerome Groopman, M.D.
Published by Houghton Mifflin

Biography/Memoir
Einstein: His Life and Universe
Written by Walter Isaacson
Published by Simon & Schuster

Sports
The Kings of New York: A Year Among the Geeks, Oddballs, and Geniuses Who Make Up America's Top High School Chess Team
Written by Michael Weinreb
Published by Gotham Books

Humor
I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence
Written by Amy Sedaris
Published by Warner Books

History/Current Events/Politics
The Assault on Reason
Written by Al Gore
The Penguin Press

Business
The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't
Written by Robert I. Sutton, PhD
Published by Business Plus, Grand Central Publishing

Mystery/Suspense
What the Dead Know
Written by Laura Lippman
Published by William Morrow

Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror
The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day One)
Written by Patrick Rothfuss
Published by DAW Books

Children's Picture Books
Flotsam
Written by David Wiesner
Published by Clarion Books, Houghton Mifflin

Children's Chapter/Middle Grade
The Invention of Hugo Cabret
Written by Brian Selznick
Published Scholastic Press

Young Adult/Teen
Sold
Written by Patricia McCormick
Published by Hyperion Books for Children

Variety Blockbuster Book to Film Award
The Bourne Film Trilogy from Universal Pictures based on the bestsellers by Robert Ludlum

Platinum Quill
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, war correspondent, and bestselling author David Halberstam

Corporate Literacy Quill
Time Warner Inc. / Time Warner Cable


Al Roker and Ann Curry announced this year's Quill Book Award winners on The Today Show. Click here to watch Today's Al Roker and Ann Curry announce the Quill Award winners of the fiction, history, romance and children's chapter book.

Nominees in popular categories from romance to biography to graphic novels were announced at Book Expo America on June 2. Click here to watch the announcement.

Debut Author Of The Year

WINNER
The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel
Written by Diane Setterfield
Published by Atria

Description: When Margaret Lea opened the door to the past, what she confronted was her destiny. All children mythologize their birth...So begins the prologue of reclusive author Vida Winter's collection of stories, which are as famous for the mystery of the missing thirteenth tale as they are for the delight and enchantment of the twelve that do exist. The enigmatic Winter has spent six decades creating various outlandish life histories for herself -- all of them inventions that have brought her fame and fortune, but kept her violent and tragic past a secret. Now old and ailing, at last she wants to tell the truth about her extraordinary life. She summons biographer Margaret Lea, a young woman for whom the secret of her own birth, hidden by those who loved her most, remains an ever-present pain. Struck by a curious parallel between Miss Winter's story and her own, Margaret takes on the commission. As Vida disinters the life she meant to bury for good, Margaret is mesmerized. It is a tale of gothic strangeness featuring the Angelfield family including the beautiful and willful Isabelle, the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline, a ghost, a governess, a topiary garden and a devastating fire. Margaret succumbs to the power of Vida's storytelling, but remains suspicious of the author's sincerity. She demands the truth from Vida, and together they confront the ghosts that have haunted them and become, finally, transformed by the truth themselves. The Thirteenth Tale is a love letter to reading, a book for the feral reader in all of us, a return to that rich vein of storytelling that our parents loved and we loved as children. Diane Setterfield will keep you guessing, make you wonder, move you to tears and laughter, and in the end, deposit you breathless yet satisfied back upon the shore of your everyday life.

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
Written by Ishmael Beah
Published by Sarah Chrichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Description: This is how wars are fought now: by children, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s. Children have become soldiers of choice. In the more than fifty conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them. What is war like through the eyes of a child soldier? How does one become a killer? How does one stop? Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have struggled to imagine their lives. But until now, there has not been a first-person account from someone who came through this hell and survived. In A Long Way Gone, Beah, now twenty-five years old, tells a riveting story: how at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he'd been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.

No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories
Written by Miranda July
Published by Scribner

Description: Award-winning filmmaker and performing artist Miranda July brings her extraordinary talents to the page in a startling, sexy, and tender collection. In these stories, July gives the most seemingly insignificant moments a sly potency. A benign encounter, a misunderstanding, a shy revelation can reconfigure the world. Her characters engage awkwardly -- they are sometimes too remote, sometimes too intimate. With great compassion and generosity, July reveals their idiosyncrasies and the odd logic and longing that govern their lives. No One Belongs Here More Than You is a stunning debut, the work of a writer with a spectacularly original and compelling voice.

This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
Written by Daniel J. Levitin
Published by Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

Description: A fascinating exploration of the relationship between music and the mind-and the role of melodies in shaping our lives Whether you load your iPod with Bach or Bono, music has a significant role in your life-even if you never realized it. Why does music evoke such powerful moods? The answers are at last becoming clear, thanks to revolutionary neuroscience and the emerging field of evolutionary psychology. Both a cutting-edge study and a tribute to the beauty of music itself, This Is Your Brain on Music unravels a host of mysteries that affect everything from pop culture to our understanding of human nature, including: 'Are our musical preferences shaped in utero?' 'Is there a cutoff point for acquiring new tastes in music?' 'What do PET scans and MRIs reveal about the brain's response to music?' 'Is musical pleasure different from other kinds of pleasure?' This Is Your Brain on Music explores cultures in which singing is considered an essential human function, patients who have a rare disorder that prevents them from making sense of music, and scientists studying why two people may not have the same definition of pitch. At every turn, this provocative work unlocks deep secrets about how nature and nurture forge a uniquely human obsession.

Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time
Written by Rob Sheffield
Published by Crown Publishing Group

Description: What Is love? Great minds have been grappling with this question throughout the ages, and in the modern era, they have come up with many different answers. According to Western philosopher Pat Benatar, love is a battlefield. Her paisan Frank Sinatra would add the corollary that love is a tender trap. Love hurts. Love stinks. Love bites, love bleeds, love is the drug. The troubadours of our times agree: They want to know what love is, and they want you to show them. But the answer is simple: Love is a mix tape. In the 1990s, when "alternative" was suddenly mainstream, bands like Pearl Jam and Pavement, Nirvana and R.E.M. -bands that a year before would have been too weird for MTV- were MTV. It was the decade of Kurt Cobain and Shania Twain and Taylor Dayne, a time that ended all too soon. The boundaries of American culture were exploding, and music was leading the way. It was also when a shy music geek named Rob Sheffield met a hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl named Renée, who was way too cool for him but fell in love with him anyway. He was tall. She was short. He was shy. She was a social butterfly. She was the only one who laughed at his jokes when they were so bad, and they were always bad. They had nothing in common except that they both loved music. Music brought them together and kept them together. And it was music that would help Rob through a sudden, unfathomable loss. In Love Is a Mix Tape, Rob, now a writer for Rolling Stone, uses the songs on fifteen mix tapes to tell the story of his brief time with Renée. From Elvis to Missy Elliott, the Rolling Stones to Yo La Tengo, the songs on these tapes make up the soundtrack to their lives. Rob Sheffield isn't a musician, he's a writer, and Love Is a Mix Tape isn't a love song- but it might as well be. This is Rob's tribute to music, to the decade that shaped him, but most of all to one unforgettable woman.

General Fiction

WINNER
The Road
Written by Cormac McCarthy
Published by Alfred A. Knopf

Description: A searing, post apocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece. A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food - and each other. The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

Brothers
Written by Da Chen
Published by Shaye Areheart Books/Crown

Description: At the height of China's Cultural Revolution a powerful general fathered two sons. Tan was born to the general's wife and into a life of comfort and luxury. His half brother, Shento, was born to the general's mistress, who threw herself off a cliff in the mountains of Balan only moments after delivering her child. Growing up, each remained ignorant of the other's existence. In Beijing, Tan enjoyed the best schools, the finest clothes, and the prettiest girls. Shento was raised on the mountainside by an old healer and his wife until their deaths landed him in an orphanage, where he was always hungry, alone, and frightened. Though on divergent roads, each brother is driven by a passionate desire—one to glorify his father, the other to seek revenge against him. Separated by distance and opportunity, Tan and Shento follow the paths that lie before them, while unknowingly falling in love with the same woman and moving toward the explosive moment when their fates finally merge.

American Youth
Written by Phil LaMarche
Published by Random House

Description: In a small town, a fourteen-year-old boy is hanging out at home with some friends - two brothers. The two boys convince him to show them his father's gun. The gun goes off, and one of the brothers lies dead. His brother holds the gun. The boy's mother grabs him and asks what happened. When he tells her that he put the bullet in the gun, she replies, "You didn't load that gun. Understand?" And from that one moment of deceit, a series of events unfolds that forces hard choices and hard emotional times on the boy as he struggles with his guilt, the police, his growing infamy at school and his impulse to flee. Casting a piercing eye on the link between young male identity and violence, American Youth is destined to become a coming-of-age classic, centered on a young man caught in a crucible of social change and the storms of adolescence.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Written by Marisha Pessl
Published by Viking

Description: This mesmerizing debut, uncannily uniting the trials of a postmodern upbringing with a murder mystery, heralds the arrival of a vibrant new voice in literary fiction. Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a darkly hilarious coming-of-age novel and a richly plotted suspense tale told through the distinctive voice of its heroine, Blue van Meer. After a childhood moving from one academic outpost to another with her father (a man prone to aphorisms and meteoric affairs), Blue is clever, deadpan, and possessed of a vast lexicon of literary, political, philosophical, and scientific knowledge-and is quite the cineaste to boot. In her final year of high school at the elite (and unusual) St. Gallway School in Stockton, North Carolina, Blue falls in with a charismatic group of friends and their captivating teacher, Hannah Schneider. But when the drowning of one of Hannah's friends and the shocking death of Hannah herself lead to a confluence of mysteries, Blue is left to make sense of it all with only her gimlet-eyed instincts and cultural references to guide-or misguide-her. Structured around a syllabus for a Great Works of Literature class and containing ironic visual aids (drawn by the author), Pessl's debut novel is complex yet compelling, erudite yet accessible. It combines the suspense of Hitchcock, the self-parody of Dave Eggers, and the storytelling gifts of Donna Tartt with a dazzling intelligence and wit entirely Pessl's own.

Jamestown
Written by Matthew Sharpe
Published by Soft Skull Press

Description: Jamestown chronicles a group of "settlers" (more like survivors) from the ravaged island of Manhattan, departing just as the Chrysler Building has mysteriously plummeted to the earth. This ragged band is heading down what's left of I-95 in a half-school bus, half-Millennium Falcon. Their goal is to establish an outpost in southern Virginia, find oil, and exploit the Indians controlling the area. Based on actual accounts of the Jamestown settlement from 1607 to 1617, Jamestown features historical characters including John Smith, Pocahontas, and others enacting an imaginative re-version of life in the pioneer colony. In this retelling, Pocahontas's father Powhatan is half-Falstaff, half-Henry V, while his consigliere is a psychiatrist named Sidney Feingold. John Martin gradually loses body parts in a series of violent encounters, and John Smith is a ruthless and pragmatic redhead continually undermining the aristocratic leadership. Communication is by text-messaging, IMing, and, ultimately, telepathy. Punctuated by jokes, rhymes, rim shot dialogue, and bloody black-comic tableaux, Jamestown is a trenchant commentary on America's past and present that confirms Matthew Sharpe's status as a major talent in contemporary fiction.

Romance

WINNER
Angels Fall
Written by Nora Roberts
Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons

Description: Reece Gilmore has come a long way to see the stunning view below her. As the sole survivor of a brutal crime back East, she has been on the run, desperately fighting the nightmares and panic attacks that haunt her. Reece settles in Angel's Fist, Wyoming - temporarily, at least-and takes a job at a local diner. And now she's hiked this mountain all by herself. It was glorious, she thought, as she peered through her binoculars at the Snake River churning below. Then Reece saw the man and woman on the opposite bank. Arguing. Fighting. And suddenly, the man was on top of the woman, his hands around her throat . . . Enjoying a moment of solitude a bit farther down the trail is a gruff loner named Brody. But by the time Reece reaches him and brings him to the scene, the pair has vanished. When authorities comb the area where she saw the attack, they find nothing. No signs of struggle. No freshly turned earth. Not even a tire track. And no one in Angel's Fist seems to believe her. After all, she's a newcomer in town, with a reputation for being jumpy and jittery-maybe even a little fragile. Maybe it's time to run again, to move on . . . Reece Gilmore knows there's a killer in Angel's Fist, even if Brody, despite his seeming impatience and desire to keep her at arm's length, is the only one willing to believe her. When a series of menacing events makes it clear that someone wants her out of the way, Reece must put her trust in Brody-and herself-to find out if there is a killer in Angel's Fist before it's too late.

Simply Magic
Written by Mary Balogh
Published by Delacorte Press/The Bantam Dell Publishing Group

Description: On a splendid August afternoon Susanna Osbourne is introduced to the most handsome man she has ever seen . . . and instantly feels the icy chill of recognition. Peter Edgeworth, Viscount Whitleaf, is utterly charming - and seemingly unaware that they have met before. With his knowing smile and seductive gaze, Peter acts the rake; but he stirs something in Susanna she has never felt before, a yearning that both frightens and dazzles her. Instantly she knows: this brash nobleman poses a threat to her heart . . . and to the secrets she guards so desperately. From the moment they meet, Peter is drawn to Susanna's independence, dazzled by her sharp wit - he simply must have her. But the more he pursues, the more Susanna withdraws . . . until a sensual game of thrust-and-parry culminates in a glorious afternoon of passion. Now more determined than ever to keep her by his side, Peter begins to suspect that a tragic history still haunts Susanna. And as he moves closer to the truth, Peter is certain of one thing: he will defy the mysteries of her past for a future with this exquisite creature - all Susanna must do is trust him with the most precious secret of all. . .

The Kommandant's Girl
Written by Pam Jenoff
Published by Mira Books/Harlequin

Description: Nineteen-year-old Emma Bau has been married only three weeks when the Nazis invade her native Poland. After her husband, Jacob, is forced underground as part of the resistance movement, Emma finds herself imprisoned in the ghetto. There she meets one of the resistance leaders, and with his help, she is able to escape and live as "Anna Lipowski" with Jacob's Christian cousin, Krysia. Emma's already precarious situation is complicated by her introduction to Kommandant Georg Richwalder, a high-ranking Nazi official who insists that Emma come to work for him. In this position, Emma has the opportunity to provide information to the resistance movement and potentially help her still-imprisoned parents. To do so, however, she must become perilously close to the Kommandant, a troubled man with a dark secret whose romantic intentions are clear.

Natural Born Charmer
Written by Susan Elizabeth Phillips
Published by William Morrow & Co.

Description: Chicago Stars quarterback Dean Robillard is the luckiest man in the world: a bona-fide sports superstar and the pride of the NFL with a profitable side career as a buff billboard model for End Zone underwear. But life in the glory lane has started to pale, and Dean has set off on a cross-country trip to figure out what's gone wrong. When he hits a lonely stretch of Colorado highway, he spies something that will shake up his gilded life in ways he can't imagine. A young woman . . . dressed in a beaver suit. Blue Bailey is on a mission to murder her ex. Or at least inflict serious damage. As for the beaver suit she's wearing . . . Is it her fault that life keeps throwing her curveballs? Witness the expensive black sports car pulling up next to her on the highway and the Greek god stepping out of it. Blue's career as a portrait painter is the perfect job for someone who refuses to stay in one place for very long. She needs a ride, and America's most famous football player has an imposing set of wheels. Now, all she has to do is keep him entertained, off guard, and fully clothed before he figures out exactly how desperate she is. But Dean isn't the brainless jock she imagines, and Blue-despite her petite stature-is just about the toughest woman Dean has ever met. They're soon heading for his summer home where their already complicated lives and inconvenient attraction to each other will become entangled with a charismatic but aging rock star; a beautiful fifty-two-year-old woman trying to make peace with her rock and roll past; an eleven-year-old who desperately needs a family; and a bitter old woman who hates them all. As the summer progresses, the wandering portrait artist and the charming football star play a high-stakes game, fighting themselves and each other for a chance to have it all. Natural Born Charmer is for everyone who's ever thought about leaving their old life in the dust and never looking back. Susan Elizabeth Phillips takes us home again . . . and shows us where love truly lives.

The Edge of Winter
Written by Luanne Rice
Published by Bantam Books/The Bantam Dell Publishing Group

Description: Neve Halloran and her daughter have shared a fierce love for the austere beauty of Rhode Island's South County ever since Neve guided Mickey's first baby steps along the sandy shore. Now, with Mickey a teenager and Neve's last hope for happiness with her daughter's loving but unstable father gone, both will struggle to make a new life together amid the windswept landscape that sustains them. Captivated by a fragile wildlife sanctuary, Mickey will move toward womanhood in the company of a lonely boy who shares her instinctive way with the creatures of the coast. And Neve will find herself drawn to a man who has devoted his life to the sanctuary, but who is unable to share the pain of a recent loss - or reconnect with the father who still bears the scars of World War II. As winter gives way to spring, and spring to summer, a secret will emerge that has lain buried in the depths just offshore for decades, a secret that will galvanize the small seaside community. For the waters bear their own vestige of the past - and their ceaseless rhythms may point the way to hope and new beginnings. Lyrical, luminous, and utterly captivating, The Edge of Winter is Luanne Rice at her most penetrating and insightful, in a moving exploration of the bonds that shape us and set us free.

Audio

WINNER
To Kill a Mockingbird
Written by Harper Lee
Read by Sissy Spacek
Published by Caedmon Audio

Description: Harper Lee's classic novel of a lawyer in the deep south defending a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has earned many distinctions since its original publication in 1960. It won the Pulitzer Prize, has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than thirty million copies worldwide, and been made into an enormously popular movie. Most recently, librarians across the country gave the book the highest of honors by voting it the best novel of the twentieth century.

Can't Wait to Get to Heaven
Written and read by Fannie Flagg
Published by Random House Audio

Description: Combining southern warmth with unabashed emotion and side-splitting hilarity, Fannie Flagg takes readers back to Elmwood Springs, Missouri, where the most unlikely and surprising experiences of a high-spirited octogenarian inspire a town to ponder the age-old question: Why are we here? Life is the strangest thing. One minute, Mrs. Elner Shimfissle is up in her tree, picking figs, and the next thing she knows, she is off on an adventure she never dreamed of, running into people she never in a million years expected to meet. Meanwhile, back home, Elner's nervous, high-strung niece Norma faints and winds up in bed with a cold rag on her head; Elner's neighbor Verbena rushes immediately to the Bible; her truck driver friend, Luther Griggs, runs his eighteen-wheeler into a ditch - and the entire town is thrown for a loop and left wondering, "What is life all about, anyway?" Except for Tot Whooten, who owns Tot's Tell It Like It Is Beauty Shop. Her main concern is that the end of the world might come before she can collect her social security. In this comedy-mystery, those near and dear to Elner discover something wonderful: Heaven is actually right here, right now, with people you love, neighbors you help, friendships you keep.

I Like You
Written and read by Amy Sedaris
Published by Hachette Audio

Description: Dear Reluctant Shopper, Welcome to my flap. If you are reading this, I can only assume that you're hesitating to buy this book. Maybe you're thinking I don't know anything about this book; I would like more information. Should I buy it based solely on the exceptionally striking cover shot? Well, that's a good enough reason for me. Do I really need to add that there's a secret poster you can see only after the book is purchased? A poster that involves plenty of skin and would make a perfect addition to any basement rec room? Why are you still reading? Look, your wishy-washy attitude is really starting to rub me the wrong way. You know what? Maybe you should set the book down and let someone more attractive buy it! I'm sorry, that was uncalled for. Deep breath...let it out slowly. I'm sure in some circles you're considered attractive. I'm sure by now you're skipping past the register...What, you still haven't bought it!? What's the matter, can't read? Who cares? I can't write. Besides, this book is so visual a monkey could enjoy it. All right, fine, you win. I'll tell you a little about the book. The first thing you should know is: I like parties! Here are some of the helpful suggestions you'll get by reading this sturdy book: 1. It's always a good idea to stock your neighbor's apartment with the basics (alcohol, ice, corn chips...) so when you run out at three o'clock in the morning, you know whose door to knock on. 2. Try filling your medicine cabinet with marbles. Nothing announces a nosy partygoer more successfully than an avalanche of marbles striking a porcelain sink. 3. Pre-crack all your liquor bottles. No one wants to be the first, especially at a wake. 4. Give the party a strict time span and if it's not going well at least you know when it will be over. 5. Have toilet paper. Convinced? I thought so. Just remember: sometimes you can judge a book by its cover, or in this case, its tremendously gorgeous cover. I'll see you on the inside.

Mississippi Sissy
Written and read by Kevin Sessums
Published by Audio Renaissance

Description: Mississippi Sissy is the stunning memoir from Kevin Sessums, a celebrity journalist who grew up scaring other children, hiding terrible secrets, pretending to be Arlene Frances and running wild in the South. As he grew up in Forest, Mississippi, befriended by the family maid, Mattie May, he became a young man who turned the word "sissy" on its head, just as his mother taught him. In Jackson, he is befriended by Eudora Welty and journalist Frank Hains, but when Hains is brutally murdered in his antebellum mansion, Kevin's long road north towards celebrity begins. In a memoir that echoes bestsellers like The Liar's Club, Kevin Sessums brings to life the pungent American south of the 1960s and the world of the strange little boy who grew there.

Thirteen Moons
Written by Charles Frazier
Read by Will Patton
Published by Random House Audio

Description: This magnificent novel by one of America's finest writers is the epic of one man's remarkable journey, set in nineteenth-century America against the background of a vanishing people and a rich way of life. At the age of twelve, under the Wind moon, Will is given a horse, a key, and a map, and sent alone into the Indian Nation to run a trading post as a bound boy. It is during this time that he grows into a man, learning, as he does, of the raw power it takes to create a life, to find a home. In a card game with a white Indian named Featherstone, Will wins - for a brief moment - a mysterious girl named Claire, and his passion and desire for her spans this novel. As Will's destiny intertwines with the fate of the Cherokee Indians - including a Cherokee Chief named Bear - he learns how to fight and survive in the face of both nature and men, and eventually, under the Corn Tassel Moon, Will begins the fight against Washington City to preserve the Cherokee's homeland and culture. And he will come to know the truth behind his belief that "only desire trumps time." Brilliantly imagined, written with great power and beauty by a master of American fiction, Thirteen Moons is a stunning novel about a man's passion for a woman, and how loss, longing and love can shape a man's destiny over the many moons of a life.

Religion/Spirituality

WINNER
Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know - And Doesn't
Written by Stephen Prothero
Published by Harper One

Description: The United States is one of the most religious places on earth, but it is also a nation of shocking religious illiteracy. Only 10 percent of American teenagers can name all five major world religions and 15 percent cannot name any. Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that the Bible holds the answers to all or most of life's basic questions, yet only half of American adults can name even one of the four gospels and most Americans cannot name the first book of the Bible. Despite this lack of basic knowledge, politicians and pundits continue to root public policy arguments in religious rhetoric whose meanings are missed - or misinterpreted - by the vast majority of Americans. "We have a major civic problem on our hands," says religion scholar Stephen Prothero. He makes the provocative case that to remedy this problem, we should return to teaching religion in the public schools. Alongside "reading, writing, and arithmetic," religion ought to become the "Fourth R" of American education. Many believe that America's descent into religious illiteracy was the doing of activist judges and secularists hell-bent on banishing religion from the public square. Prothero reveals that this is a profound misunderstanding. "In one of the great ironies of American religious history," Prothero writes, "it was the nation's most fervent people of faith who steered us down the road to religious illiteracy. Just how that happened is one of the stories this book has to tell." Prothero avoids the trap of religious relativism by addressing both the core tenets of the world's major religions and the real differences among them. Complete with a dictionary of the key beliefs, characters, and stories of Christianity, Islam, and other religions, Religious Literacy reveals what every American needs to know in order to confront the domestic and foreign challenges facing this country today.

American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion
Written by Paul M. Barrett
Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Description: Vivid, dramatic portraits of Muslims in America in the years after 9/11, as they define themselves in a religious subculture torn between moderation and extremism. There are as many as six million Muslims in the United States today. Islam (together with Christianity and Judaism) is now an American faith, and the challenges Muslims face as they reconcile their intense and demanding faith with our chaotic and permissive society are recognizable to all of us. From West Virginia to northern Idaho, American Islam takes readers into Muslim homes, mosques, and private gatherings to introduce a population of striking variety. The central characters range from a charismatic black imam schooled in the militancy of the Nation of Islam to the daughter of an Indian immigrant family whose feminist views divided her father's mosque in West Virginia. Here are lives in conflict, reflecting in different ways the turmoil affecting the religion worldwide. An intricate mixture of ideologies and cultures, American Muslims include immigrants and native born, black and white converts, those who are well integrated into the larger society and those who are alienated and extreme in their political views. Even as many American Muslims succeed in material terms and enrich our society, Islam is enmeshed in controversy in the United States, as thousands of American Muslims have been investigated and interrogated in the wake of 9/11. American Islamis an intimate and vivid group portrait of American Muslims in a time of turmoil and promise.

Gonzo Judaism: A Bold Path for Renewing an Ancient Faith
Written by Rabbi Niles Elliot Goldstein
Published by St. Martin's Press/Griffin

Description: Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson transformed his field with an audacity that did not always sit well with his publishers. Gonzo Judaism embraces that same spirit, challenging today's Jews to reclaim their rebel roots, even if the consequences of their actions are disquieting to the leaders of a largely complacent Jewish establishment. Rabbi Niles Elliot Goldstein explores how this revolutionary drive can reshape and revitalize contemporary Judaism - a Judaism many find out of touch and irrelevant. His fresh, maverick approach urges us to take risks and think freely, but also to look back into the past in order to move forward into our future. Gonzo Judaism offers practical tools for creating a more accessible, meaningful, and celebratory Jewish life. Learn why the current nostalgia- and fear-based Judaism has utterly failed to resonate with the modern Jew. Discover how to gain inspiration both inside and outside the conventional synagogue setting. Become a "spiritual archaeologist" and recover powerful practices that have been lost over the centuries. This isn't your run-of-the-mill Judaica book. It is a bold, no-holds-barred manifesto that meets us where we are, a much-needed and daring work that re-visions Jewish identity, community, holidays, and ritual, written with both the credibility of an insider toiling in the trenches and the piercing insight of an outsider observing from the margins. Gonzo Judaism is required reading for anyone in search of an adventurous but authentic path toward spiritual growth and religious wisdom.

The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief
Written by Francis S. Collins
Published by The Free Press

Description: Dr. Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, is one of the world's leading scientists. He works at the cutting edge of the study of DNA, the code of life. Yet he is also a man of unshakable faith in God and scripture. He believes that God cares about us and can intervene in human affairs -- on rare occasions, even miraculously. Collins has personally discovered some of the scientific evidence for the common descent of all living creatures, even though he repudiates the materialist, atheistic worldview argued by many prominent Darwinists. In short, Dr. Collins provides a satisfying solution for the dilemma that haunts everyone who believes in God and respects science. Faith in God and faith in science can be harmonious -- combined into one worldview. The God that he believes in is a God who can listen to prayers and cares about our souls. The biological science he has advanced is compatible with such a God. For Collins, science does not conflict with the Bible, science enhances it. For many years Dr. Collins kept his views largely to himself, as he helped oversee the Human Genome Project's stunning sequencing of the code of life. Now, in what may be the most important melding of reason and revelation since C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, Dr. Collins explains himself in detail. The Language of God makes the case for God and for science. Dr. Collins considers and rejects several positions along the spectrum from atheism to young-earth creationism -- including agnosticism and Intelligent Design. Instead, he proposes a new synthesis, a new way to think about an active, caring God who created humankind through evolutionary processes. He has heard every argument against faith from scientists, and he can refute them. He has also heard the needless rejection of scientific truths by some people of faith, and he can counter that, too. He explains his own journey from atheism to faith, and then takes readers on a stunning tour of modern science to show that physics, chemistry, and biology can all fit together with belief in God and the Bible. The Language of God is essential reading for anyone who wonders about the deepest questions of all: Why are we here? How did we get here? And what does life mean?

Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference?
Written by Philip Yancey
Published by Zondervan

Description: Philip Yancey probes the very heartbeat-the most fundamental, challenging, perplexing, and deeply rewarding aspect-of our relationship with God: prayer. What is prayer? Does it change God's mind or ours-or both? This book is an invitation to communicate with God the Father who invites us into an eternal partnership through prayer.

Graphic Novel

WINNER
Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels
Written by Scott McCloud
Published by Harper Paperbacks

Description: Learn How to . . . Choose the right moments to clarify and strengthen your stories. Frame actions and guide your readers' eyes through each comics page. Choose words and pictures that communicate together. Create varied and compelling new characters. Master body language and facial expressions. Create rich, believable worlds for your readers to explore. Pick the tools that are right for you. Navigate the vast world of comics styles and genres.

Ode to Kirihito
Written by Osamu Tezuka
Published by Vertical

Description: It may or may not be contagious. There seems to be no cure for it. Yet, Monmow Disease, a life-threatening condition that transforms a person into a dog-like beast, is not the only villain in this shocking triumph of a medical thriller by manga-god Osamu Tezuka. Said to have been the personal favorite of the artist, who held a degree in medicine, and surprisingly attentive to Christian themes and imagery, Ode to Kirihito demolishes naive notions about human nature and health and likely preconceptions about the comics master himself. From pregnant vistas of the Japanese countryside to closed rooms full of sin and redemption, Tezuka astounds for more than eight hundred continuous pages, his art in turn easefully concise and flamboyantly experimental, his inquiry into our most repugnant instincts and prospects for overcoming them unflinchingly serious. Incorporating elements of the often lurid and adult-oriented "gekiga" style for the first time, Tezuka entered into his fruitful late period with this work. A promising young doctor, Kirihito Osanai visits a remote Japanese mountain village to investigate the source of the latest medical mystery. While he ends up traveling the world to discover what it takes to be cured of such a disease, a conspiracy back home attempts to explain away his absence. Hinging upon his fate are those of his loved ones: an unstable childhood friend and colleague trapped between factions of the medical establishment that nurtured him; a fiancée emotionally transformed by Kirihito's mysterious disappearance; and a stranger who becomes his guardian angel, a sensual circus-act performer with volatile psychological secrets. From plutocratic Taipei and racially divided South Africa to backwater Arabia and modern Osaka, ambition and desire beckon "normal men" to behave uglier than any beast. Riveting our attention on deformity and its acceptance like The Elephant Man by David Lynch, Ode to Kirihito examines the true worth of human beings through and beyond appearances.

Alice in Sunderland
Written by Bryan Talbot
Published by Dark Horse

Description: Sunderland! Thirteen hundred years ago it was the greatest center of learning in the whole of Christendom and the very cradle of English consciousness. In the time of Lewis Carroll it was the greatest shipbuilding port in the world. To this city that gave the world the electric light bulb, the stars and stripes, the millennium, the Liberty Ships and the greatest British dragon legend came Carroll in the years preceding his most famous book, Alice in Wonderland, and here are buried the roots of his surreal masterpiece. Enter the famous Edwardian palace of varieties, The Sunderland Empire, for a unique experience: an entertaining and epic meditation on myth, history and storytelling and decide for yourself - does Sunderland really exist?

Exit Wounds
Written by Rutu Modan
Published by Drawn & Quarterly

Description: Set in modern-day Tel Aviv, a young man, Koby Franco, receives an urgent phone call from a female soldier. Learning that his estranged father may have been a victim of a suicide bombing in Hadera, Koby reluctantly joins the soldier in searching for clues. His death would certainly explain his empty apartment and disconnected phone line. As Koby tries to unravel the mystery of his father's death, he finds himself piecing together not only the last few months of his father's life but his entire identity. With thin, precise lines and luscious watercolors, Rutu Modan creates a portrait of modern Israel, a place where sudden death mingles with the slow dissolution of family ties.

Aya
Written by Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie
Published by Drawn & Quarterly

Description: Family and friends gather at Aya's house every evening to watch the country's first television ad campaign promoting the fortifying effects of Solibra, "the strong man's beer." It's a golden time, and the nation, too - an oasis of affluence and stability in West Africa - seems fueled by something wondrous. Who's to know that the Ivorian miracle is nearing its end? In the sun-warmed streets of working-class Yopougon, aka Yop City, holidays are around the corner, the open-air bars and discos are starting to fill up, and trouble of a different kind is about to raise eyebrows. At night, an empty table in the market square under the stars is all the privacy young lovers can hope for, and what happens there is soon everybody's business. Aya tells the story of its nineteen-year-old heroine, the studious and clear-sighted Aya, her easygoing friends Adjoua and Bintou, and their meddling relatives and neighbors. It's a breezy and wryly funny account of the desire for joy and freedom, and of the simple pleasures and private troubles of everyday life in Yop City.

Poetry

WINNER
For the Confederate Dead
Written by Kevin Young
Published by Alfred A. Knopf

Description: In this passionate new collection, Kevin Young takes up a range of African American griefs and passages. He opens with the beautiful "Elegy for Miss Brooks," invoking Gwendolyn Brooks, who died in 2000, and who makes a perfect muse for the volume: "What the devil / are we without you?" he asks. "I tuck your voice, laced / tight, in these brown shoes." In that spirit of intimate community, Young gives us a saucy ballad of Jim Crow, a poem about Lionel Hampton's last concert in Paris, an "African Elegy" which addresses the tragic loss of a close friend in conjunction with the first anniversary of 9/11, and a series entitled "Americana" in which we encounter a clutch of mythical southern towns, such as East Jesus ("The South knows ruin & likes it / thataway - the barns becoming / earth again, leaning in - ") and West Hell ("Sin, thy name is this / wait - this place - / a long ways from Here / to There"). For the Confederate Dead finds Young, more than ever before, in a poetic space that is at once public and personal. In the marvelous "Guernica" Young's account of a journey through Spain blends with the news of an American lynching, prompting him to ask, "Precious South, / must I save you, / or myself?" In this surprising book, the poet manages to do a bit of both, embracing the contradictions of our "Confederate" legacy and the troubled nation where that legacy still lingers.

Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems, 1970 – 2005
Written by Alice Notley
Published by Wesleyan University Press

Description: Considered by many to be among the most outstanding of living American poets, Alice Notley has amassed a body of work that includes intimate lyrics, experimental diaries, traditional genres, the postmodern series, the newly invented epic, political observation and invective, and the poem as novel. This chronological selection of her most notable work offers a delineation of her life and creative development. Formerly associated with the second generation of the New York School, Notley has become a poet with a completely distinctive voice. Grave of Light is a progression of changing forms and styles--an extensive panorama held together explicitly by the shape of the poet's times. Notley's poems challenge their subjects head-on, suffusing language with radiant truth.

One Big Self: An Investigation
Written by C.D. Wright
Published by Copper Canyon Press

Description: Inspired by numerous visits inside Louisiana state prisons-where MacArthur Fellow C.D. Wright served as a "factotum" for a portrait photographer - One Big Self bears witness to incarcerated men and women and speaks to the psychic toll of protracted time passed in constricted space. It is a riveting mosaic of distinct voices, epistolary pieces, elements from a moralistic board game, road signage, prison data, inmate correspondence, and "counts" of things-from baby's teeth to chigger bites: Count your folding money, Count the times you said you wouldn't go back, Count your debts, Count the roaches when the light comes on, and Count your kids after the house fire.

Blackbird and Wolf
Written by Henri Cole
Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Description: "I don't want words to sever me from reality. I don't want to need them. I want nothing to reveal feeling but feeling - as in freedom, or the knowledge of peace in a realm beyond, or the sound of water poured in a bowl." - From Gravity and Center. In his sixth collection of poetry, Henri Cole deepens his excavations of autobiography and memory. "I don't want words to sever me from reality," he asserts, and these poems - often hovering within the realm of the sonnet - combine a delight in the senses with the rueful, the elegiac, the harrowing. Many confront the human need for love, the highest function of our species. But whether writing about solitude or the desire for unsanctioned love, animals or flowers, the dissolution of his mother's body or war, Cole maintains a style that is neither confessional nor abstract. And in Blackbird and Wolf, he is always opposing disappointment and difficult truths with innocence and wonder.

A Thief of Strings
Written by Donald Revell
Published by Alice James Books

Description: What is a nation when it ignores history? What is a man when he forgets his life? This acclaimed poet's tenth collection chronicles our seeming, and apocalyptic, liberation from conscience-and even consciousness itself. These masterful poems, written in Donald Revell's increasingly more enraptured and oracular style, delineate the consequences of such disregard in a manner both spiritually generous and urgent.

Cooking

WINNER
Joy of Cooking: 75th Anniversary Edition
Written by Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, and Ethan Becker
Published by Scribner

Description: Seventy-five years ago, a St. Louis widow named Irma Rombauer took her life savings and self-published a book called The Joy of Cooking. Her daughter Marion tested recipes and made the illustrations, and they sold their mother-daughter project from Irma's apartment. Today, nine revisions later, the Joy of Cooking-- selected by The New York Public Library as one of the 150 most important and influential books of the twentieth century -- has taught tens of millions of people to cook, helped feed and delight millions beyond that, answered countless kitchen and food questions, and averted many a cooking crisis. Ethan Becker, Marion's son, leads the latest generation of JOY, still a family affair, into the twenty-first century with a 75th anniversary edition that draws upon the best of the past while keeping its eye on the way we cook now. It features a rediscovery of the witty, clear voices of Marion Becker and Irma Rombauer, whose first instructions to the cook were "stand facing the stove." JOY remains the greatest teaching cookbook ever written. Reference material gives cooks the precise information they need for success. New illustrations focus on techniques, including everything from knife skills to splitting cake layers, setting a table, and making tamales. This edition also brings back the encyclopedic chapter Know Your Ingredients. The chapter that novices and pros alike have consulted for over thirty years has been revised, expanded, and banded, making it a book within a book. Cooking Methods shows cooks how to braise, steam, roast, sauté, and deep-fry effortlessly, while an all-new Nutrition chapter has the latest thinking on healthy eating -- as well as a large dose of common sense. This edition restores the personality of the book, reinstating popular elements such as the grab-bag Brunch, Lunch, and Supper chapter and chapters on frozen desserts, cocktails, beer and wine, canning, salting, smoking, jellies and preserves, pickles and relishes, and freezing foods. Fruit recipes bring these favorite ingredients into all courses of the meal, and there is a new grains chart. There are even recipes kids will enjoy making and eating, such as Chocolate Dipped Bananas, Dyed Easter Eggs, and the ever-popular Pizza. In addition to hundreds of brand-new recipes, this JOY is filled with many recipes from all previous editions, retested and reinvented for today's tastes. This is the JOY for how we live now. Knowing that most cooks are sometimes in a hurry to make a meal, the JOY now has many new dishes ready in 30 minutes or less. Slow cooker recipes have been added for the first time, and Tuna Casserole made with canned cream of mushroom soup is back. This JOY shares how to save time without losing flavor by using quality convenience foods such as canned stocks and broths, beans, tomatoes, and soups, as well as a wide array of frozen ingredients. Cooking creatively with leftovers emphasizes ease and economy, and casseroles -- those simple, satisfying, make-ahead, no-fuss dishes -- abound. Especially important to busy households is a new section that teaches how to cook and freeze for a day and eat for a week, in an effort to eat more home-cooked meals, save money, and dine well. As always, JOY grows with the times: this edition boasts an expanded Vegetables chapter, including instructions on how to cook vegetables in the microwave, and an expanded baking section, Irma's passion -- always considered a stand-alone bible within the JOY. This all-new, all-purpose anniversary edition of the Joy of Cooking offers endless choice for virtually every occasion, situation, and need, from a 10-minute stir-fry on a weekday night to Baby Back Ribs and Grilled Corn in the backyard, or a towering Chocolate Layer Cake with Chocolate Fudge Frosting and Homemade Vanilla Ice Cream. JOY will show you the delicious way just as it has done for countless cooks before you. Even after 75 years, the span of culinary information is breathtaking and covers everything from boiling eggs (there are two schools of thought) to show stopping, celebratory dishes such as Beef Wellington, Roast Turkey and Bread Stuffing, and Crown Roast of Pork.

Pork & Sons
Written by Stephane Reynaud
Published by Phaidon Press

Description: This delightful, affectionate homage to the pig is a blend of cookbook and travel guide, celebrating the pig and the bounty it provides.

Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey and Lebanon
Written by Claudia Roden
Published by Alfred A. Knopf

Description: In the 1960s Claudia Roden introduced Americans to a new world of tastes in her classic A Book of Middle Eastern Food. Now, in her enchanting new book, Arabesque, she revisits the three countries with the most exciting cuisines today - Morocco, Turkey, and Lebanon. Interweaving history, stories, and her own observations, she gives us 150 of the most delectable recipes: some of them new discoveries, some reworkings of classic dishes - all of them made even more accessible and delicious for today's home cook. From Morocco, the most exquisite and refined cuisine of North Africa: couscous dishes; multilayered pies; delicately flavored tagines; ways of marrying meat, poultry, or fish with fruit to create extraordinary combinations of spicy, savory, and sweet. From Turkey, a highly sophisticated cuisine that dates back to the Ottoman Empire yet reflects many new influences today: a delicious array of kebabs, fillo pies, eggplant dishes in many guises, bulgur and chickpea salads, stuffed grape leaves and peppers, and sweet puddings. From Lebanon, a cuisine of great diversity: a wide variety of mezze (those tempting appetizers that can make a meal all on their own); dishes featuring sun-drenched Middle Eastern vegetables and dried legumes; and national specialties such askibbeh, meatballs with pine nuts, and lamb shanks with yogurt. Claudia Roden knows this part of the world so intimately that we delight in being in such good hands as she translates the subtle play of flavors and simple cooking techniques to our own home kitchens.

The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook: Stories and Recipes for Southerners and Would-Be Southerners
Written by Matt Lee & Ted Lee
Published by W. W. Norton & Co.

Description: You don't have to be southern to cook southern. From the New York Times food writers who defended lard and demystified gumbo comes a collection of exceptional southern recipes for everyday cooks. The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook tells the story of the brothers' culinary coming-of-age in Charleston - how they triumphed over their northern roots and learned to cook southern without a southern grandmother. Here are recipes for classics like Fried Chicken, Crab Cakes, and Pecan Pie, as well as little-known preparations such as St. Cecilia Punch, Pickled Peaches, and Shrimp Burgers. Others bear the hallmark of the brothers' resourceful cooking style - simple, sophisticated dishes like Blackened Potato Salad, Saigon Hoppin' John, and Buttermilk-Sweet Potato Pie that usher southern cooking into the twenty-first century without losing sight of its roots. With helpful sourcing and substitution tips, this is a practical and personal guide that will have readers cooking southern tonight, wherever they live. 32 pages of full-color photographs of the recipes; fifty b/w photographs from the Lee Bros.' travels throughout the South.

Baking: From My Home to Yours
Written by Dorie Greenspan
Published by Houghton Mifflin

Description: Dorie Greenspan has written recipes for the most eminent chefs in the world: Pierre Hermé, Daniel Boulud, and arguably the greatest of them all, Julia Child, who once told Dorie, "You write recipes just the way I do." Her recipe writing has won widespread praise for its literate curiosity and "patient but exuberant style." (One hard-boiled critic called it "a joy forever.") In Baking: From My Home to Yours, her masterwork, Dorie applies the lessons from three decades of experience to her first and real love: home baking. The 300 recipes will seduce a new generation of bakers, whether their favorite kitchen tools are a bowl and a whisk or a stand mixer and a baker's torch. Even the most homey of the recipes are very special. Dorie's favorite raisin swirl bread. Big spicy muffins from her stint as a baker in a famous New York City restaurant. French chocolate brownies (a Parisian pastry chef begged for the recipe). A dramatic black and white cake for a "wow" occasion. Pierre Hermé's extraordinary lemon tart. The generous helpings of background information, abundant stories, and hundreds of professional hints set Baking apart as a one-of-a-kind cookbook. And as if all of this weren't more than enough, Dorie has appended a fascinating minibook, A Dessertmaker's Glossary, with more than 100 entries, from why using one's fingers is often best, to how to buy the finest butter, to how the bundt pan got its name.

Health/Self-Improvement

WINNER
How Doctors Think
Written by Jerome Groopman, M.D.
Published by Houghton Mifflin

Description: On average, a physician will interrupt a patient describing her symptoms within eighteen seconds. In that short time, many doctors decide on the likely diagnosis and best treatment. Often, decisions made this way are correct, but at crucial moments they can also be wrong -- with catastrophic consequences. In this myth-shattering book, Jerome Groopman pinpoints the forces and thought processes behind the decisions doctors make. Groopman explores why doctors err and shows when and how they can -- with our help -- avoid snap judgments, embrace uncertainty, communicate effectively, and deploy other skills that can profoundly impact our health. This book is the first to describe in detail the warning signs of erroneous medical thinking and reveal how new technologies may actually hinder accurate diagnoses. How Doctors Think offers direct, intelligent questions patients can ask their doctors to help them get back on track. Groopman draws on a wealth of research, extensive interviews with some of the country's best doctors, and his own experiences as a doctor and as a patient. He has learned many of the lessons in this book the hard way, from his own mistakes and from errors his doctors made in treating his own debilitating medical problems. How Doctors Think reveals a profound new view of twenty-first-century medical practice, giving doctors and patients the vital information they need to make better judgments together.

Is it Hot in Here? Or Is it Me?: The Complete Guide to Menopause
Written by Pat Wingert, Barbara Kantrowitz
Published by Workman Publishing

Description: For significant milestones, significant books: first, Our Bodies, Ourselves, then What to Expect When You're Expecting, and now, Is it Hot in Here? Or is it me? The Complete Guide to Menopause. Written with an uncompromising intelligence and wit by two award-winning Newsweek journalists, Is it Hot in Here? Or is it me? is the essential, comprehensive, up-to-the-minute, deeply optimistic book for the millions of women in their forties-to-sixties. The menopause transition-so often mysterious-varies greatly from woman to woman. Finally, here is the one book that makes the full scope of it accessible and understood. It covers the role of hormones and the controversy over hormone therapy. The truth about hot flashes . . . and how to deal with one in the middle of a meeting. A top-to-bottom assessment of the aches, pains, and assorted ills that can afflict menopausal women. The impact on sexuality, and how to counteract that wavering libido. (Yes, it's possible to buy a sex toy without the neighbors-or the children- finding out.) There are chapters on memory (how to protect it), moods (how to ride them out), and sleep (how to get it). And then an entire section on using this period as a springboard to staying healthy, feeling great, and looking beautiful for the next act in your life. A complete approach to losing middle-age weight (and tips on finding jeans that will make you look as if you've had a tummy tuck). The essential exercises to keep bones strong. Dealing with dry skin and thinning hair. Habits (and recipes) to begin to encourage heart health now.

YOU On a Diet: The Owner's Manual for Waist Management
Written by Michael F. Roizen, M.D. and Mehmet C. Oz, M.D.
Published by Free Press

Description: For the first time in our history, scientists are uncovering astounding medical evidence about dieting -- and why so many of us struggle with our weight and the size of our waists. Now researchers are unraveling biological secrets about such things as why you crave chocolate or gorge at buffets or store so much fat. Michael Roizen and Mehmet Oz, America's most trusted doctor team and authors of the bestselling YOU series, are now translating this cutting-edge information to help you shave inches off your waist. They're going to do it by giving you the best weapon against fat: knowledge. By understanding how your body's fat-storing and fat-burning systems work, you're going to learn how to crack the code on true and lifelong waist management. Roizen and Oz will invigorate you with equal parts information, motivation, and change-your-life action to show you how your brain, stomach, hormones, muscles, heart, genetics, and stress levels all interact biologically to determine if your body is the size of a baseball bat or of a baseball stadium. In You on a Diet, Roizen and Oz will redefine what a healthy figure is, then take you through an under-the-skin tour of the organs that influence your body's size and its health. You'll even be convinced that the key number to fixate on is not your weight, but your waist size, which best indicates the medical risks of storing too much fat. Because the world has almost as many diet plans as it has e-mail spammers, you'd think that just about all of us would know everything there is to know about dieting, about fat, and about the reasons why our bellies have grown so large. You on a Diet is much more than a diet plan or a series of instructions and guidelines or a faddish berries-only eating plan. It's a complete manual for waist management. It will show you how to achieve and maintain an ideal and healthy body size by providing a lexicon according to which any weight-loss system can be explained. You on a Diet will serve as the operating system that facilitates future evolution in our dieting software. After you learn about the biology of your body and the biology and psychology of fat, you'll be given the YOU Diet and YOU Workout. Both are easy to learn, follow, and maintain. Following a two-week rebooting program will help you lose up to two inches from your waist right from the start. With Roizen and Oz's signature accessibility, wit, and humor, You on a Diet -- The Owner's Manual for Waist Management will revolutionize the way you think about yourself and the food you consume, so that you'll diet smart, not hard. Welcome to your body on a diet.

Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss—and the Myths and Realities of Dieting
Written by Gina Kolata
Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Description: In this eye-opening book, New York Times science writer Gina Kolata shows that our society's obsession with dieting and weight loss is less about keeping trim and staying healthy than about money, power, trends, and impossible ideals. Rethinking Thin is at once an account of the place of diets in American society and a provocative critique of the weight-loss industry. Kolata's account of four determined dieters' progress through a study comparing the Atkins diet to a conventional low calorie one becomes a broad tale of science and society, of social mores and social sanctions, and of politics and power. Rethinking Thin asks whether words like will power are really applicable when it comes to eating and body weight. It dramatizes what it feels like to spend a lifetime struggling with one's weight and fantasizing about finally, at long last, getting thin. It tells the little-known story of the science of obesity and the history of diets and dieting - scientific and social phenomena that made some people rich and thin and left others fat and miserable. And it offers commonsense answers to questions about weight, eating habits, and obesity - giving us a better understanding of the weight that is right for our bodies.

Walking on Eggshells: Navigating the Delicate Relationship Between Adult Children and Parents
Written by Jane Isay
Published by Flying Dolphin Press/Doubleday

Description: Using extensive interviews with people from ages twenty-five to seventy, Isay shows that we're far from alone in our struggles to make this new, adult relationship work. She offers up groundbreaking insights and deeply moving stories that will inspire those in even the toughest situations. You'll learn why silence really is golden, and how sometimes the smallest gesture of love and acceptance is all that's needed to keep the lines of communication open. Isay's warmth and wit shine through on every page as she charts an invaluable course through the confusing and often painful interactions parents and children can face. From marriage and remarriage to stepparents and grandparents, virtually every type of family issue is addressed in anecdotes that are both compelling and reassuring. Preserving intimacy within a family isn't easy, but learning to maintain close ties with your children can be a truly rewarding and life-changing experience. As the world around us grows colder and more disconnected, we need the comfort of family now more than ever. Walking on Eggshells is the much-needed road map that will keep you connected to the people you love most.

Biography/Memoir

WINNER
Einstein: His Life and Universe
Written by Walter Isaacson
Published by Simon & Schuster

Description: By the author of the acclaimed bestseller Benjamin Franklin, this is the first full biography of Albert Einstein since all of his papers have become available. How did his mind work? What made him a genius? Isaacson's biography shows how his scientific imagination sprang from the rebellious nature of his personality. His fascinating story is a testament to the connection between creativity and freedom. Based on newly released personal letters of Einstein, this book explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk -- a struggling father in a difficult marriage who couldn't get a teaching job or a doctorate -- became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe. His success came from questioning conventional wisdom and marveling at mysteries that struck others as mundane. This led him to embrace a morality and politics based on respect for free minds, free spirits, and free individuals. These traits are just as vital for this new century of globalization, in which our success will depend on our creativity, as they were for the beginning of the last century, when Einstein helped usher in the modern age.

The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam
Written by Tom Bissell
Published by Pantheon Books

Description: In April 1975, as Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese Army, John Bissell, a former Marine officer living in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, was glued to his television. Struggling to save his marriage, raise his sons, and live with his memories of the war in Vietnam, Bissell found himself racked with anguish and horror as his country abandoned a cause for which so many of his friends had died. Opening with a gripping account of the chaotic and brutal last month of the war, The Father of All Things is Tom Bissell's powerful reckoning with the Vietnam War and its impact on his father, his country, and Vietnam itself. Through him we learn what it was like to grow up with a gruff but oddly tender veteran father who would wake his children in the middle of the night when the memories got too painful. Bissell also explores the many debates about the war, from whether it was winnable to Ho Chi Minh's motivations to why America's leaders lied so often. Above all, he shows how the war has continued to influence American views on foreign policy more than thirty years later. At the heart of this book is John and Tom Bissell's unforgettable journey back to Vietnam. As they travel the country and talk to Vietnamese veterans, we relive the war as John Bissell experienced it, visit the site of his near-fatal wounding, and hear him explain how Vietnam shaped him and so many of his generation. This is the first major book about the war by an author who grew up after the fall of Saigon. It is a fascinating, all-too-relevant work about the American character - and about war itself. It is also a wise and moving book about fathers, sons, and the universal desire to understand who our parents were before they became our parents.

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
Written by Ishmael Beah
Published by Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Description: This is how wars are fought now: by children, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s. Children have become soldiers of choice. In the more than fifty conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them. What is war like through the eyes of a child soldier? How does one become a killer? How does one stop? Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have struggled to imagine their lives. But until now, there has not been a first-person account from someone who came through this hell and survived. In A Long Way Gone, Beah, now twenty-five years old, tells a riveting story: how at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he'd been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.

Edith Wharton
Written by Hermione Lee
Published by Alfred A. Knopf

Description: The definitive biography of one of America's greatest writers, from the author of the acclaimed masterpiece Virginia Woolf. Delving into heretofore untapped sources, Hermione Lee does away with the image of the snobbish bluestocking and gives us a new Edith Wharton - tough, startlingly modern, as brilliant and complex as her fiction. Born in 1862, Wharton escaped the suffocating fate of the well-born female, traveled adventurously in Europe and eventually settled in France. After tentative beginnings, she developed a forceful literary professionalism and thrived in a luminous society that included Bernard Berenson, Aldous Huxley and most famously Henry James, who here emerges more as peer than as master. Wharton's life was fed by nonliterary enthusiasms as well: her fabled houses and gardens, her heroic relief efforts during the Great War, the culture of the Old World, which she never tired of absorbing. Yet intimacy eluded her: unhappily married and childless, her one brush with passion came and went in midlife, an affair vividly, intimately recounted here. With profound empathy and insight, Lee brilliantly interweaves Wharton's life with the evolution of her writing, the full scope of which shows her far to be more daring than her stereotype as lapidarian chronicler of the Gilded Age. In its revelation of both the woman and the writer, Edith Wharton is a landmark biography.

William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism
Written by Robert D. Richardson
Published by Houghton Mifflin

Description: The prize-winning biographer Robert D. Richardson has written a masterly and utterly moving portrait of James-pivotal member of the Metaphysical Club, author of The Varieties of Religious Experience, eldest sibling in the singular James family. William James, ten years in the making, draws on a vast number of unpublished letters, journals, and family records. Richardson paints extraordinary scenes from what James himself called the "buzzing blooming confusion" of his life, beginning with childhood, as he struggled to achieve amid the domestic chaos and intellectual brilliance of Father, brother Henry, and sister Alice. Through impassioned scholarship, Richardson illuminates James's hugely influential works: the Varieties, Principles of Psychology, Talks to Teachers, and Pragmatism. James was a beloved teacher who taught courage and risk-taking, and served as mentor to W.E.B. Du Bois, Gertrude Stein, and many other Harvard outsiders. One of the great figures in mysticism, James coined the phrase "stream of consciousness." Brought richly to life through Richardson's brilliant insights, James is a man "whose leading ideas are still so fresh and challenging that they are not yet fully assimilated by the modern world they helped to bring about."

Sports

WINNER
The Kings of New York: A Year Among the Geeks, Oddballs, and Geniuses Who Make Up America's Top High School Chess Team
Written by Michael Weinreb
Published by Gotham Books

Description: An award-winning sportswriter takes you inside a year with the nation's top high school chess team. With strict admission standards and a progressive curriculum, Brooklyn's Edward R. Murrow High School has long been one of New York's public-education success stories, serving a diverse neighborhood of immigrants and minorities and ranking among the nation's best high schools. At Murrow, there are no sports teams, and the closest thing to jocks are found on the school's powerhouse chess team, which annually competes for the national championship. In The Kings of New York sportswriter Michael Weinreb follows the members of the Murrow chess team through an entire season, from cash games in Washington Square Park to city and state tournaments to the SuperNationals in Nashville, where this eclectic bunch competes against private schoolers and suburbanites. Along the way, Weinreb brings to life a number of colorful characters: the Yale-educated calculus teacher (and former semipro hockey player) who guides the savants while struggling to find funding for his team; an aspiring rapper and tournament hustler who plays with cutthroat instinct; the team's lone girl, a shy Ukrainian immigrant; the Puerto Rican teen from the rough neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant who plays an ingenious opening gambit named the Orangutan; and the Lithuanian immigrant and team star whose chess rating is climbing toward grandmaster status. In the bestselling tradition of such books as Word Freak and Friday Night Lights, The Kings of New York is a riveting look inside the world of competitive chess and an inspiring profile of young genius.

Ty and The Babe: Baseball's Fiercest Rivals; A Surprising Friendship and the 1941 Has-Beens Golf Championship
Written by Tom Stanton
Published by St. Martin's Press/Thomas Dunne Books

Description: Early in the twentieth century, fate thrust a young Babe Ruth into the gleaming orbit of Ty Cobb. The resulting collision produced a dazzling explosion and a struggle of mythic magnitude. At stake was not just baseball dominance, but eternal glory and the very soul of a sport. For much of fourteen seasons, the Cobb-Ruth rivalry occupied both men and enthralled a generation of fans. Even their retirement from the ball diamond didn't extinguish it. On the cusp of America's entry into World War II, a quarter century after they first met at Navin Field, Cobb and Ruth rekindled their long-simmering feud--this time on the golf course. Ty and Babe battled on the fairways of Long Island, New York; Newton, Massachusetts; and Grosse Ile, Michigan; in a series of charity matches that spawned national headlines and catapulted them once more into the spotlight. Ty and The Babe is the story of their remarkable relationship. It is a tale of grand gestures and petty jealousies, superstition and egotism, spectacular feats and dirty tricks, mind games and athleticism, confrontations, conflagrations, good humor, growth, redemption, and, ultimately, friendship. Spanning several decades,Ty and The Babe conjures the rollicking cities of New York, Boston, and Detroit and the raucous world of baseball from 1915 to 1928, as it moved from the Deadball days of Cobb to the Lively Ball era of Ruth. It also visits the spring and summer of 1941, starting with the Masters Tournament at Augusta National, where Cobb formally challenged Ruth, and continuing with the golf showdown that saw both men employ secret weapons. On these pages, author Tom Stanton challenges the stereotypes that have cast Cobb forever as a Satan and Ruth as a Santa Claus. Along the way, he brings to life a parade of memorable characters: Bobby Jones, Walter Hagen, Grantland Rice, Tris Speaker, Lou Gehrig, Will Rogers, Joe DiMaggio, a trick shot-shooting former fugitive, and a fifteen-year-old caddy with an impeccable golf lineage. No other ball players dominated their time as formidably as Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth. Even today, many decades since either man walked this earth, they tower over the sport. Who was better? Who was the greatest? Those questions followed them throughout their baseball careers, into retirement, and onto the putting greens. That they linger yet is a testament to their talents and personalities.

Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History
Written by Cait Murphy
Published by Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins/Collins

Description: From the perspective of 2007, the unintentional irony of Chance's boast is manifest-these days, the question is when will the Cubs ever win a game they have to have. In October 1908, though, no one would have laughed: The Cubs were, without doubt, baseball's greatest team-the first dynasty of the 20th century. Crazy '08 recounts the 1908 season-the year when Peerless Leader Frank Chance's men went toe to toe to toe with John McGraw and Christy Mathewson's New York Giants and Honus Wagner's Pittsburgh Pirates in the greatest pennant race the National League has ever seen. The American League has its own three-cornered pennant fight, and players like Cy Young, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, and the egregiously crooked Hal Chase ensured that the junior circuit had its moments. But it was the National League's-and the Cubs'-year. Crazy '08, however, is not just the exciting story of a great season. It is also about the forces that created modern baseball, and the America that produced it. In 1908, crooked pols run Chicago's First Ward, and gambling magnates control the Yankees. Fans regularly invade the field to do handstands or argue with the umps; others shoot guns from rickety grandstands prone to burning. There are anarchists on the loose and racial killings in the town that made Lincoln. On the flimsiest of pretexts, General Abner Doubleday becomes a symbol of Americanism, and baseball's own anthem, 'Take Me Out to the Ballgame,' is a hit. Picaresque and dramatic, 1908 is a season in which so many weird and wonderful things happen that it is somehow unsurprising that a hairpiece, a swarm of gnats, a sudden bout of lumbago, and a disaster down in the mines all play a role in its outcome. And sometimes the events are not so wonderful at all. There are several deaths by baseball, and the shadow of corruption creeps closer to the heart of baseball-the honesty of the game itself. Simply put, 1908 is the year that baseball grew up. Oh, and it was the last time the Cubs won the World Series. Destined to be as memorable as the season it documents, Crazy '08 sets a new standard for what a book about baseball can be.

Streams of Consciousness: Hip-Deep Dispatches from the River of Life
Written by Jeff Hull
Published by Lyons Press

Description: This collection is about fishing and everything but fishing. From the trout streams of Montana to the shores of New England, to the spring creeks of Chile's Patagonia to the clear waters of Belize, Hull regales readers with humility and hilarity. In Montana he fishes fabled trout streams in twilight; the day runs down while his brother's time literally runs out. In a small pond on the grounds of a psychiatric hospital in Kansas, he fishes, pulling bluegill out of the water along with an essential part of his identity. While Hull fills his dispatches with wonderful characters and spectacular fishing stories, he offers searing insight into the human heart.

The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the Shot Heard Round the World
Written by Joshua Prager
Published by Pantheon Books

Description: The 1951 regular season was as good as over. The Brooklyn Dodgers led the New York Giants by three runs with just three outs to go in their third and final playoff game. And not once in major league baseball's 278 preceding playoff and World Series games had a team overcome a three-run deficit in the ninth inning. But New York rallied, and at 3:58 p.m. on October 3, 1951, Bobby Thomson hit a home run off Ralph Branca. The Giants won the pennant. The Echoing Green follows the reverberations of that one moment-the Shot Heard Round the World-from the West Wing of the White House to the Sing Sing death house to the Polo Grounds clubhouse, where a home run forever turned hitter and pitcher into hero and goat. It was also in that centerfield block of concrete that, after the home run, a Giant coach tucked away a Wollensak telescope. The spyglass would remain undiscovered until 2001, when, in the jubilee of that home run, Joshua Prager laid bare on the front page of the Wall Street Journal a Giant secret: from July 20, 1951, through the very day of that legendary game, the orange and black stole the finger signals of opposing catchers. The Echoing Green places that revelation at the heart of a larger story, re-creating in extravagant detail the 1951 pennant race and illuminating as never before the impact of both a moment and a long-guarded secret on the lives of Bobby Thomson and Ralph Branca. A wonderfully evocative portrait of the great American pastime, The Echoing Green is baseball history, social history and biography-irresistible reading from any angle.

Humor

WINNER
I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence
Written by Amy Sedaris
Published by Warner Books

Description: Dear Reluctant Shopper, Welcome to my flap. If you are reading this, I can only assume that you're hesitating to buy this book. Maybe you're thinking I don't know anything about this book; I would like more information. Should I buy it based solely on the exceptionally striking cover shot? Well, that's a good enough reason for me. Do I really need to add that there's a secret poster you can see only after the book is purchased? A poster that involves plenty of skin and would make a perfect addition to any basement rec room? Why are you still reading? Look, your wishy-washy attitude is really starting to rub me the wrong way. You know what? Maybe you should set the book down and let someone more attractive buy it! I'm sorry, that was uncalled for. Deep breath...let it out slowly. I'm sure in some circles you're considered attractive. I'm sure by now you're skipping past the register...What, you still haven't bought it!? What's the matter, can't read? Who cares? I can't write. Besides, this book is so visual a monkey could enjoy it. All right, fine, you win. I'll tell you a little about the book. The first thing you should know is: I like parties! Here are some of the helpful suggestions you'll get by reading this sturdy book: 1. It's always a good idea to stock your neighbor's apartment with the basics (alcohol, ice, corn chips...) so when you run out at three o'clock in the morning, you know whose door to knock on. 2. Try filling your medicine cabinet with marbles. Nothing announces a nosy partygoer more successfully than an avalanche of marbles striking a porcelain sink. 3. Pre-crack all your liquor bottles. No one wants to be the first, especially at a wake. 4. Give the party a strict time span and if it's not going well at least you know when it will be over. 5. Have toilet paper. Convinced? I thought so. Just remember: sometimes you can judge a book by its cover, or in this case, its tremendously gorgeous cover. I'll see you on the inside.

25 Questions for a Jewish Mother
Written by Judy Gold and Kate Moira Ryan
Published by Voice/Hyperion

Description: For a Jewish girl who remembers the first book ever read to her as a child was the pop-up version of The Diary of Anne Frank, learning how to be a Jewish mother who wasn't a carbon copy of HER Jewish mother wasn't easy. Here, Emmy Award winning comedienne Judy Gold asks, "Are there any Jewish mothers out there like me, or are they all, G-d forbid, like my mother????" In 25 Questions for a Jewish Mother, she incorporates her own adventures in Jewish motherdom and her memories of growing up Jewish in suburban New Jersey -- communicating with her mother by putting Ann Landers articles on the fridge ("Dear Ann, My mother won't let me walk alone to school and I'm 16! Please help." "Dear Ann, The crossing guard drinks. Please help.") -- with the voices of the fifty other Jewish mothers, she and her co-author, Kathleen Moira Ryan, interviewed. They asked homemakers, lawyers, Holocaust survivors twenty-five questions, including: Who's your favorite Jewish mother? (Judy's is Barbra Streisand.) How many times a day do you talk to your children or mother? (for Judy, it's anywhere from one to the high double digits) Are Jewish mothers really more paranoid? (or, "Why do I have to write an entire itinerary with names, addresses, and phone numbers every time I leave the house?") And so on. The culmination of these extraordinary stories confirms that there is ultimately something strong, courageous, and loving in every Jewish mother -- a hopeful -- and very funny -- message to mothers and their children everywhere.

Spy: The Funny Years
Written by Kurt Andersen, Graydon Carter, George Kalogerakis
Published by Miramax Books

Description: With equal parts nostalgia and snarkiness, this history/anthology celebrates the now legendary satirical magazine during its heyday—aka 1986 to 1991.

I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This!: And Other Things That Strike Me as Funny
Written by Bob Newhart
Published by Hyperion Books

Description: There has never been another comedian like Bob Newhart. His comedy albums, films and hit television series have made him a national treasure and placed him firmly in the pantheon of comedy legends. And now, at last, Newhart has put his brilliant and hysterical worldview on paper. Always the storyteller, Bob tells anecdotes from throughout his life and career, including his beginnings as an accountant and the groundbreaking success of his comedy albums and two television shows - giving him a 15-year slot on primetime TV. And he also adds his wry, comedic twist to a multitude of topics, including golf, drinking and family holidays. Includes excerpts from some classic Bob routines.

Oy!: The Ultimate Book of Jewish Jokes
Written by David Minkoff
Published by St. Martin’s Press/Thomas Dunne Books

Description: From Rabbis to Relationships, Latkes to lawyers, marriage to miracles, and from chazans to chutzpah, here is a feast of over 1,000 old and new Jewish jokes and witty anecdotes-- and you don't have to be Jewish to enjoy them. The book includes an appendix of terms for those who need to brush up on their kvetching.

History/Current Events/Politics

WINNER
The Assault on Reason
Written by Al Gore
The Penguin Press

Description: A visionary analysis of how the politics of fear, secrecy, cronyism, and blind faith has combined with the degration of the public sphere to create an environment dangerously hostile to reason At the time George W. Bush ordered American forces to invade Iraq, 70 percent of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was linked to 9/11. Voters in Ohio, when asked by pollsters to list what stuck in their minds about the campaign, most frequently named two Bush television ads that played to fears of terrorism. We live in an age when the thirty-second television spot is the most powerful force shaping the electorate's thinking, and America is in the hands of an administration less interested than any previous administration in sharing the truth with the citizenry. Related to this and of even greater concern is this administration's disinterest in the process by which the truth is ascertained, the tenets of fact-based reasoning-first among them an embrace of open inquiry in which unexpected and even inconvenient facts can lead to unexpected conclusions. How did we get here? How much damage has been done to the functioning of our democracy and its role as steward of our security? Never has there been a worse time for us to lose the capacity to face the reality of our long-term challenges, from national security to the economy, from issues of health and social welfare to the environment. As The Assault on Reason shows us, we have precious little