Previously Reviewed by National Book Critics Circle
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Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case (Melville House Classic Journalism) by A. M. Rosenthal
 When a 78-year-old pedestrian was downed by a hit-and-run driver in Hartford, Conn., in June, street surveillance video showed multiple cars passing by without stopping and fellow pedestrians staring at the victim without any visible move to aid him. This provoked public outrage and claims of a...
Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love by Lara Vapnyar
 When Nora Ephron wrote her bitterly comic novel Heartburn and threw in a few recipes to sweeten the effect, she was devising a recipe for other authors to follow.
Since then, novelists including Jan Karon, Laura Esquivel and Diane Mott Davidson have made food an essential ingredient of their...
Ark of the Liberties: America and the World by Ted Widmer
 Woodrow Wilson is a tip-of-the-tongue name in foreign policy circles these days, largely because the members of the Bush administration are seen as revamped Wilsonians. Former Middle East envoy Dennis Ross, in his recent book Statecraft, identifies them as such, citing their belief in the...
Life Studies and for the Union Dead (FSG Classics) by Robert Lowell
 Even before Robert Lowell published Life Studies, his masterpiece, in 1959, he was widely regarded as the best American poet of his generation. But for most of the 1950s he was also completely blocked, managing to write, as he later recalled, just "five messy poems in five years." The problem was...
America America by Ethan Canin
 It's refreshing -- and almost quaint -- to see someone try to write a Great American Novel in the 21st century. These days, writers are more apt to pursue the Great American Screenplay or the Not-So-Great American Ironic, Postmodern Fiction. But Ethan Canin's sixth book, with its flag-waving title, ...
Seven Notebooks: Poems by Campbell Mcgrath
 It's easy to forget that American poetry was not always as friendly to the middle class as it is today. In the first half of the last century, a generation of poets who grew up reading Flaubert accepted Epater le bourgeois as the Second Commandment of their art, just after Pound's "Make it new...
The Slaves' War: The Civil War in the Words of Former Slaves by Andrew Ward
 "It was God's blessing to the black peoples to come out from bondage, to belong only to their selves and God, to read about what's going on in the world and write and figure for theirselves." So said Louis Meadows, a former slave from Georgia who is the last of many hundreds of African-Americans...
The Garden of Last Days: A Novel by Andre Dubus III
 We know from The 9/11 Commission Report that 12 of the "muscle" hijackers that day (the non-pilots) came from Saudi Arabia and were 20 to 28 years old; most were unemployed, had little more than a high-school education and were unmarried. Five of the Saudis came from Asir province, in the south of...
Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein
 Rick Perlstein's new book, Nixonland, is the "It" history book of this publishing season. The Chicago historian's 800-plus-page account of how Richard Nixon stoked and exploited the political divisions of the '60s has struck a nerve, as analysts argue over whether Nixonland -- a country at war with ...
McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld by Misha Glenny
 Twenty years ago, as the Soviet Union began coming undone, a dissident intellectual named Boris Kargalitsky coined a useful expression, "kleptocrats," to describe those officials who were enriching themselves thanks to their power in what remained of the Communist state and economy. "Kleptocracy...
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