Books news and books widget

(see chart link on the right)...

This weekFICTION Bay Area Last weekWeeks on list 1THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY, Shaffer and Barrows (The Dial Press; 277 pages; $22): An English author corresponds with members of a club formed while their island was under German...

Books of local interest recently released in paperback. Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (University of Chicago Press; 594 pages; $20) by Jeffrey J. Kripal: Kripal, wrote our critic Don Lattin, "has written the definitive intellectual history...

Impassioned critic David Thomson wanders through the archives of world cinema in "Have You Seen ... ?".

TRAITOR TO HIS CLASS The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt By H.W. Brands

After grappling with the biggest and most complicated structures man has made -- cathedrals, mosques, pyramids, dams, bridges, skyscrapers and more -- it is fitting that David Macaulay has now turned to the building blocks of life and a feat of engineering that man did not create.

A new biography of the explorer Samuel de Champlain depicts him as the main reason for the success of French settlement.

"The Road to Rescue," by Mietek Pemper and "Searching for Schindler," by Thomas Keneally, pay tribute to Oskar Schindler and the "multifarious acts of resistance" that made his rescues possible.

Russell Shorto's book considers Descartes's reason alongside his embrace of religion.

If you are looking for a bilingual children's picture book about the Day of the Dead, I have one to recommend. It's A Gift for Abuelita: Celebrating the Day of...