Valerie & Walter's Best Books for Children: A Lively, Opinionated Guide

Walter M. Mayes, Valerie V. Lewis. Quill, $17.95 (543pp) ISBN 978-0-06-052467-8

Valerie & Walter's Best Books for Children: A Lively, Opinionated Guide, Second Edition, by Valerie V. Lewis and Walter M. Mayes offers brief synopses and commentaries for 2,000 titles, hundreds of which are new, according to the authors' introduction; and they've weeded out those that are no longer available. Lewis and Mayes have added a ""best books"" section for both fiction and nonfiction, and they've modified the index in response to readers' reactions.

Featured Nonfiction Reviews

Daniel Saldaña París

Novelist París (Ramifications) reflects in these striking essays on the complicated relationship between place and identity. Traversing the cities “that have marked my life,” Continue reading »

John Gilbert McCurdy

The 1774 trial of British army chaplain Robert Newburgh (1742–1825) for “vicious and immoral behavior” sheds valuable light on contemporaneous ideas about homosexuality, Continue reading »

Dean Jobb

Jobb follows up The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream with a top-shelf work of true crime focused on lovestruck “gentleman thief” Arthur Barry (1896–1981). A con artist since his Continue reading »

Corinne Fowler

“Colonialism... affected the remotest corners” of Britain’s landscape, demonstrates historian and curator Fowler (Green Unpleasant Land) in this revelatory Continue reading »