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Are We Born Racist? New Insights from Neuroscience and Positive Psychology Edited by Jason Marsh, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Jeremy Adam Smith. Beacon, $18 paper (160p) ISBN 978-0-8070-1157-7

In this slender multidisciplinary analysis, scientists, novelists, and religious leaders examine the roots of racial prejudice and possible antidotes. Princeton psychology professor Susan T. Fiske pre-sents neuroscience findings that in repeated studies, when white test subjects look at photographs of black people, their amygdalae—the seat of the fear response system in the brain—lights up, suggesting that bias is unconscious and deep-seated. But biology is not destiny, nor is bias ineradicable, as following essays attest. Contributors address how schools, businesses, and police departments can counter an inborn tendency to distrust that which is different. And the book's third section celebrates racial and ethnic diversity as a source of vitality. Rebecca Walker addresses being biracial, and others meditate on raising bicultural and biracial children or being part of an interracial couple. The concluding essay by Archbishop Desmond Tutu relates how the truth and reconciliation process helped heal South Africa's deep racial fissures. While topics are explored too briefly to be of scholarly interest, their brevity will be an advantage to readers looking for a snapshot of contemporary research into and activism around ending racism. (Aug.)

Seven Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin James Sullivan. Da Capo, $26 (304p) ISBN 978-0-306-81829-5

A recipient of the Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, stand-up comedian Carlin (1937—2008) wrote three bestselling humor books and looked back over his five-decade career in his recent memoir, Last Words. Now music journalist and culture critic Sullivan, a contributor to Rolling Stone and the San Francisco Chronicle, offers an overview, starting with the young Carlin in 1950s New York. The Air Force sent him off to Louisiana, where he began as a Shreveport radio personality. As a DJ in Fort Worth, Tex., he polished a comedy act with Jack Burns, and the two left for the West Coast, performing together for two years before they split in 1962. Going solo, Carlin's taboo topics and “subversive attitude” took center stage. In this linear summary of Carlin's career, Sullivan dissects the comedian's classic iconoclastic routines, probes his working methods and successfully captures his rocketlike ascent to fame from night clubs and the 1960s comedic cauldron of Greenwich Village to television acclaim, controversy, and creative conflicts. However, those who want to experience a full explosion of the cynical and caustic Carlin blasting off minus the heat shields should instead seek out the finely tuned and wit-saturated Last Words. (June)

The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Selena Hastings. Random, $35 (640p) ISBN 978-1-4000-6141-9

In Hastings's new biography, the facts of Maugham's life form a fascinating narrative because they are full of public incident and accomplishment, shadowed by privately known and whispered secrets, Hastings is the first biographer with permission to quote from Maugham's private papers, and from observations by his daughter, Liza, concerning the disastrous court case instigated by his homosexual companion, Alan Searle, when Maugham (1874—1965), in his dotage, threatened to disinherit Liza. The sordid details, fully disclosed for the first time, reveal the tragic ending to a life that had produced great wealth, exotic travel, and public acclaim. Although Maugham maintained that he was “three quarters 'normal' and only a quarter 'queer,' '' Hastings demonstrates that Maugham's great love was his secretary and traveling companion, Gerald Haxton. She also documents the bitter relationship between a reluctantly married Maugham and his notorious wife, Syrie. In addition to his many homosexual love affairs, Hastings reveals Maugham's work as an espionage agent in two world wars. The biographer of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, Hastings is a stylish and sensitive writer who addresses her subject's double life with insight and compassion. 32 pages of b&w photos. (June)

Lost in Wonder: Imagining Science and Other Mysteries Colette Brooks. Counterpoint, $15.95 paper (256p) ISBN 978-1-58243-572-5

What is science, and what makes scientists so different from the rest of us? Brooks (In the City: Random Acts of Awareness) poses, but never really answers these questions in her argument for everyone learning the language of science. We must get over our fear of math, Brooks claims. Elaborating on the gap between scientists and laypeople, the author describes how the Wright Brothers' sister Katherine was “mystified” by their obsession with flight, and the superstitious Anna Roentgen was nervous as her husband, Wilhelm, used her hand to make the first X-ray image. Often, Brooks trivializes great work by juxtaposing it with the mundane: the creators of foam rubber slippers and Stove Top stuffing share a short chapter with Ada Lovelace (Lord Byron's daughter), who invented “computer” programming for Charles Babbage's “Analytical Engine.” Many chapters offer little more than name-dropping, whizzing, for example, from Isaac Newton through Galileo to Werner von Braun and remarking that “scientists are lonely men.” Although Brooks writes of wanting to “bridge the gap between experts and everybody else,” this book merely skims the surfaces of ideas and the people behind them. (June)

Constantine: Roman Emperor, Christian Victor Paul Stephenson. Overlook, $27.95 (384p) ISBN 978-1-59020-324-8

Stephenson, a historian at the University of Durham, successfully combines historical documents, examples of Roman art, sculpture, and coinage with the lessons of geopolitics to produce a complex biography of the Emperor Constantine. Rather than the divinely guided hero of legend who singlehandedly brought pagan Rome to Christian orthodoxy, Constantine is depicted as very much a product of his political environment. Recognizing the growing influence of the Christian Church, he adapted the generally pacifist faith to the Roman “theology of victory” and created a newly militant Christianity that would sustain his rule. Constantine wisely sought to impose religious toleration on the diverse Roman Empire while discouraging “trivial” disputes among the Christian faithful. Stephenson examines the variety of religious beliefs in the early fourth century with emphasis on Mithraism, a pagan mystery cult practiced by pre-Constantine soldiers, and on the bitter divisions within victorious Christianity that ultimately led to the Council of Nicaea. Constantine is revealed as a master politician who, while delaying his own baptism for reasons not fully explained in the text, became the ruler of both church and state. 24 pages of illus.; 8 maps. (June)

Work Your Strengths: A Scientific Process to Identify Your Skills and Match Them to the Best Career for You Chuck Martin, Richard Guare, and Peg Dawson. Amacom, $21.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-814-41407-1

Martin, chairman and CEO of NFI Research, along with Guare, a neuropsychologist, and Dawson, a psychologist, both at the Center for Learning and Attention Disorders, reunite to aid readers in identifying their core skills to find a perfectly suited job match. Building on the theories put forth in their previous book, Smarts, the authors conducted a two-year study that revealed how the cognitive skills of high performing individuals aligned to what they do and where they work. Their research helps readers gravitate to work roles that play to their innate strengths and to how their brains are wired. The authors overexplain a relatively simple premise, citing extensive scientific evidence, which may turn off readers looking for a good career fit in a tumultuous job market without the heavy-duty explanations. The book offers guidance on how to choose the right career path, determine your best industry and department, and avoid taking the wrong promotion. Only those who are willing to devote considerable time and effort will find much benefit. (June)

How Did You Get This Number: Essays Sloane Crosley. Riverhead, $24.95 (256p) ISBN 978-1-59448-759-0

Nine thoughtful, unfussy essays by the author of the collection I Was Told There'd Be Cake navigate around illusions of youth in the hope that by young adulthood they'll “all add up to happiness.” The account of Crosley's footloose adventure to Lisbon on the eve of her 30th birthday starts things off in rollicking fashion in “Show Me on the Doll”: without proficient language skills, getting hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of Bairro Alto, and panicking in front of the myriad QVC channels offered by her hotel, Crosley recognizes that Lisbon “was a place with a painfully disproportionate self-reflection-to-experience ratio.” There is the requisite essay about moving to New York and replacing her anorexic-kleptomaniac roommate with a more acceptable living arrangement: in Crosley's case, delineated in “Take a Stab at It,” she is interviewed by the creepily disembodied current occupier of a famous former brothel on the Bowery, McGurk's Suicide Hall. As well, Crosley delivers witty, syncopated takes on visiting Alaska and Paris, and finding much consolation from a two-timing heartbreak in New York by buying stolen items from her “upholstery guy,” Daryl, who found them fallen “Off the Back of a Truck,” as the delightful last selection is titled. These essays are fresh, funny, and eager to be loved. (June)

The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee Sarah Silverman. Harper, $25.99 (272p) ISBN 978-0-06-185643-3

Demonstrating that her penchant for swearing began at an early age, comedian Silverman begins her hilarious memoir by describing how, at age three, she gleefully responded to her grandmother's offer of brownies with “shove 'em up your ass.” Growing up in New Hampshire (“where cows are well done and Jews are rare”), Silverman naturally gravitated toward performing and moved to New York, where she attended and eventually dropped out of New York University to pursue a standup comedy career. Mixing show business moments (she wrote for Saturday Night Live for one season, but none of her sketches made it past dress rehearsal) with stories of her childhood and adolescence (punctuated by a persistent bedwetting problem), Silverman never shies away from poking fun at her own expense. Though she's best known for sexually explicit jokes, Silverman is able to address more serious subjects in the book without losing her edge, particularly her teenage struggle with depression and that her often abrasive public persona allowed her to “say what I didn't mean, even preach the opposite of what I believed.... It was a funny way of being sincere.” 8-page color insert. (May)

Burmese Lessons: A True Love Story Karen Connelly. Doubleday/Talese, $27.95 (400p) ISBN 978-0-385-52800-9

Weaving a poignant personal love story within a larger cultural tapestry of Myanmar circa 1996, Canadian poet, memoirist, and novelist Connelly (The Lizard Cage) delivers a lyrical look at a country in the throes of a deeply pernicious military dictatorship. Although she is based in Greece, Connelly's various trips to Burma and Thailand are sponsored by PEN Canada in order to gather information on Burmese political prisoners such as short story author Ma Thida; consequently, Connelly, then in her late 20s, is easily accepted within Burmese artistic circles, gets caught up in violent street demonstrations, and even interviews the revered opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, now under strict house arrest. At a Christmas party, she meets and falls for Maung, a sexy Burmese revolutionary leader who shares his not uncommon story of becoming politicized after the unrest of 1988 and being forced underground. However, she comes to the wrenching realization that her lover belongs to the national struggle for Burmese democracy, and not to her. Connelly writes eloquently of having given her heart to Asia, yet her portrait is dated as the country has changed much since then, considering the recent devastation by Cyclone Nargis, well chronicled in Emma Larkin's Everything Is Broken. (May)

Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House Meghan Daum. Knopf, $24 (256p) ISBN 978-0-307-27066-5

By turns disarming and tedious, Daum's (The Quality of Life Report) cautionary tale about “house lust” tracks her dizzying succession of moves from New York City to Lincoln, Neb., to Los Angeles. Place becomes inextricably linked with being, and fashioning an impressive shelter creates a whole life, from choosing college at Vassar because it could ultimately secure her “a shabby yet elegant prewar apartment in Manhattan” to a self-empowering, self-confessed hare-brained relocation at age 29—single, and now an established journalist and author—to the plains of Nebraska to achieve the perpetually elusive “domestic integrity.” Desiring to be that person who “deserved” to have the perfect living situation, Daum is seized by full-blown real-estate addiction, despite her inability to afford anything like her dream place, and she eventually migrates from the modest charms of a Lincoln farmhouse to the “parched crevices” of L.A., where she aims to write a screenplay. Here the locus of her memoir fixes on the purchase of a dilapidated bungalow in Echo Park in 2004: becoming a homeowner translates into being an “evolved human.” Alas, the outcome is sadly predictable, even the finding-the-man-to-fill-the-house with, but Daum's treading in the wake of the burst housing bubble is sweet and timely. (May)

Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life Kim Severson. Riverhead, $25.95 (256p) ISBN 978-1-59448-757-6

In this frank confessional memoir, Severson, food writer for the New York Times since 2004, attributes her culinary confidence to the tutelage of eight maternal figures, from the legendary to the not-so-famous. Moving from Alaska, where she wrote for the Anchorage Daily News, to San Francisco to be a food writer for the Chronicle, Severson quits her destructive habit of excessive drinking, and when she first interviews Marion Cunningham, the beloved California food writer, the two share their similar fears and vulnerabilities. Severson's refrain that “I was a fraud and an alcoholic and I was scared to death I would fail” runs through this narrative like a dirge, while her successive culinary acquaintances reflect her insecurities: Chez Panisse chef Alice Waters represents an admirable, however “ridiculously uncompromising” model of perseverance; Ruth Reichl, her intimidating predecessor at the New York Times, reminds her of the leader of the “popular girls” at school into whose realm she never fit; and Southern food writer Edna Lewis's unconventional living situation with the young gay cook Scott Peacock inspires Severson to recount her own difficult early years of coming out as a lesbian in the face of her family's disapproval and discomfort. Some of the portraits verge on the fawning (e.g., Rachael Ray has a “charisma that is as God-given as a star pitcher's right arm”), but Severson's goal of finding “a connection” to her Italian mother dying of Parkinson's rings brave and sincere. (May)

Paradise Under Glass: An Amateur Creates a Conservatory Garden Ruth Kassinger. Morrow, $24.99 (368p) ISBN 978-0-06-154774-4

After a bout with cancer, the loss of a beloved sister to a brain tumor, and the onset of an empty nest, science and health writer Kassinger, inspired by Brooklyn Botanic Garden's Palm House, decided that a conservatory (or more prosaically, sunroom) “would be the perfect antidote to the losses and changes of middle age.” The book vividly chronicles her initiation into the world of indoor gardening as well as the fascinating and unlikely histories of greenhouses and the flamboyant gardens they have housed, from 15th-century windowless arancieras built to winter orange trees to the Industrial Age, glass-and-iron 18-acre Crystal Palace. The characters Kassinger encounters, literarily and in the flesh, are as quirky as their plants. Michel Adanson, the “first botanist to go on a collecting venture in equatorial Africa,” declared the country “ 'delicious' in all ways,” despite facing “lions, tigers, wild boars, huge 'serpents,' ” masses of mosquitoes, and “red ants that blistered him all over.” Breadfruit trees collected by David Nelson, a “quiet and unassuming” botanist, may have been responsible for Captain Bligh's Bounty mutiny. Tom Winn and Ken Frieling, whose Glasshouse Works is housed in a remote Ohio former hotel, now old-age home, reject growing marketable plants like poinsettias in favor of having fun. Kassinger's lush writing and exotic stories will delight the armchair gardener and historian. (May)

The One-Week Job Project: One Man, One Year, 52 Jobs Sean Aiken. Villard, $15 paper (320p) ISBN 978-0-345-50803-4

After graduating from college with a business administration degree—and very uncertain about his career path—Aiken embarked on a yearlong journey throughout Canada and the U.S., trying out new jobs for one week at a time and donating all his wages to a charity. It's a bit contrived and by now familiar (A.J. Jacobs has written a shelf of such books), but Aiken is an appealing guinea pig. Readers expecting a meditation on work (or working at all during a recession, let alone finding 52 jobs) should look elsewhere; this is a lark and Aiken tests a variety of unusual jobs (NHL mascot, snowshoe guide, tattooist/piercer, bungee jumping instructor, cattail picker) and more traditional career paths (research assistant, park ranger, and mayor). The takeaway isn't particularly profound (“Traveling taught me a lot about myself. I experienced new cultures, met all sorts of people, and was forced outside my comfort zone on a daily basis”), but it's a lighthearted read and a pleasant—if unmemorable—vicarious journey to take. (May)

Nomad: From Islam to America —A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Free Press, $27 (304p) ISBN 978-1-4391-5731-2

After a harrowing childhood lived according to a particularly strict interpretation of Muslim law, Somali-born Ali (Infidel) escaped to Europe rather than move to Canada to marry a man she'd never met. Arriving in Holland, she soon became an international cause célèbre for her willingness to publicly denounce the uglier sides of Islamic culture, particularly as in certain regions it oppresses women and girls. Many personal stories are repeated from her earlier accounts, but here Ali adds the story of her immigration to the U.S., and as always, her writing can be moving, as she bares heartrending moments such as her father's death. But with this third memoir, she has become tiresomely repetitive, and her wholesale condemnation of an entire religion and the multiple cultures it has engendered is so sweeping and comprehensive, and her faith in Western values (particularly her romantic view of Christianity) is so wide-eyed, that the book ultimately reads like a callow exercise in expressing the author's own sense of aggrievement. (May)

The Eyes of Willie McGee: A Tragedy of Race, Sex, and Secrets in the Jim Crow South Alex Heard. Harper, $26.99 (416p) ISBN 978-0-06-128415-1

An iconic criminal case—a black man sentenced to death for raping a white woman in Mississippi in 1945—exposes the roiling tensions of the early civil rights era in this provocative study. McGee's prosecution garnered international protests—he was championed by the Communist Party and defended by a young lawyer named Bella Abzug (later a New York City congresswoman and cofounder of the National Women's Political Caucus), while luminaries from William Faulkner to Albert Einstein spoke out for him—but journalist Heard (Apocalypse Pretty Soon) finds the saga rife with enigmas. The case against McGee, hinging on a possibly coerced confession, was weak and the legal proceedings marred by racial bias and intimidation. (During one of his trials, his lawyers fled for their lives without delivering summations.) But Heard contends that McGee's story—that he and the victim, Willette Hawkins, were having an affair—is equally shaky. The author's extensive research delves into the documentation of the case, the public debate surrounding it, and the recollections of McGee and Hawkins's family members. Heard finds no easy answers, but his nuanced, evocative portrait of the passions enveloping McGee's case is plenty revealing. Photos. (May)

Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard: A Journey Through the Inside-Out Worlds of Iran and Afghanistan Nicholas Jubber. Da Capo, $15.95 paper (368p) ISBN 978-0-306-81884-4

In his travelogue-cum-history, Jubber (The Prester Quest) recounts his journey into the heart of contemporary Persian culture with the 11th-century poetic epic, Shahnameh (“The Book of Kings”), as his Rosetta stone. Traveling through Iran, Central Asia, and Afghanistan, the author finds that the book is “a living, breathing entity; the most accurate account available of the psyche of the Persian-speaking people”; its myths, heroes, and villains are daily cultural touch points, from dinnertime conversation to pop song lyrics, in village butcher shops and on city stages. As Jubber becomes better acquainted with the Shahnameh, he comes to see that “the best way of getting to grips with this strange, secretive [region] might be through the unlikely binoculars of a thousand-year-old epic,” and he uses the epic to scaffold his own discoveries. By book's end, having moved from North Tehran villas to rickety Afghan buses, and having encountered kindness and brutality, technological savvy and vestiges of medievalism, Jubber's account offers a full and satisfying panorama of the region with its rich paradoxes and complexities intact. (May)

Not Fit for Our Society: Immigration and Nativism in America Peter Schrag. Univ. of California, $26.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-520-25978-2

Schrag (Paradise Lost) offers a scholarly history of the political movements that have sought to restrict immigration to the U.S. since its founding—from the 19th-century Know-Nothing Party through the years of American eugenics “research” that vastly influenced the Nazis in the years leading up to WWII. He points out how the same anti-immigration and anti-immigrant arguments have been recycled across generations: most notably the idea that certain groups—be they the Irish, Jews, Chinese, or Mexicans—were “inassimilable.” Though he doesn't provide any especially new insights, Schrag has assembled a fine history of nativist movements and the reasons why their rhetoric has been so seductive at particular points in history. The book would have been well-served had Schrag devoted more time to untangling the provocative idea he concludes with: that rather than “becoming white” and thus acceptable—the path trod by previous generations of European and Jewish immigrants—today's Latino and Asian immigrants may be shifting the paradigm and derailing the very mechanism that keeps the U.S. on a locked pattern of exclusion and race-based fearmongering against new immigrants. (May)

168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think Laura Vanderkam. Portfolio, $25.95 (272p) ISBN 978-1-59184-331-3

Vanderkam (Grindhopping) offers a “new” system of time management: if readers want to “make” more time to spend with their children, get fit, or write that novel, they must slash nonessential time wasters and minimize tasks that are not “core competencies,” a business term for what a company does best and must prioritize. She offers solid and even excellent career advice, about both how to make the most of time at a current job and how to manage time to get ahead. And there is something curiously fascinating about her bizarrely brutal approach to time management (“There's little point... in spending much time on activities in which you can't excel”). But given that the author seems to be targeting a very rarefied echelon of upper-middle-class working moms (like herself), the book might have very limited appeal. More alienating, though, is her insistence on pummeling the life out of life. Vanderkam's vision may yield plenty of time to pursue worthy activities, but it's a life leached of color or spontaneity. (May)

The Edge of the Precipice: Henry Clay and the Compromise That Saved the Union Robert V. Remini. Basic, $24 (208p) ISBN 978-0-465-01288-6

The National Book Award—winning biographer of Andrew Jackson focuses on Henry Clay, who as an aging, ill Kentucky senator spearheaded the Compromise of 1850, a complex balancing of Northern and Southern interests that averted Southern secession. The compromise guaranteed that California would be a free state and New Mexico and Utah free territories; gave Texas $10 million in return for its relinquishing its claim to parts of New Mexico; the enactment of a more effective fugitive slave law; and the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia. The compromise gave the North 10 years to industrialize and find a leader in Abraham Lincoln who could restore the Union. Clay, who also delivered the 1820 Missouri Compromise, emerges as a complex figure, a slave owner who regarded slavery as an evil that betrayed American values. He was an electrifying orator and remarkable statesman who lacked discipline (he indulged in carousing, gambling, and drinking). Not all readers will linger over the legal details of the compromise, but Remini ably dissects a dangerous moment in the nation's history and the remarkable but flawed man who ushered the nation through it. (May)

A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough Wayne Muller. Harmony, $25 (256p) ISBN 978-0-307-59002-2

In a world seduced by its own unlimited potential, rather than feeling omnipotent we feel powerless and overwhelmed by impossible responsibilities. This is because we have forgotten what “enough” feels like, says minister, therapist, and philanthropist Muller (Sabbath). He urges readers to step back from their inner pressures and from the externalities of culture, community, and work to reclaim an unshakable trust in their own deep inner sufficiency. We must trust who we are and choose our lives; our so-called shortcomings often aren't defects at all but allow us to be honestly present with ourselves and others, in all our flawed abundance. Further, he says, worrying only saturates us with stress and steers us away from trusting in our essential wholeness and ability to handle whatever comes our way. The greater our heart's capacity for joy, the more we will learn to bear our sorrows; and perhaps the greatest wealth one possesses is one's presence. Readers who mistrust New Age/inspirational snippets should avoid this book, while aficionados of the genre may find wisdom, contentment, and self-acceptance in these same pages. (May)

Records of Our National Life: American History at The National Archives Michael Beschloss et al. D. Giles (Antique Collectors' Club, dist.), $59.95 (302p) ISBN 978-1-904832-71-3

Since its birth in 1934, the National Archives has housed some of the United States' most important artifacts, from the Articles of Confederation to the official electoral vote tally from the 2000 presidential election. Now these national treasures can be read and viewed at home in this glossy new volume. Beginning with terse introductions by such contributors as Cokie Roberts and Ken Burns, the book commences with glowing if not substantial essays regarding the archives. Yet the materials themselves—e.g., photographs of the microphones President Richard Nixon disguised as Chapsticks during the Watergate years—are fascinating enough to not need effusive declarations. American history enthusiasts will relish the chance to see culturally evocative documents, like a woeful teenager's letter to the U.S. Department of Labor begging lenience for the Beatles in 1964, as well as the opportunity to glimpse the psyches of some of our most revered public figures: for example, Washington's annotations on the Constitution. The separate placement in the back of the book of paragraphs explaining each image is frustrating, yet this design succeeds admirably in visually showcasing the defining documents of American history. (Apr.)

No Exit

The Life of Irène Némirovsky Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt. Trans. by Euan Cameron. Knopf, $35 (464p) ISBN 978-0-307-27021-4

French biographers Philipponnat and Lienhardt draw on heretofore unexamined archives to present the turbulent, tragic life of Irène Némirovsky, author of the posthumous bestseller Suite Française. Némirovsky (1903—1942) lived through two great persecutions of the 20th century: the pogroms of her native Kiev and Odessa and, having fled Russia for France after the Russian revolution, the Holocaust. As WWII raged, with the Germans' relentless oppression of so-called “stateless people,” her conversion to Catholicismdid not save her. Némirovsky was taken to a concentration camp in the Loiret, then shipped to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she died with Suite Française uncompleted. This book elegantly balances her life and the work, painting a portrait (if at some distance) of a spirited young asthmatic writer, daughter, wife, and mother. Descended from cultural rather than religiously observant Jews, Némirovsky's artistic sensibility survived an early monotonous environment formed by her commercial-banker father and the scorn of her vain, spiteful mother. The authors nicely cover the French publishing industry during the high-flying days of success when Némirovsky's bestselling and controversial 1929 novel, David Golder, was published as well as the upper-crust émigré Parisian lifestyle of the Jazz Age. 43 photos. (May 10)

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