Growing Older

Anyone who has ever forgotten their purse, wallet or cell phone and remembered it while stuck in traffic, or struggled to remember the name of a movie they just saw or a person they just met will find help in The Memory Bible: An Innovative Strategy for Keeping Your Brain Young. Neuroscientist Gary Small says that middle-aged people need to realize that they are "all one day closer to Alzheimer's disease." He gives prescriptive tips for "brain fitness," among them: minimize stress, do puzzles and brainteasers—even eat antioxidant fruits and vegetables like prunes and blueberries. Agent, Sandra Dijkstra. (Hyperion, $25.95 320p ISBN 0-7868-6826-0; June)

Addressing the disappointment or apprehension many retirees feel when faced with a lifestyle change, Edgar M. Bronfman offers The Third Act: Reinventing Yourself After Retirement. The author, who retired as CEO of Seagram's at age 65, presents practical advice from notable leaders including Walter Cronkite, Jimmy Carter, Katharine Graham, Kitty Carlisle Hart and others. Their suggestions range from volunteering in order to expand one's horizons, to exercising for longevity, to nurturing close family relationships for inspiration. One appendix gives short bios of the interviewees; another lists resources such as AARP and the Peace Corps. This is a respectful and honest guide to enjoying life after retirement. (Putnam, $25.95 176p ISBN 0-399-14869-8; June 10)

Law and Order

San Francisco personal injury lawyer Stephen M. Murphy has talked with dozens of JDs-turned-authors over the years, and in Their Word Is Law: Bestselling Lawyer-Novelists Talk About Their Craft, he gathers their pearls of wisdom into an anthology of interviews. Novelists, both famous and not reflect on their craft in engaging terms, and Murphy is a fine cross-examiner: the bestselling David Baldacci discusses breaking into fiction and laughingly deems himself a "twelve-year overnight success," while prolific author and "Living Landmark" Louis Auchincloss rather snobbishly disdains the notion of reading books by "lawyer-hyphen-authors." A foreword by Steve Martini (the author of Jury and other novels also contributes an interview) highly praising Murphy should boost sales. (Berkley, $14.95 paper 368p ISBN 0-425-18478-1; July 2)

When Jock Smith was eight, his father, Jacob, a lawyer, was murdered by a client's husband; Climbing Jacob's Ladder: From Queens to Tuskegee—A Trial Lawyer's Journey on Behalf of "the Least of These" is Jock's tale, written with the aid of journalist Paul Hemphill, of growing up to be a lawyer, too. Now a partner to Johnnie Cochran (who pens the foreword), Jock is also a sports memorabilia collector (his first purchase, after the baseball cards of his youth, was a 1972 Willie Mays jersey), an announcer for the Tuskegee Golden Tigers and an inspirational speaker. In efficient if unlovely prose, Jock bears witness to his successes, especially in championing the causes of the underprivileged and the overlooked. (NewSouth Books [www.newsouthbooks.com], $27.95 400p ISBN 1-58838-078-5; June)

Biographical Details

Love literature but lack leisure? Readers who appreciate the bestselling Penguin Lives series in theory—but find the volumes a trifle text-heavy in practice—will flock to the new Overlook Illustrated Lives series, in which scholars gloss the lives and times of great 20th-century writers in slim books replete with photographs. Ruth Prigozy's F. Scott Fitzgerald($19.95 158p ISBN 1-58567-265-3; July), Jeremy Adler's Franz Kafka(164p -267-X) and Mary Ann Caws's Virginia Woolf(136p -264-5) make up the first batch; volumes on Nabokov and Beckett are slated for publication this fall. The reproductions—of family portraits, letters, movie posters and paintings—are fascinating, and the pared-down bios are clean and highly readable.

Internationally acclaimed Czech writer Karel Capek (1890—1938) may have played second fiddle to his Prague colleague and contemporary Franz Kafka, but he gets treated to a fond biography with Ivan Klíma's (No Saints or Angels) Karel Capek: Life and Work. Primary sources and occasional literary exegesis add to the detailed, thoughtful account of a man whose plays, novels and journalism made him a "symbol of anti-ideological thought... of art that was free and unfettered by any doctrine." Norma Conrada translates from the Czech. For true Capek fans, Catbird Press will simultaneously publish Cross Roads, two Capek story collections in a single volume. (Catbird [www.catbirdpress.com], $23 266p ISBN 0-945774-53-2; July)

"Memory, untiring memory that multiplies its illusions with a perverse art, memory turbulent as a child running from room to room": style is substance in award-winning French novelist and poet Louis-René des Forêts's (1918—2000) episodic and inventive autobiography (in the loosest definition of the term) Ostinato. Imagistic paragraphs follow one another with the dream-logic of a ghazal, and the power of emotions becomes the note struck again and again (the title means a musical figure insistently repeated). CUNY professor Mary Ann Caws translates and prefaces a volume that shies away from concrete dates and details, but relishes in the most profound sensations of the author's life. (Univ. of Nebraska, $50 167p ISBN 0-8032-1718-8; $19.95 paper -6624-3; June)

Gay and Lesbian Studies

Whether it's a 14-year-old waiting for her first Transexual Menace T-shirt in the mail, a lesbian in a butch-femme relationship reflecting on the subversive power of being an "invisible" femme, or a female-to-male transsexual singing the praises of his Colt .45, the contributors to GenderQueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary report on life in the gray area between genders and suggest that those genders aren't as self-evident as they appear. Edited by writer Joan Nestle (A Restricted Country); Riki Wilchins (Read My Lips), director of the gender advocacy group GenderPAC; and Brooklyn Public Library librarian Clare Howell, the anthology includes 30 first-person testimonies from writers and activists like Sylvia Rivera, Cheryl Chase and Ethan Zimmerman. (Alyson, $16.95 paper 320p ISBN 1-55583-730-1; Aug.)

With plenty of color photos, graphics, best-of lists and miniprofiles of celebrities, plus a foreword by Boy George, Queer is a lighthearted celebration of gay and lesbian culture, especially of the last three decades. Edited by freelance writer Lisa Richard, former Boyz magazine editor Simon Gage and journalist Howard Wilmot, the book includes a survey of the gayest cities in the world, a retrospective of gay and lesbian contributions to entertainment and fashion (from drag kings to Versace) and spotlights of activists and icons ("Princess Diana: Latter day saint and gay icon or stupid spoilt bitch?"), all in a busy, slick package that will remind readers of their favorite glossy magazines. (Thunder's Mouth, $29.95 256p ISBN 1-56025-377-0; July)

"The gay right is on the march," warns Village Voice executive editor Richard Goldstein (Reporting the Counterculture) in his slim new primer on the rise of conservatism among gays and lesbians. The Attack Queers: Liberal Society and the Gay Right looks at the work and the public personas of prominent "homocons" like Andrew Sullivan, Camille Paglia and Norah Vincent, and at the political implications of gay conservatism and Republican alliances for the gay and lesbian population at large. For Goldstein, the rise of the gay right points to some weaknesses in liberal gay activism, and he exhorts bourgeois "strivers" not to abandon their more radical counterparts. (Verso, $22 112p ISBN 1-85984-678-5; June)

Last year, Kevin Bourassa and Joe Varnell became the first gay couple to be issued a government marriage certificate. Challenged by the Canadian government, their case is still making its way through the courts. In the meantime, Bourassa, a banker, and Varnell, who works for an electronics company, tell their story in Just Married: Gay Marriage and the Expansion of Human Rights, a joint memoir of the events leading up to their wedding at the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto. In alternating chapters, they take turns recalling the unexpected and slightly bizarre experience of sharing their prewedding breakfast with camera crews and other moments from the ceremony broadcast around the world. (Univ. of Wisconsin, $26.95 296p ISBN 0-299-17880-3; June)

Southern Activists

From 19th century abolitionist Gaspar Betancourt Cisneros to six-year-old castaway Elián González, Cubans in America: A Vibrant History of a People in Exile traces the fortunes of the island's millions of emigrants to the U.S. Beginning with the first Cuban settlements in the 15th century, filmmaker Alex Antón and journalist Roger E. Hernández explore the upheavals in Cuba that brought refugees north, as well as the social and political life of the exiles in the U.S. About half of this concise, illustrated history is devoted to events after the 1959 revolution, with spotlights on Ricky Ricardo, Gloria Estefan and other Cuban celebrities, athletes, businessmen and politicians. (Kensington, $30 304p ISBN 1-57566-593-X; May)

"The most urgent problem facing us is that of unity... there is a wide difference between constructive criticism that will pave the way to a consensus and mere invective that tends to harden the differences." So begins Nelson Mandela's "Clear the Obstacles and Confront the Enemy," an essay on strategies and "stumbling blocks" for the antiapartheid movement. It's one of the nine pieces in Reflections in Prison: Voices from the South African Liberation Struggle, a collection of essays, mostly about the future of the resistance movement, by South African activists written in the Robben Island prison. The book is edited by Mac Maharaj, a founding member of the antiapartheid movement, and includes a foreword by Desmond Tutu. (Univ. of Massachusetts, $24.95 paper 274p ISBN 1-55849-342-5; May)

August Publication

"If I really want to scare the hell out of my white friends, I drive out to the suburb they live in and walk down their street slowly, carrying the real estate section of the New York Times." This bon mot from 1960s comedian Godfrey Cambridge (1933—1978) is among the many jokes, snaps, comedy sketches, satires and folk anecdotes gathered in African American Humor: The Best Black Comedy from Slavery to Today. Selected by editor and writer Mel Watkins (On the Real Side), the witticisms come from such luminaries as Zora Neale Hurston, Satchel Paige, Nipsey Russell, Richard Pryor, Damon Wayans and many others. (Lawrence Hill, $29.95 400p ISBN 1-55652-430-7; $18.95 paper -431-5)

July Publications

Between 1846 and 1849, the potato blight left some one million Irish citizens dead of starvation or disease; Booker Prize—nominated novelist Colm Tóibín (The Blackwater Lightship) and historian Diarmaid Ferriter team up to reconsider the tragedy (was it the fault of the British?) in The Irish Famine: A Documentary. Tóibín pens a historiography that acknowledges "no narrative now seems capable of combining the sheer scale of the tragedy..., the complex society which surrounded it and the high politics which governed it," while Ferriter compiles a wide range of documents, including letters, newspaper articles and relief commission reports, to offer a scholarly look at the days of (in the words of a parish priest) "calamity" and "universal doom." (St. Martin's/Dunne, $23.95 224p ISBN 0-312-30051-4)

After September 11, poet William Heyen asked his fellow writers for contributions to an anthology that would articulate how the events of that morning "had awakened us and shaken our senses of identity and security." The result, September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond, is part reflection, part analysis, part tribute; its selections range from immediate reactions—David Zane Mairowitz's letter in which he admits he thought "thank goodness... it's not the Chrysler building"—to considered responses—Lucille Clifton's poem that acknowledges "God has blessed America/ to learn that no one is exempt." Other contributors include Joy Harjo, Joanna Scott, John Updike and Denis Johnson. (Etruscan [www.estruscanpress.org], $19 paper 496p ISBN 0-9718228-0-8)

From "The Case for Hemp" to "Native Auctions and Buyer Ethics," the pieces in The Winona LaDuke Reader address all manner of political issues concerning Native Americans, women, environmental activists and anyone to the left of Al Gore. LaDuke, an environmentalist, Native American rights activist and 2000 vice-presidential candidate on Ralph Nader's ticket, gathers her speeches, articles, fiction and poetry for this anthology. Some of the pieces appeared in such publications as the American Indian and Sierra, and they weigh in on subjects like the dangers of dioxin, the U.N. Conference on Women and corporate sponsorship of the presidential debates. The book opens with a foreword from Ralph Nader. (Voyageur, $16.95 paper 304p ISBN 0-89658-573-5)

June Publications

"LOST LOST LOST. One brown and white 'mottled' street duck. Does not answer to the name of Neither Norman." A paean to what is perhaps the most poignant form of street art, Lost: Lost and Found Pet Posters from Around the World gathers mournful pleas for the return of "Porky Pie," "Boo-Boo," "Kwai Chang" and other missing creatures wanted "vivant ou mort." One poster simply reads "Turtle. Find Him." A handful of maudlin crayon drawings by children are mixed in with striking and sometimes witty drawings and collages selected by Toronto-based illustrator Ian Phillips, who collects these posters. (Princeton Architectural, $14.95 paper 208p ISBN 1-56898-337-9)

From a solar electric bus to fashions made from recycled inner tubes, EcoDesign: The Sourcebook showcases some of the most innovative, environmentally friendly products and prototypes from around the world. The 700-some designs include furniture, appliances, vehicles and electronics. Each entry in this encyclopedic reference features a photograph and brief description, as well as information about the various components of the product. The book is edited by Alastair Fuad-Luke, who teaches green design at Falmouth College of Arts in England, and includes a resource guide that lists designers, manufacturers, green organizations and "eco strategies." (Chronicle, $35 paper 352p ISBN 0-8118-3548-0)