College Bound

Home-schooling has become an elaborate social movement, with its own celebrities, rituals and networks, which now encompasses more than a million American children, observes Hamilton College sociologist Mitchell L. Stevens in Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement. Moving from why parents opt for home-schooling to the long-term effects on their children, he draws on interviews with a mix of parents—from fundamentalist Christians to pagans and educational radicals—and persuasively contextualizes the movement within the "organizational strategies of the progressive left and the religious right" in their attempt to preserve their core set of values: "the sanctity of childhood and the primacy of family in the face of an increasingly competitive and bureaucratized society." (Princeton Univ., $24.95 238p ISBN 0-691-05818-0; Sept.)

Americans spend millions of dollars each year trying to give their children an edge in the college admissions process. In Winning the Heart of the College Admissions Dean: An Expert's Advice for Getting into College, Joyce Slayton Mitchell packs 35 years of college counseling experience into one concise admission guidebook, providing practical advice on such topics as researching colleges, improving standardized testing scores, writing essays and interviewing. With intelligence, ease and a sense of humor, Mitchell helps students get through the stressful college admissions process. (Ten Speed, $14.95 paper 208p ISBN 1-58008-300-5; Sept.)

While still in high school, Ben Kaplan won more than two dozen merit-based scholarships amounting to more than $90,000 in funds for use at any school. After graduating from Harvard magna cum laude in 1999, he self-published How to Go to College Almost for Free: The Secrets of Winning Scholarship Money, selling more than 65,000 copies out of a custom tour bus dedicated to raising awareness about scholarships. Now reissued, his book offers advice on how to find and win money for college, delivered in an energetic and inspiring voice with broad appeal. (HarperResource, $22 paper 320p ISBN 0-06-093765-3; Sept.)

Letters from the Diaspora

"I've studied whiteness the way I would a foreign language. I know its grammar... the subtleties of its idioms, its vernacular words and phrases to which the native speaker has never given a second thought," writes Dalton Conley in his essay about growing up white in a mostly African-American housing project. In The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, editors Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Eric Klinenberg, Irene J. Nexica and Matt Wray present numerous essays, some new, some from the 1997 academic and activist conference of the same name at UC Berkeley. "If whiteness is a signifier of power and condition of access in U.S. culture, then women are less white than men, gay people less white than straight people, poor people less white than rich people, Jews than Christians, and so forth," observes Mab Segrest in "The Souls of White Folks." Thoughtful, astute and representing a wide range of perspectives, the contributors explore pressing questions of this emerging discipline. (Duke Univ., $19.95 paper 360p ISBN 0-8223-2740-6; Oct.)

Pen/Faulkner Award—winning novelist John Edgar Wideman presents the best of early African-American writing in My Soul Has Grown Deep: Classics of Early African-American Literature, featuring such works as The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk in full text, with informative biographical introductions. Appreciative and thorough, Wideman provides an introduction to each author's life and work, and acknowledges the literary presence of black women writers in early American literature: Karen Lee, Sojourner Truth, Phyllis Wheatley and Ida B. Wells. The 12 works consist mostly of autobiographical essays, along with the poetry of Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Phyllis Wheatley. 100,000 first printing; $25,000 marketing campaign; 5-city author tour. (Running Press, $29.95 1,153p ISBN 0-7624-1035-3; Sept.)

Widely known as a religious and political liberal, Tikkun editor Michael Lerner brings together poetry, fiction, essays and memoir from across the spectrum in Best Contemporary Jewish Writing, which includes work by Philip Roth, Yehuda Amichai, Naomi Wolf, Daniel Pipes and Rodger Kamenetz. Still, Lerner aims for writing "that connects to or reflects the fundamental Jewish project of healing and transformation," both of the person and the world. This book also includes Lerner's list of the 100 best contemporary Jewish books, available in English and published since 1985. This book covers the years 1994—2000; the 2002 edition will include material from the years 2000 and 2001. (Jossey-Bass, $27.50 cloth gift edition, 384p ISBN 0-7879-5936-7; $16.95 paper -5972-3; Sept.)

From Behind Closed Doors

Scholars Timothy Naftali, Philip Zelikow and Ernest May, in collaboration with the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs, present the first three volumes of The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy, Volumes 1—3, the Great Crises, transcripts of recently declassified recordings of White House meetings, annotated by various scholars. Multimedia CD-ROMs containing the audio recordings and official notes are also included. Readers and listeners will be privy to Oval Office debates behind decisions about the Berlin crisis, the Cuban missile crisis, the Old Miss civil rights events and many other key moments in the domestic and international politics of the early 1960s. Opinions, advice, quips, arguments and questions come straight from the mouths of such key players as Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Dwight D. Eisenhower, JFK and Robert Kennedy. Politicos and professional and scholars will be delighted to have access to this material. (Norton, $165 1,966p (vol. 1 712p; vol. 2 688p; vol. 3 566p) ISBN 0-393-04954-X; Sept.)

In 1958, "before Chernobyl, before the Challenger rocket blew up, before the advent of Internet porn or cell phones that ring in the middle of the opera," when " 'technological progress' still had only positive connotations," Jack Kilby had a good idea, but wasn't sure if his boss at Texas Instruments in Dallas would let him try it. In 1959, in what would become Silicon Valley, Robert Noyce had the same idea about overcoming "the numbers barrier" in electronics: "in a computer with tens of thousands of components... things were just about impossible to make," says Noyce. In his completely revised and updated edition of The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution, Washington Post reporter and columnist T.R. Reid (Confucius Lives Next Door) investigates these underappreciated heroes of the technological age and the global repercussions of their invention. The enormity of their accomplishment was fully recognized only in 2000, when Kilby won the Nobel Prize. 3-city author tour. (Random, $13.95 paper 288p ISBN 0-375-75828-3; Oct. 16)

September Publications

Tony Hillerman's popular mysteries, set in the Four Corners region, have helped fuel America's fascination with the Southwest over the last decade. Indeed, his books have prompted the publication of ancillary volumes like Tony Hillerman's Indian Country Map & Guide (Time Traveler Maps, 1998) and Tony Hillerman: A Reader's Checklist and Reference Guide (CheckerBee Publishing, 1999). So Laurance D. Linford (Navajo Places) is in good company—and targets an already established readership (Hillerman's preface will help sales)—with Tony Hillerman's Navajoland: Hideouts, Haunts, and Havens in the Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee Mysteries. Appreciative of "the way in which Tony infuses into his stories the Navajo affinity for—and sense of stewardship of—the land," Linford fleshes out the places "that serve as backdrop to Hillerman's yarns" with physical, historical and cultural information. One map and 54 photos not seen by PW. (Univ. of Utah, $19.95 paper 360p ISBN 0-87480-698-4)

An artist and his legendary comic strip are honored by MAD magazine in Spy vs. Spy: The Complete Casebook. Antonio Prohias's wordless, Cold War—inspired spoof of the agents of international intrigue portrays the twin enemies outdoing each other in elaborately stupid plots to achieve the other's demise. Assembled after Prohias's death, the volume commemorates the cartoon's 40th birthday as well as Prohias's compelling personal story (in 1960 he fled Castro's new regime in Cuba after being unofficially blacklisted for his political cartoons). Comic book fans, especially of the MAD variety, will love this intelligent tribute to an artist. 70 color and 300 b&w illus. (Watson-Guptill, $24.95 paper 304p ISBN 0-8230-5021-1)

"It was one of the easiest pictures to make—including the difficulties with Marilyn Monroe," says Billy Wilder of his legendary comedy in Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot, edited by Alison Castle and with interviews by Dan Auiler. This large format, suede-covered tribute—replete with new interviews with all the major stars (including Jack Lemmon), behind-the-scenes dish, working drafts of the screenplay and hundreds of photos, film stills and other illustrations—will dazzle fans of 1950s and '60s Hollywood. Inset into the back cover is an added gem: a facsimile of Monroe's copy of the script, bound like the original and including handwritten notes (when her character, Sugar, is supposed to be startled, Monroe wrote "freeze like a bunny" as a stage direction). Collectors will rejoice. (Taschen, $150 386p ISBN 3-8228-6056-5)