Booklist articles from January 2003

Booklist archives from January 2003

Bloom, Harold. Genius: a Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Warner $35.95 (0-446-52717-3). Famed critic Bloom conducts an enlightening, and entertaining inquiry into that elusive quality called genius, portraying 100 poets, dramatists, novelists, philosophers, and religious writers whose quests...

Gass, William. Tests of Time.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Knopf, $25 (0-375-41257-3). Gass' newest essays are grounded in erudition, spiked with wit, and charged with a trenchant passion for and belief in literature. As he considers the work of writers around the world and literature's role in...

Lane, Anthony. Nobody's Perfect: Writings from the New Yorker.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Knopf, $30 (0-375-41448-7). Lane has been a movie critic at the New Yorker since 1993, and his delightfully spunky, absolutely brilliant criticism has proven to be one of former editor Tina Brown's most significant and pleasurable...

Marin, Cheech. Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Little, Brown/Bulfinch, $35 (0-8212-2805-6); paper, $19.95 (0-8212-2806-4). Marin is a pioneer in recognizing the vibrancy and significance of Chicano art, and his magnificent collection forms the foundation for this exciting and...

Prose, Francine. The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women & the Artists They Inspired.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... HarperCollins, $24.95 (0-06-019672-6). Novelist and critic Prose brings her acumen and wit to a rarely considered subject, the lives of women who served as muses. In nine strongly composed and deftly synthesized portraits, Prose analyzes...

Belli, Gioconda. The Country under My Skin: a Memoir of Love and War.(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... Tr. by Kristina Cordero Knopf, $25 (0-375-40370-1). Nicaraguan poet and Sandinista Belli relates the astonishing story of her life as a privileged young wife and mother, advertising and media executive, gun-running revolutionary, and exiled...

Caro, Robert. Master of the Senate: the Years of Lyndon Johnson.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Knopf, $35 (0-394-52836-0). The third volume in this author's dynamic, definitive biography of LBJ lives up to the profound success of the earlier volumes. Covering Johnson's career in the U.S. Senate, Caro authoritatively and rousingly...

Coetzee, J. M. Youth: Scenes from a Provincial Life II.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Viking, $22.95 (0-670-03102-X). South African Coetzee's wry, honest, edgy memoir is a portrait of the young artist as a failure. The third-person present-tense narrative takes you right into the young man's angst and is wonderfully...

Everitt, Anthony. Cicero: the Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Random, $25.95 (0-375-50746-9). Everitt's masterful biography draws on Cicero's letters to his friend Atticus to give a remarkably clear picture of the famous Roman orator, noting both his brilliance and his faults.

Gilmour, David. The Long Recessional: the Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Farrar, $26 (0-374-18702-9). Focusing on Kipling's political ideas and influence, Gilmour portrays the Nobel-laureate poet, short-story writer, and novelist as the most humane of imperialists and the most prescient pessimistic prophet of...

Miller, William Lee. Lincoln's Virtues: an Ethical Biography.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Knopf, $30 (0-375-40158-X). In this sophisticated examination, Miller argues that Abraham Lincoln should be admired on the basis of his moral character. Miller delivers a still-enigmatic Lincoln, possessed of the steely but subtle...

Zwonitzer, Mark and Hirshberg, Charles. Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Simon & Schuster, $25 (0-684-85763-4). The Original Carter Family's repertoire is the bedrock of country music. Zwonitzer and Hirshberg show that although Alvin Pleasant Carter, his wife, Sara, and her sister Maybelle grew up remote from...

Ansary, Tamim. West of Kabul, East of New York.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Farrar, $18 (0-374-28757-0). Afghan American Ansary shares his compelling and illuminating life story with the hope that it will provide the sort of perspective on and personal insight into Afghanistan and the roots of Islamic terrorist...

Bernstein, Richard. Out of the Blue: the Story of September 11, 2001 from Jihad to Ground Zero.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Holt/Times, $26 (0-8050-7240-3). Bernstein, a veteran New York Times reporter, correspondent, and critic, prepares an amazingly comprehensive account of September 11. His story is not only about the victims, the rescuers, and their families...

Bowden, Charles. Blues for Cannibals: the Notes from Underground.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Farrar/North Point, $24 (0-86547-624-1). Bowden writes with red-hot lyricism and intellectual intensity about life along the Mexican border, profiling outcasts and criminals; victims of racism, injustice, and violence; and the legal system...

Burrows, Larry. Vietnam.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Knopf, $50 (0-375-41102-X). Life staff photographer Burrows regarded the war in Vietnam as his greatest professional opportunity. This selection of his photo-essays confirms that he was an artist as well as a journalist, capable of...

Horwitz, Tony. Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Holt, $26 (0-8050-6541-5). Horwitz retells Captain James Cook's story and tries to re-create first contact from the point of view of the South Pacific locals and judge the legacy of his landing. This thought-provoking travelogue brims with...

Linklater, Andro. Measuring America: How an Untamed Wilderness Shaped the United States and Fulfilled the Promise of Democracy.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Walker, $26 (0-8027-1396-3). Here is the never-before-told saga of the survey that turned America's unmapped tribal lands into a plotted grid of properties for purchase. With spare lucidity, Linklater brings to life a host of compelling...

Nicolson, Adam. Sea Room: an Island Life in the Hebrides.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Farrar/North Point, $27 (0-86547-636-5). Nicolson owns the tiny Shiant Islands between the Outer Hebrides and the Isle of Skye; in this literary and ecological masterpiece, he recounts their human and natural history so vividly, sensually,...

Pleshakov, Constantine. The Tsar's Last Armada: the Epic Journey to the Battle of Tsushima.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Basic, $30 (0-465-05791-8). Pleshakov conveys a mood of foreboding in this story of a Russian battle fleet sailing around the world to its doom. In woeful condition, the Russian warships suffered from unremitting mechanical breakdowns and...

Preston, Diana. Lusitania: an Epic Tragedy.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Walker, $30 (0-8027-1375-0). Preston's brilliant account of the destruction of the liner Lusitania in 1915 is two stories rolled into one: a Titanic-type tale of personal catastrophes and a still murky diplomatic incident of the first...

Standage, Tom. The Turk: the Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess Playing Machine.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Walker, $24 (0-8027-1391-2). Wolfgang yon Kempelen's magnificent machine, called the Turk, was an automaton that could play chess, outwitting some of Europe's finest players. Was it a hoax? Standage keeps us on the edge of our seats,...

Whitaker, Robert. Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Perseus, $27 (0-7382-0385-8). Whitaker's history of "mad medicine" in the U.S. shows why U.S. schizophrenics' recovery rates are far below those of Third World schizophrenics and reveals that once, in Quaker Pennsylvania, kindness and...

Fairchild, B. H. Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Norton, $22.95 (0-393-05096-3). Fairchild's lusciously long story poems suggest that we create and re-create ourselves out of memory. Strong emotion suffuses this poetry, while concrete vocabulary and images, propulsive syntax and rhythms,...

Good Poems. Ed. by Garrison Keillor.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Viking, $25.95 (0-670-03126-7). Memorableness and recitability are Garrison Keillor's criteria of goodness in poetry, and it is astonishing how well they serve. Perhaps the one commonality in the collection is homeliness, or domesticity....

de Villiers, Marq and Hirtle, Sheila. Sahara: a Natural History.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Walker, $26 (0-8027-1372-6). This engrossing study will bring the Saharan landscape to life even for those who have never set foot in a desert. Insightful and intelligent, it will appeal to anyone with a curiosity about the world's largest...

Fukuyama, Francis. Our Postmodern Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution.(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... Farrar, $25 (0-374-23643-7). Fukuyama warns that eugenics and genetic engineering threaten to undermine the principle of human equality by creating a powerful new genetic overclass. Incisive and disturbing, this is an urgent summons to a...

Montgomery, Sy. The Search for the Golden Moon Bear: Science and Adventure in Pursuit of a New Species.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Simon & Schuster, $26 (0-7432-0584-7). Courageous and eloquent science writer Montgomery accompanies biologist Gary Galbreath on a harrowing quest for the mysterious golden moon bear throughout Southeast Asia, where they confront the...

Jenkins, Philip. The Next Christendom: the Coming of Global Christianity.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Oxford, $25 (0-19-514616-6). Islam is booming, but Christianity will remain the largest world religion, Jenkins says. By 2050, however, most of the faithful will be poor nonwhites south of Europe, the U.S., and Russia, who will spur a...

Meloy, Ellen. The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Pantheon, $24 (0-375-40885-1). Southwestern writer and outdoorswoman Meloy, knowledgeable, forthright, and witty, combines superbly wrought natural and cultural history with soulful memoir in this creative approach to the fascinating and...

Pesic, Peter. Seeing Double: Shared Identities in Physics, Philosophy, and Literature.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... MIT, $23.95 (0-262-16205-9). Is identity resemblance or distinction? Answer: yes, because physical reality consists of unchanging things that are exactly alike and changing things that are individually distinct. Citing literature to...

Rodriguez, Richard. Brown: the Last Discovery of America.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Viking, $24.95 (0-670-03043-0). In a meditative, witty, and deeply philosophical essay, the always-provocative Rodriguez celebrates the browning of America, reflecting on how the mixing of different races, religions, styles of dress, kinds...

Scruton, Roger. The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... ISI, $19.95 (1-882926-81-1). In one of the most cogent books on Islamic-Western relations, Scruton argues that the war on terrorism is based in a misunderstanding of Islamic identity that reflects invidious Western prejudices about...

Barry, Sebastian. Annie Dunne.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Viking, $24.95 (0-670-03112-7). Old Annie Dunne, crippled in body and spirit, lives on her once-fair cousin Sarah's farm in rural Ireland in the late 1950s. When a man ambitious for land begins courting Sarah, it threatens both women and...

Boswell, Robert. Century's Son.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Knopf, $24 (0-375-41237-9). In his deeply affecting novel, Boswell illuminates the subtle interplay of a grieving family with great compassion. Like an alchemist, he uses language to invoke a depth of feeling out of all proportion to the...

Bragg, Melvyn. The Soldier's Return.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Arcade, $25.95 (1-55970-639-2). Bragg weaves a powerful, deeply moving story of a family and a society torn apart by war. The depth and reality of his characters and his ability to bring the horrors of war alive are nothing short of...

Cisneros, Sandra. Caramelo.(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... Knopf, $24 (0-679-43554-9). The author's long-awaited second novel is a sweeping, fictionalized history of her Mexican American family. Her gorgeous prose and sumptuous scene-setting make this an unforgettable read.

Eco, Umberto. Baudolino.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Harcourt, $27 (0-15-100690-3). In keeping with his customary practice, Eco sets his latest novel in the past--in this case, twelfth-century Europe and the Near East--as a man named Baudolino, of northern Italian peasant stock, tells his...

Faber, Michel. The Crimson Petal and the White.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Harcourt, $26 (0-15-100692-X). This is part saga, part morality play, and utterly engrossing. The large themes that intertwine the character's--religion, health, sexuality, death, and, reluctantly, love--are juxtaposed against the most...

Hijuelos, Oscar. A Simple Habana Melody.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... HarperCollins, $24.95 (0-060-17569-9). Perhaps no other contemporary novelist has managed to sustain a melancholy mood more convincingly than Hijuelos does in this haunting story of a Cuban composer whose life is an agonizing mix of joy and...

Jin, Ha. The Crazed.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Pantheon, $24 (0-375-42181-5). Jian Wart's graduate studies at Beijing University are derailed when his beloved mentor suffers a severe stroke. As Jian listens to Professor Yang rant and rave in the grip of painful memories of the Cultural...

Kadare, Ismail. Spring Flowers, Spring Frost.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Tr. from the French of Jusef Vrioni by David Bellos. Arcade, $23.95 (1-55970-635-X). An artist-teacher in a small city in Albania is drawn, in his dreams as well as his waking life, into the re-irruption of Albania's age-old culture of the...

Kaye, John. The Dead Circus.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Grove/Atlantic, $24 (0-87113-849-2). In this evocative novel, Kaye calls up a richly atmospheric and surprisingly small-town version of L.A., where everyone seems to be connected and where fame is completely arbitrary. The author...

Kennedy, William. Roscoe.(Book Review)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2003... Viking, $24.95 (0-670-03029-5). World War II is over, and Roscoe Conway, the driving force behind Albany's formidable Democratic machine and a truly soulful man, wants out, but his cronies still need him. Writing with unsurpassed...

Lin, Ed. Waylaid. Kaya.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... by D.A.P., paper, $12.95 (1-885030-32-0). The nameless 12-year-old narrator of Lin's harsh realist novel schemes to lose his virginity in an inchoate attempt to prove himself to himself when everything else at the run-down motel owned by...

McDermott, Alice. Child of My Heart.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Farrar, $22 (0-374-12123-0). McDermott offers an exquisite, sly, and profoundly discerning tale about a watershed Long Island summer in the life of lovely 15-going-on-30-year-old Theresa and her sweet little cousin in a magical yet cunning...

Merullo, Roland. In Revere, in Those Days.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Crown/Shaye Areheart, $22 (0-609-61032-5). Merullo's supple storytelling about a boy who loses both parents in a fiery air crash reveals a quest: What does it mean to be a good man? The sacrament of Italian American family lives in the...

Mistry, Rohinton. Family Matters.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Knopf, $25 (0-375-40376-6). Bombay circa 1990 is the setting for Mistry's flawless novel about an extended Parsi family suffering the long-term consequences of a catastrophic love affair. A penetrating social observer and master dramatist,...

O'Brien, Edna. In the Forest.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Houghton, $24 (0-618-19730-3). O'Brien's latest novel, set in her native Ireland, is a psychological thriller about a damaged young man who has carried the seeds of killing within him since childhood. A brilliant illumination of human...

O'Neill, Jamie. At Swim, Two Boys.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Scribner, $27 (0-7432-2294-6). This powerful debut novel, which took Irishman O'Neill 10 years to write, is the story of two boys and their tragic involvement in the 1916 Easter Uprising. O'Neill creates a stunningly vivid world ("a...

Otsuka, Julie. When the Emperor Was Divine.(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... Knopf, $18 (0-375-41429-0). Otsuka tells an exquisite psychological tale, respired by her own family's travails, of the internment of tens of thousands of innocent Japanese Americans during World War II.

Pears, Iain. The Dream of Scipio.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Riverhead, $27.95 (1-57322-202-X). Pears' elaborate narrative triptych joins together three different historical periods and three love stories, all of which take place in Provence. This grand-scale historical thriller is dazzling for its...

Pearson, T. R. Polar.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Viking, $24.95 (0-670-03035-X). Despite the engaging plot, it's the characters, the narrative voice, and the meandering stories within stories that make this novel so special. Pearson peoples this tale with a baker's dozen of ne'er-do-well...

Shields, Carol. Unless.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... HarperCollins/ Fourth Estate, $24.95 (0-00-714107-6). Shields writes a gut-gripping story of one woman's difficult psychological journey, which becomes, in effect, a treatise on goodness and a testament to the several roles women must...

Smith, Lee. The Last Girls.(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... Algonquin/ Shannon Ravenel, $24.95 (1-56512-363-8). With graceful, even brilliant shifts from past to present, during the course of a reunion of women who went to college together and took a riverboat trip more than 30 years ago, Smith...

Spragg, Mark. The Fruit of Stone.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Riverhead, $23.95 (1-57322-223-2). Spragg finds poetry (and humor) in the silence of his characters in this superb first novel about a recalcitrant Wyoming rancher who understands the land but struggles to master the tricky terrain of the...

Tartt, Donna. The Little Friend.(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... Knopf, $26 (0-679-43938-2). This is an exceptionally suspenseful, flawlessly written story fairly teeming with outsize characters and roiling emotion, and at its center is a ruthlessly clever, poker-faced 12-year-old named Harriet. A...

Trevor, William. The Story of Lucy Gault.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Viking, $24.95 (0-670-03154-2). Trevor's novel begins in the early 1920s in his native Ireland and continues through the present day. This beautiful, haunting tale of love and redemption rings with the resonance of a legend.

Updike, John. Seek My Face.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Knopf, $23 (0-375-41490-8). Artist Hope Chafetz recounts the story of her life to a woman doing research for an article, and as it turns out, Hope's long life more or less represents the entire history of post--World War II American art....

Warner, Marina. The Leto Bundle.(Book Review)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2003... Farrar, $26 (0-374-18548-4). Warner cunningly parses the undercurrents of hate and fear in today's multicultural metropolises by interleaving the spellbinding, time-warping tale of a seemingly mythological figure, Leto, a self-sacrificing...

Barry, Lynda. One Hundred Demons.(Book Review)(Young Adult Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... illus. Sasquatch, $24.95 (1-57061-337-0). Barry calls these vivid color comic-strip stories autobifictionalgraphy, and she confronts childhood memories and events that haunt her, including old boyfriends, mothers and grandmas, people who...

Ben Jelloun, Tahar. Islam Explained.(Book Review)(Young Adult Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Tr. by Franklin Philip. New Press, $19.95 (1-56584-781-4). Taking the form of a conversation between a progressive Muslim father and his daughter, this short book explains Islamic history and discusses the religious implications of 9/11...

Bradsher, Keith. High and Mighty: SUVs--the World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way.(Book Review)(Young Adult Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Public Affairs $28 (1-58648-123-1). The excitement for drivers, the danger for the environment: both are of passionate interest to teens, and Bradsher explores the facts and the issues with depth and insight.

Ellis, Gerry. Wild Orphans.(Book Review)(Young Adult Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Welcome Books; dist. by Andrews McMeel, $24.95 (0-941807-58-4). With heartwarming text and photographs, this beautiful book follows eight small young elephants through their first years of 24-hour care and attendance in a wild animal...

Highfield, Roger. The Science of Harry Potter: How Magic Really Works.(Book Review)(Young Adult Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Viking, $23.95 (0-670-03153-4). Whether dealing with flying broomsticks, Quidditch, or Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans, science journalist Highfield uses the Potter magic as the launching pad for a wonderful foray into genetics, quantum...

Irwin, John P. Another River, Another Town: a Teenage Tank Gunner Comes of Age in Combat--1945.(Book Review)(Young Adult Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Random, $21.95 (0-375-50775-2). "In spite of the disaster, it seemed almost glorious." This spare, honest memoir of an 18-year-old G. I. on the German front in 1945 conveys the romance of combat as well as the fear and the slaughter.

Lovenheim, Peter. Portrait of a Burger as a Young Calf: the Story of One Man, Two Cows, and the Feeding of a Nation.(Book Review)(Young Adult Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Harmony, $23 (0-609-60591-7). In a compelling personal narrative that follows his farm animals from birth to death, journalist Lovenheim brings home the story of the milk and the beef we eat, and he does it by honoring the cattle and the...

Morton, Alexandra. Listening to Whales: What the Orcas Have Taught Us.(Book Review)(Young Adult Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... illus. Ballantine, $26.95 (0-345-43794-2). Morton weaves together her own exciting fieldwork with scientific discoveries about the huge black-and-white dolphins known as killer whales. This is biographical natural history at its best.

Nuwere, Ejovi and Chanoff, David. Hacker Cracker: a Journey from the Mean Streets of Brooklyn to the Frontiers of Cyberspace.(Book Review)(Young Adult Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Morrow, $24.95 (0-06-621079-8). Nuwere grew up poor in a violent New York; by the time he was 15, he had become a computer hacker and sleuth. The mix of coming-of-age memoir and computer technology makes for an exciting cyber adventure.

When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Confront Their Personal Histories.(Book Review)(Young Adult Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Ed. by Bernestine Singley. Lawrence Hill; dist. by Independent Publishers Group, $26.95 (1-55652-448-X). In this riveting collection of personal essays about racial identity, blacks and whites, young and old, talk with candor and passion...

Wieviorka, Annette. Auschwitz Explained to My Daughter.(Book Review)(Young Adult Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Tr. by Leah Brumer. Marlowe & Co., $14.95 (1-56924-516-9); paper, $7.95 (1-56924-552-5). "So are all Germans from that time guilty?" A Jewish teenager asks blunt questions about the Holocaust, and her mother, a French Holocaust scholar,...

Barnes, John. The Sky So Big and Black.(Book Review)(Young Adult Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Tor, $24.95 (0-765-30303-5). She hates school; she saves lives--every teen will want to know 15-year-old Teri, an "ecoprospector" on Mars who must take on a painful but inspiring rescue mission. Highly suspenseful sf.

Cisneros, Sandra. Caramelo.(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... Knopf, $24 (0-679-43554-9). On her family vacation from Chicago to Mexico City, Celaya ("Lala") Reyes begins her journey from girl to young adult as she weaves together wild, beautiful, cruel, and tender stories of ancestors and family...

Crichton, Michael. Prey.(Book Review)(Young Adult Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... HarperCollins, $26.95 (0-06-621412-2). In a perfect blend of science and terror, this gripping sci-tech thriller is a wild ride not to be missed; it's also a cautionary tale of the danger that lies in carelessly used technology.

Jackson, Jeremy. Life at These Speeds.(Book Review)(Young Adult Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... St. Martin's/Thomas Dunne, $24.95 (0-312-28808-5). After everyone else on the track team is killed in a van accident, high-school star athlete Kevin copes with the tragedy by running track and setting new records. The smart-mouthed teen is...

Lickiss, Rebecca. Never After.(Book Review)(Young Adult Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Berkley/ Ace, paper, $6.50 (0-441-00907-7). Charming and clever, this fractured fairy tale is about Princess Vevila, who has had enough of dancing with doltish prospective husbands and seeks adventure, while her cousin fights through yards...

Malloy, Brian. The Year of Ice.(Book Review)(Young Adult Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... St. Martin's, $22.95 (0-312-28948-0). In a wonderfully direct teenage voice, both passionate and vulnerable, tall, handsome, high-school senior Kevin tells how he spends his time dodging girls because he knows he's gay. Meanwhile, he...

Otsuka, Julie. When the Emperor Was Divine.(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... Knopf, $18 (0-375-41429-0). In the simplest words, this small, beautiful novel captures the anguish of Japanese American internment through the separate viewpoints of one family: the mother as they leave home, the daughter on the long...

Schroeder, Karl. Permanence.(Book Review)(Young Adult Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Tor, $27.95 (0-765-30371-X). Rue flees her bullying brother after their parents die and stumbles on an abandoned starship that might make her rich, or might get her killed. For strong readers, this is coming-of-age sf that grabs the...

Sebold, Alice. Lovely Bones.(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... Little, Brown, $21.95 (0-316-66634-3). After 14-year-old Suzie Salmon is murdered, she goes to heaven and is able to observe her family, friends, and even her murderer dealing with the aftermath of her death. Sebold's beautiful debut novel...

Tartt, Donna. The Little Friend.(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... Knopf, $26 (0-679-43938-2). Very long, but compelling for strong readers, this story is told from the viewpoint of 12-year-old Harriet, who is haunted by the murder of her older brother in small-town Mississippi.

Anderson, M. T. Feed.(Book Review)(Young Adult Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Candlewick, $16.99 (0-7636-1726-1). Gr. 9-12. Both hilarious and disturbing, this story of two teens in a dystopian universe is hauntingly familiar in its barrage of greed and superficiality.

Armstrong, Jennifer and Butcher, Nancy. The Kindling.(Book Review)(Young Adult Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... HarperCollins, $15.95 (0-06-008048-5); lib. ed., $15.89 (0-06-029411-6). Gr. 7-10. A great team of writers sets up the new Fire-Us trilogy with this riveting survival story about kids making a home together in a ruined world.

The Body Eclectic: An Anthology of Poems.(Book Review)(Young Adult Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2003... Ed. by Patrice Vecchione. Holt, $ 16.95 (0-8050-6935-6). Gr. 8-12. Hand, hair, blood, breast, skin, semen, vagina, bone, and more are celebrated in this rich global anthology of poetry about love and beauty, laughter and tears, kissing and...