Nonfiction in August 2003…

Coming in August 2003… thrillers from Heffernan, Jance, and Robinson but lots more exciting new writers than last issue's column could boast. Hariharan and Leroy break into the U.S. market; writers who've already shown promise, like Croft, Holman, and Leegant, get a chance to shine; and McIntosh plays the brash newcomer. In nonfiction, there's serious consideration of everything from the origins of Homo sapiens to the germ warfare that could bring about our demise.

BARENBLATT, Daniel.
A Plague Upon Humanity: The Secret Genocide of Axis Japan's Germ Warfare Operation.
HarperCollins. Aug. 2003. 320p. ISBN 0-06-018625-9. $25.95.
Truly a story for our times, though it took place during World War II. Barenblatt chronicles how Japanese doctors infected some 250,000 individuals—mostly Chinese civilians, though POWs were also victimized—with virulent strains of anthrax, cholera, and other epidemic diseases but were ultimately shielded from prosecution by Gen. Douglas MacArthur himself.

BAUER, Susan Wise.
The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had.
Norton. Aug. 2003. 384p. ISBN 0-393-05094-7. $27.95.
Not just what to read—from Cervantes to Byatt—but how. Bauer draws on methods she used successfully in The Well-Trained Mind.

CAMPO, Rafael.
The Healing Art: A Doctor's Black Bag of Poetry.
Norton. Aug. 2003. 128p. ISBN 0-393-05727-5. $21.95.
Campo knows his poetry—he's won a Pushcart Prize, a National Poetry Series award, and two Lambda Literary Awards and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award—and as a physician associated with Harvard Medical School he also knows his medicine. Here he discusses the connection between poetry and healing, which he invokes every time he recites poetry to patients while doing rounds.

KATZ, Robert.
The Battle for Rome: The Germans, the Allies, the Partisans and the Pope, September 1943–June 1944.
S. & S. Aug. 2003. 448p. ISBN 0-7432-1642-3. $30.
Katz draws on previously sealed OSS intelligence files, plus German and Italian archives, to chronicle the Allied effort to take Rome from the Germans. Since he lives in Rome and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, he should offer a vivid rendering.

KESSLER, Lauren.
Clever Girl: Elizabeth Bentley and the Dawn of the McCarthy Era.
HarperCollins. Aug. 2003. 416p. ISBN 0-06-018519-8. $26.95.
It only sounds like fiction: Bentley, known as the "Red Spy Queen," ran two successful spy rings in America and handed off U.S. secrets to her lover in the KGB. Then she turned coat and starting naming names, setting back Soviet espionage for years. Kessler is the author of numerous books, including the best-selling The Happy Bottom Riding Club. With a six-city author tour.

KINNEY, Harrison with Rosemary A. Thurber.
The Thurber Letters: The Wit, Wisdom, and Surprising Life of James Thurber.
S. & S. Aug. 2003. 800p. ISBN 0-7432-2343-8. $35.
It's been a long time coming, but this volume of Thurber's letters was doubtless worth the wait.

KIPNIS, Laura.
Against Love: A Polemic.
Pantheon. Aug. 2003. 224p. ISBN 0-375-42189-0. $24.
Adulterers aren't naughty; they're social theorists looking to remake our beliefs regarding intimacy and the primacy of work before play. Kipnis, a media studies professor at Northwestern who stirred controversy with a Harper's article on adultery in 1985, keeps the pot boiling.

MUKERJEE, Madhusree.
The Land of Naked People: Encounters with Stone Age Islanders.
Houghton. Aug. 2003. 288p. ISBN 0-618-19736-2. $24.
Formerly an editor at Scientific American, Mukerjee checks out a recently discovered aboriginal group on an island in the Bay of Bengal. Can they keep up their resistance to the modern world?

ROTELLA, Carlo.
Cut Time: An Education at the Fights.
Houghton. Aug. 2003. 224p. ISBN 0-618-14533-8. $24.
Rotella is not one of your average sportswriters; one of his boxing pieces was named Best Essay of the Year by The American Scholar. Here he gets metaphysical about the fight world.

SHLAIN, Leonard.
Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Changed the Course of Human Evolution.
Viking. Aug. 2003. 368p. ISBN 0-670-03233-6. $25.95.
Chief of laparoscopic surgery at California Pacific Medical Center, Shlain writes challenging best sellers (e.g., The Alphabet Versus the Goddess) that can't easily be summed up. His new work argues that changes in female sexuality go hand in hand with the emergence of Homo sapiens.

STEINFELS, Peter.
A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America.
S. & S. Aug. 2003. 400p. ISBN 0-684-83663-7. $25.
Author of the "Beliefs" column at the New York Times and formerly editor of the influential Catholic lay publication Commonweal, Steinfels knows his stuff. Here he argues that as leadership in the Church is taken over by laity raised in a more liberal post–Vatican II environment, the Catholic Church faces upheaval that goes far beyond the pedophile crisis.