Painting a portrait of life both human and animal in Montana’s isolated Yaak Valley, novelist/naturalist RICK BASS shows us Why I Came West: A Memoir (Houghton Mifflin, July 3). It’s alcoholic poet dad, clingy artist mom, and JULIA BLACKBURN in The Three of Us: A Memoir (Pantheon, July 22), from the award-winning author of With Billie. Music lovers will want to pick up Chinese pianist LANG LANG’s Journey of a Thousand Miles: My Story (Spiegel & Grau, July 15), a memoir written with David Ritz from the world’s top-selling classical artist.
China is in the news and in bookstores everywhere, with the number of books on the subject creating a mini-boom. Up this summer: JI CHAOZHU’s The Man on Mao’s Right: From Harvard Yard to Tiananmen Square, My Life Inside China’s Foreign Ministry (Random, July 15), whose author grew up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, studied at Harvard, and then returned home to serve as Mao’s trusted translator. Former Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post PHILLIP PAN sizes up the fight among those who would decide China’s future in Out of Mao’s Shadow (Simon & Schuster, June 17).
For history from a different perspective, start with ANDREW WARD’s The Slaves’ War: The Civil War in the Words of Former Slaves (Houghton Mifflin, June 19), which uses WPA interviews, the diaries of former slaves, oral histories, and more to show us a Civil War we hardly know. KATHRYN SHEVELOW’s For the Love of Animals: The Rise of the Animal Protection Movement (Holt, June 24) explains how a few people came together in bull-baiting 18th-century England to convince others that animals should be treated humanely.
KARL E. MEYER and SHAREEN BLAIR BRYSAC’s Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East (Norton, June 28) gallops from Lawrence of Arabia to Paul Wolfowitz and Lord and Lady Lugard in an effort to capture the (sometimes crazy) Westerners who essentially defined the Middle East as we think of it today. And according to DAVID MARANISS’s Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World (Simon & Schuster, July 1), that year’s games served as a turning point in both sports and world history.
Can’t travel this summer? Hop aboard Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: 28,000 Miles in Search of the Railway Bazaar (Houghton Mifflin, August 18), as PAUL THEROUX repeats a journey he took 30 years ago through Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Pacific Rim nations. At home in London since the 1990s, New York Times correspondent SARAH LYALL is happy to offer The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British (Norton, August 18) for those interested in something more than Big Ben.
And if you do hit the road, TOM VANDERBILT’s Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) (Knopf, August 7) will provide more than a little entertainment. What other book can explain why people crash mostly on sunny days, what weather reports have to do with traffic patterns, and why road rage can be good for you?
Poetry
After the spring deluge — brought to you by National Poetry Month in April — poetry publishing tends to get a bit quiet. But that just makes the interesting titles stand out. Take JOE BONOMO’s Installations (Penguin, July 1), selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the 2007 National Poetry Series. Exploring art installations, the poems each open with the same line evoking a plain white room and then go in intriguingly different directions.
