November 1996

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Note: Prices listed below reflect the publisher's suggested list price. They are subject to change without notice.

Have No Fear: The Charles Evers Story

Nonfiction by Charles Evers and Andrew Szanton

John Wiley & Sons ($24.95, ISBN: 0471122513)

Publication date: November 1996

Description:

The brother of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers offers a landmark addition to the history of the civil rights era and its searing aftermath. Featuring candid profiles of Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Lyndon Johsnon, George Wallace, and others whom Evers knew, this chronicle recreates the raw emotions of those times and conveys all of the hatred, humiliation, rage, and hope of a people rising against injustice to demand equality of photos.

Lincoln

A Biography by David Herbert Donald

Touchstone Books ($16, ISBN: 068482535X)

Publication date: November 1996 (Paperback reprint of hardcover edition published by Simon & Schuster in 1995)

Description:

In the year’s most important and compelling biography, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author presents a moving, original portrait of a man who grew into greatness as president. Drawing on Lincoln’s personal papers and on the vast, unexplored records of his legal practice, Donald recreates Lincoln’s world with immediacy and rich detail.

The Book of Yaak

Nonfiction by Rick Bass

Houghton Mifflin (Hardcover, $21.95, ISBN: 0395770149)

Publication date: November 1996

Description:

Rick Bass, a prolific writer of considerable merit, has crafted an elegant plea to save the ecosystem of the Yaak Valley in northwestern Montana. Bass argues that the Yaak deserves to be saved, both for its beauty and for its role in a biological system that stretches through much of North America. To enamor readers with the Yaak he describes it with reverence, and in doing so makes us care. “We are all complicit,” he says.

The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy

Letters by Shelby Foote and Walker Percy; edited by Jay Tolson

W.W. Norton (Hardcover, $29.95, ISBN: 0393040313)

Publication date: November 1996

Description from Kirkus Reviews (October 1, 1996):

Tolson marshals a more comprehensive selection of the 1948-90 correspondence excerpted in his Percy biography, Pilgrim in the Ruins (1992). Percy's reputation rests on his novels, especially the National Book Award-winning The Moviegoer and Love in the Ruins, Foote's on his titanic nonfiction narrative The Civil War. Because literary orthodoxy beholds Percy as the brighter star, it's surprising how much more brilliantly Foote shines here. Though younger by six months, Foote, who published four novels by age 35, is initially a kind of artistic big brother to Percy, who in 1948 began the first of two novels that preceded The Moviegoer. Since Foote didn't save Percy’s letters until 1970, the first 22 years are one-sided: Foote’s expansive, 19th-century epistolary style (he recaps Percy’s philosophical and artistic arguments as he refutes them) is nearly detailed enough to carry the monologue, and his passion—for writing, reading, music, food—is more than up to the task. However, better annotation from Tolson (as well as a fuller introduction that would put their works in a sequential context) would have shed some welcome light. Even as Percy’s star rises, his letters—shorter, less composed, and less frequent—reveal a more tentative, self-doubting muse compared with the brimming confidence that propels Foote fearlessly into his 1.5-million-word magnum opus. Beneath the deeply abiding fraternal affection of boyhood friends (they met at 14 in Greenville, Miss.) lie diametrical approaches to art. Foote, driven to tell stories because “how a thing happens is more interesting than what happens” or why, advises the “christian existentialist” (as Percy ruefully considered himself pigeonholed) to “leave psychology to the psychologists, theology to the theologians.” Percy saves his didacticism for fiction, while Foote continuously assails his friend with literary advice and books to read—most prominently Proust, whom Percy resists to the end. Despite shortcomings in the editorial packaging, the letters provide a fascinating window into a lifelong friendship and the writing life. (8 pages photos) —Copyright © 1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Reading Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury

Nonfiction by Stephen M. Ross and Noel Polk

University Press of Mississippi (Paperback, $17.50, ISBN: 0878059369)

Publication date: November 1996

In the Country Of Hearts: Journeys in the Art of Medicine

Essays by John Stone

Louisiana State University Press (Paperback, $12.95, ISBN: 0807121045)

Publication date: November 1996.

Description:

In the tradition of Oliver Sacks and Lewis Thomas comes this fascinating book of essays about the two hearts that beat in all of us—the literal one and its fraternal twin, the metaphorical heart.

Dead Over Heels

By Charlaine Harris

Scribner (Hardcover, ISBN: 0684804298)

Publication date: November 1996

Description:

Soon after happily married Aurora Teagarden discovers her husband’s shady past, the dead body of Detective Sergeant Jack Burns is unceremoniously dumped in her backyard by a small plane and she cannot help but wonder if it is related to Martin’s secrets.

October 1996

December 1996

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