On Writing and Politics, Gunter Grass, translated...

On Writing and Politics, Gunter Grass, translated by Ralph Manheim (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). Gunter Grass knows “that the writer is inseparable from specific time, immediate place. He neither contrives escape nor offers it.” His works articulate “the writer’s imperative to rail against authority imposed or regime institutionalized” (Art Seidenbaum).

The Lindbergh Kidnapping and the Framing of Richard Hauptmann, Ludovic Kennedy (Viking). The author, whose journalistic career includes three books that have resulted in pardons for innocent people falsely convicted of murder, takes apart the case against Hauptmann “like a five-dollar watch” (Don G. Campbell).

Challenges to Musicology, Joseph Kerman (Harvard). “A gracefully polemical survey” of musical life in the 20th Century: scholarship, criticism, technology, philosophies of history and art, education and the avant-garde (David Hamilton).

The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, Dominick Dunne (Crown). Dominick Dunne, whose daughter was murdered by her boyfriend, creates a fictional version of the Ann Woodward case, involving a society woman who shoots her husband after two years of marriage in what may or may not have been an accident; a Truman Capote-like character, Basil Plant, encounters her several years later, determined to unravel her secret. “Art, it is clear, is reflecting life” (Charles Champlin).

The Fabulous Englishman, Robert McCrum (Houghton Mifflin). An elaborate story, told in a “spare and lucid” style, of a “Me-Decade man, mildly ambitious, happily married . . . a bookish Mr. Average” (Elaine Kendall).