High Adventure, Donald Westlake (Mysterious). Is Kirby...

High Adventure, Donald Westlake (Mysterious). Is Kirby Galway really a Mayan artifact smuggler? “This is Westlake at his best--intriguing, breezy, fast-moving and funny . . . . Westlake juggles characters, plot and background as smoothly as one of his con-man characters can pluck a sucker” (Mark Schorr).

The Hiroshima Maidens, Rodney Barker (Viking). “Fearsome, wonderful, appalling” look at American insensitivity after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The book opens on an episode of Ralph Edwards’ “This Is Your Life.” An atomic bomb flashes on the screen, kettledrums blast and Edwards says, “And where were you on Aug. 6, 1945?” (Carolyn See).

Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980: An Illustrated History, Thomas Albright (University of California). If Albright “were nothing but a conscientious journalist, (this) richly illustrated book would stand as a valuable contribution to the inappropriately tiny literature on contemporary California art.” But he is “a critic with a novelist’s sense of place, character and drama . . . his real subject may be the chemistry of an area that simultaneously encourages creativity and allows it to fizzle into triviality” (William Wilson).

The Iron Cross, Gordon Williamson (Sterling). A biography of “the granddaddy decoration of them all . . . a device that still appears on everything from West German jets to gold charms” (Paul Dean).

What Is Japanese Architecture?, Kazuo Nishi, Kazuo Hozumi, translated and adapted by Mack Horton (Kodansha International). “A well structured, clearly illustrated study . . . that is accessible to a general readership . . . it puts architecture in historical and social context” as well as dealing with buildings, forms and materials (Dana Levy).

Under the Safety Net, Charles Baxter (Viking). “Listlessness pervades the world” depicted in this collection of short stories. “In his characters,” Baxter finds “nothing but the clay of which they’re made” (Richard Eder).

Coming Down Again, John Balaban (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). The story of an English professor’s attempt to rescue a couple from a prison in Thailand. While Balaban, a poet, fails to answer all of the questions he raises about his main characters, this first novel succeeds as an “absorbing, adventure yarn” (Douglas Sun).