Germany Today, a Personal Report, Walter Laqueur...

Germany Today, a Personal Report, Walter Laqueur (Little, Brown). “(Walter) Laqueur has produced an interesting and generally sensible work with the balance and good judgment missing in other works on a subject that continues to inflame passions 40 years after Hitler’s death” (Harry Trimborn).

Still Life, Antonia Byatt (Scribner’s). “Centering around an English family made up of teachers and curates, madmen and artists . . this is a novel about creation. . . . The sheer poetry of (Antonia) Byatt’s language makes the world new to us. Generation, regeneration and the progress of life toward death all become real on the page” (Brett Singer).

A Small Town, Shelby Hearon (Atheneum) follows the life of Alma van der Linden after she marries her high school principal. . . . (Shelby Hearon) suggests--correctly, and often beautifully--that small-town life is a continuous loop, that things always change and are always the same” (James Kaufmann).

Isak Dinesen’s Africa, Isak Dinesen and contributors (Sierra Club) is “a stunning scrapbook, not a substitute for the original works but a fine companion piece . . . a particularly seductive introduction to the life and work of an extraordinary writer” (Elaine Kendall).

The Quest for Merlin, Nikolai Tolstoy (Little, Brown) finds eerie parallels to Merlin the Trickster in the shaman figures who have existed in other cultures from Siberia to North America. . . . Scholarly as it is, (the book) has the non-pedantic warmth of a passionate act of faith, impelled by Tolstoy’s evident belief in the past as prologue, and his vision of Merlin standing at the last edge of a pagan past, foretelling a later, different light” (Charles Champlin).

Saturday Night at San Marcos, William Packard (Thunder Mouth) “has more good will and wit and spooky knowledge than you can shake a stick at. . . . Poor Eliot is stuck, madly in love with the beautiful but dumb Cindy, whose analyst is earnestly abjuring her to get rid of failed-writer Eliot. . . . Because the human mind is pathetic and hilarious in its yearnings, the synopses of these stories alone are stunning in their perfection” (Carolyn See).