Winters Coming, Winters Gone, Allen Glick (Pinnacle)....

Winters Coming, Winters Gone, Allen Glick (Pinnacle). This “fine first novel deals with two recent wars--the shooting war in Vietnam in the mid-1960s, as experienced by a squad of young Marines, and the emotional war that raged through the squad’s survivors and other veterans in the subsequent decade” (Harry Trimborn).

The House of the Prophets, Nicholas Saudray; Julia Allen, translator (Doubleday) is “an elegiac, haunting work of art about the erosion of religious tolerance in the Arab World” (Laila Said).

The Painted Witch: How Western Artists Have Viewed the Sexuality of Women, Edwin Mullins (Carroll & Graf) “is a man’s account of what men have done unto women in the name of art during 500 years of European history.” Edwin Mullins “calls these artists to task for their endlessly repeated images in glorification of immaculate super-virgins, wilting brides and menial moms. Women who did not fit snugly within that trinity of categories were portrayed as sinners, man-eating dragons or sword-carrying murderesses” (Bram Dijkstra).

The First Socialist Society, Geoffrey Hosking (Harvard) “not only penetrates the Iron Curtain, but allows its readers to go far beyond Moscow and the Kremlin to take a closer look at Soviet life in historical perspective . . . well-informed and provocative” (W. Bruce Lincoln).

Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time, Paul Griffiths (Cornell). Paul “Griffiths’ connection to Messiaen’s work goes beyond empathy to something like rapt fascination. In this book, an English intellectual of impeccable discipline and taste suggests how to come to terms with, and find terms for, a music of schematic conundrums, garish vulgarities, childlike animism and measureless, precise excesses” (John Harbison).

Lady’s Time, Alan V. Hewat (Harper & Row) evokes New Orleans life at the crack of the Modern Age and “makes the birth of jazz as real and strange as a vivid dream” (Tom Nolan).