Heart’s Desire, Gwyneth Cravens (Knopf), gives a...

Heart’s Desire, Gwyneth Cravens (Knopf), gives a history of how and why the women’s movement got started. The novelist “tells almost more than she should about how relentless women can be when they need a man, how cavalier they can be when that need has been met” (Carolyn See).

The Nemesis Affair: A Story of the Death of Dinosaurs and the Ways of Science, David M. Raup (Norton). “Though he is a clear partisan for the extinction hypothesis, (David M.) Raup even-handedly assesses the evidence and arguments for and against it.” The book is “an admirable description of the way scientists think and science works” (Lee Dembart).

Xorandor, Christine Brooke-Rose, (Carcanet). Lodged in a corner of Cornwall, the novel’s protagonist--a two-foot-long sentient rock--is haunted by Arthurian ghosts from the past and contaminated by a nuclear waste dump in the present. Though flattened by contrivance, the book’s ideas are “provocative” and “enlivened by wit” (Richard Eder).

In Praise of Wolves, R. D. Lawrence (Holt, Rinehart & Winston); Don Coyote: The Good Times and the Bad Times of a Maligned American Original, Dayton O. Hyde (Arbor House). Lawrence’s insights into wolves “benefit extravagantly from his intimate familiarity with the animals and the adoration that leads to tireless patience.” In “Don Coyote,” Dayton Hyde, an Oregon cattle rancher with an utterly improbable fondness for unplowed ground and irreverent coyotes, gives us a book that is “joyously ornery . . . damned funny (and) compelling” (David M. Graber).