Cousin Rosamund, Rebecca West (Viking), is about...

Cousin Rosamund, Rebecca West (Viking), is about “the uneasy balance between the corruption of wealth and the power of love . . . . West’s words remain as fresh as the day she put them on paper” (Mary Dryden).

The Screaming Room: A Mother’s Journal of Her Son’s Struggle with AIDS, Barbara Peabody (Oaktree Press). “By the end of this book, the reader will have learned a great deal about AIDS . . . . But he will also get a sense, both enlightening and depressing, about how some modern American families work” (Carolyn See).

Water, Aridity and the Growth of the American West, Donald Worster (Pantheon); Cadillac Desert, The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Marc P. Reisner (Viking). “Donald Worster is capable of making the most prosaic facts come alive through his . . . ability to weave his ideas with events and personalities into a fascinating historical record.” Less taken with explicit class analysis than Worster, Marc Reisner “tells some fascinating stories and offers anecdotal evidence of the wrongheadedness of federal water policy” (Dean E. Mann).

The Last Film of Emile Vico, Thomas Gavin (Viking), a “credible and moving” account of the relationship between cinematographer and director, “can be enjoyed well beyond Hollywood for its gaudy events, its interplay of character, its re-creation of the ‘30s, its fresh and agile style” (Charles Champlin).

Your Native Land, Your Life, Adrienne Rich (Norton). “Adrienne Rich proves herself, again, a major writer who continues to carve poems out of difficult stone: her own suffering and the suffering of those she identifies with.” Her poems “encourage the hope for finding true homes within ourselves and our society” (Holly Prado).