God’s Snake, Irini Spanidou (Norton). Anna struggles...

God’s Snake, Irini Spanidou (Norton). Anna struggles to discover herself as a female “despite the vigorous presence of the masterful father she adored; and the vacancy of a depressed and fastidious mother. . . . Over and over, (Anna’s) voice, abrupt and charged, brings to us the universal truths of a remote, provincial and mythological childhood” (Richard Eder).

I See a Long Journey: Three Novellas, Rachel Ingalls (Simon & Schuster), “engages the reader in the deadly habituation of someone’s casual life style, only to rush the reader to a sudden climax that is as inevitable as it is bewildering. . . . (Rachel) Ingalls is a superlative writer, careful in her craft and awesome in her effects” (William Packard).

Your Down’s Syndrome Child: Everything Today’s Parents Need to Know about Raising Their Special Child, Eunice McClurg (Doubleday). “A constructive, comprehensive and compassionate book assuring parents they can rear their child at home” (E. W. Alexander).

The Passion of Ayn Rand: A Biography, Barbara Branden (Doubleday). A “carefully researched, thoughtfully written, very interesting biography.” The author “keeps an iron grip on her prose style,” and her “research on the early literary works and the two major novels is solid and reasonable” (Carolyn See).

Waiting to Live, Mewa Ramgobin (Random House/Adventura). The author, a black South African activist who wrote this novel in prison while awaiting trial on charges of treason, uses plain language and simple characterizations to show how conditions in South Africa conspire to turn its best citizens “into victims of an irrational design” (Elaine Kendall).

Iron Eagle: The Turbulent Life of General Curtis LeMay, Thomas M. Coffey (Crown). “In this easy, understanding, almost conversational profile, (the author) shows that the very qualities that made LeMay a superlative, revered field commander were his weaknesses as Air Force chief of staff” (Paul Dean).

Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, Alfred W. Crosby (Cambridge University), is about “an extraordinarily interesting question, namely, why and how did Europeans, alone among peoples of the world, disperse around the globe . . . a provocative and fascinating book” (Lee Dembart).