The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov,...

The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov, Andrew Field (Crown). “The most exhaustive and revealing biography of the writer we will see until well into the next century . . . . (Andrew) Field delves into Nabokov’s work with a seriousness and sensitivity that is impressive” (Roberta Smoodin).

Was Einstein Right? Putting General Relativity to the Test, Clifford M. Will (Basic). “Readers interested in why physicists are so sure (that Einstein had it right) will profit from this book, and so will people who delight in the beauty of our scientific method” (Lee Dembart).

The Soviet Paradox: Expansion, Internal Decline, Seweryn Bialer (Knopf), “deals with flesh-and-blood Russians, not the cardboard cut-outs that (Zbigniew) Brzezinski seems to have set up at the other side of his game table” in his new book, “Game Plan” (Dean Mills).

The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow: The Rediscovered Diary of Opal Whiteley, presented by Benjamin Hoff (Ticknor & Fields), is “the journal of a lovable and precocious 7-year-old girl living in the wilderness of the American Northwest in the early years of this century, a child with an amazing ability to see and record the marvelous world of nature around her, in language that is poetically individual” (Madeleine L’Engle).

The House on Moon Lake, Francesca Duranti; translated by Stephen Saltarelli (Random House), “is a fable, of a sort, about a refined and attenuated intellectual who disappears out of life into his own imagination. The narrative is lively, then dreamlike; the writing is musical in its balance and variety” (Richard Eder).