The Paper: The Life and Death of...

The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune, Richard Kluger (Knopf). “An absorbing, serious and colorful picture of social, political and journalistic life in an era when newspapers across America were family businesses, and reporters and writers were the television of the times” (Don Cook).

The Great American Magazine: An Inside History of LIFE, Loudon Wainwright (Knopf), looks back with “a hard-eyed affection and an unsparing, but also unmalicious candor . . . a reminder just how profoundly tacky, trivial, ephemeral and silly--as well as profound--the magazine could be” (Charles Champlin).

The Apocalyptic Sublime, Morton D. Paley (Yale University), “documents a growing British obsession--as the French Revolution nears--with images of ‘the crack of doom’ ” and reminds us that paintings can be a useful window back onto a culture’s obsessions (George Leonard).

The Well, Elizabeth Jolley (Viking). “A striking portrait of loneliness and of the terrible price paid by fantasy when it attempts to substitute itself for life” (Richard Eder).