The Rug Merchant, Phillip Lopate (Viking). “A...

The Rug Merchant, Phillip Lopate (Viking). “A small and quietly wonderful novel.” Cyrus, “a fully achieved and perduring character . . . can understand and appreciate everything; he can talk gracefully and eloquently, but he can’t say: ‘I want’ ” (Richard Eder).

Watching Television: A Pantheon Guide to Popular Culture, edited by Todd Gitlin; Reading the News: A Pantheon Guide to Popular Culture, edited by Robert Karl Manoff and Michael Schudson (Pantheon). The seven essays in “Watching Television” emphasize “how television is implicated in the growing sense of impotence and fragmentation that characterize the American mood.” “Reading the News” tries “to demystify journalism by revealing in specific terms how the news happens.” Both books are “rich and provocative” (Neil Postman).

Winston S. Churchill: Road to Victory, 1941-1945, Martin Gilbert (Houghton Mifflin). “An engrossing history of Churchill’s crucial role in the grand alliance of World War II from Pearl Harbor to V.E. Day” (David Eisenhower).

The Enigma of Arrival, V. S. Naipaul (Knopf). “An oblique, exasperating and finally moving . . . journal and series of reflections based on the years that Naipaul spent in the English countryside” (Richard Eder).