The Bondage of Love: A Life of...

The Bondage of Love: A Life of Mrs. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Molly Lefebure (Norton). Mrs. Coleridge “wins our respect and admiration.” The author covers, “in rich and evocative detail,” the quality of Sara’s experience, “how and what a remarkable and representative woman saw, felt and thought nearly 200 years ago” (Paul D. Sheats).

The English: A Social History, 1066-1945, Christopher Hibbert (Norton). This “well-organized and comprehensive synthesis of 900 years of English social history has a clear and lively style and contains many odd facts and interesting anecdotes” (Jeffrey Meyers).

Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven, Steve Stern (Viking). Perhaps “the most arresting quality” of this work of “dreamy brilliance” about the Jews of Memphis, Tenn., “is the ease with which Stern moves between so-called reality and another space, no less earthy for its inclusion of ghosts, angels and even the voice of God” (Janet Hadda).

Waltzing With a Dictator: The Marcoses and the Making of American Policy, Raymond Bonner (Times Books), uses “rich detail and documentation” to tell the story, “by turns bizarre and disheartening,” of how the United States influenced the Marcos government (Marvin Seid).

Corazon Aquino: The Story of a Revolution, Lucy Komisar (Braziller). Conscientious and up-to-the minute, this is “an excellent entry to what will become a weighted-down bookshelf on the subject” (David Bain).