Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel, Truman Capote...

Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel, Truman Capote (Random House). Truman Capote’s Proustian view of international high society is irresistible. “A gift from an unbridled genius” (Paul Rudnick).

The New History and the Old, Gertrude Himmelfarb (Harvard University Press). The author “does not discount the importance of social history but wants it to be placed in the proper context of general history,” where we can see the role of individuals in shaping world events. “A valuable collection of essays” (Paul Johnson).

Miami, Joan Didion (Simon & Schuster). “Powerfully seductive.” The author “sees, in the vortex plotting by exiles against Castro’s Cuba and Ortega’s Nicaragua, and in the splintering rivalries among the exiles themselves, . . . a tropicalization of the causes dear to the American Right” (Richard Eder).

The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness, Cynthia Earl Kerman and Richard Eldridge (Louisiana State University Press). For readers exploring art, psychology, or religion, as Jean Toomer did, this book will be thought-provoking, even though this interesting and complex man never found the wholeness he sought (Patricia Levering).