Waiting for Childhood, Sumner Locke Elliott (Harper...

Waiting for Childhood, Sumner Locke Elliott (Harper & Row), “manages at once to be terribly melancholy and extraordinarily exhilarating. You are asked to wonder . . . what it is you want out of life” (Carolyn See).

Fall Out of Heaven: An Autobiographical Journey, Alan Cheuse (Gibbs M. Smith, P.O. Box 667, Layton, Utah 84041), is “the exotic tale of a father’s unlikely adventures and unsuspected heroism,” the public confession of a son’s estrangement and a celebration of the belated intimacy of father and son (Jonathan Kirsch).

Leaving Home: A Collection of Lake Wobegon Stories, Garrison Keillor (Viking/Penguin). The author’s radio “seances” hold their spell in print. Keillor “still likes to head the story down a gravel turnoff and then, just when nothing at all looks familiar, hook up with the main highway” (Dan Sullivan).

Economics in Perspective: A Critical History, John Kenneth Galbraith (Houghton Mifflin). “This new book will raise (the author’s) reputation among those who already know him and will introduce him to a new generation” (Walter Russell Mead).