Perestroika: Our Hopes for Our Country and...

Perestroika: Our Hopes for Our Country and the World, Mikhail Gorbachev (A Cornelia and Michael Bessie Book/Harper & Row). Perestroika , an attempt to unleash individual human economic energy, “is vividly and conversationally described in this remarkable manifesto.” It is based on “a profound criticism of the ‘stagnation’ of Soviet society and an insistence on radically reordering its essential economic mechanisms” (Robert Scheer).

Chaos: Making a New Science, James Gleick (Viking), “ably explains the emergence of a new understanding throughout the natural and social sciences that complexity, chaos and chance are a built-in part of reality” (Lee Dembart).

Time With Children, Elizabeth Tallent (Knopf). “The emotional calligraphy with which Elizabeth Tallent draws her uneasy modern couples and trios is minute and perfectly formed . . . (and her) meteorology of contemporary alienated emotions is breathtakingly accurate” (Richard Eder).

The Boy Who Held Back the Sea, retelling by Lenny Hort (Dial Books). Seventeenth-Century Holland is the backdrop for this “charming, classic” children’s story. Thomas Locker’s oil paintings are superb (Kristiana Gregory).