Sunday Book Review, May 11, 2008

Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins is so moved by a shipwreck that he starts writing again.

The sensational story of architect Stanford White’s murder and the alluring young woman who was its catalyst receives its best telling in this book.

Two journalists meet and fall in love while covering the war in Afghanistan.

In search of the godfather of soul

The longtime television journalist has selected his talks on the state of America’s system of government.

A teen fights for survival during the Siege of Leningrad.

A mathematician shares his love of numbers, grids and graphs.

The Story of a Marriage A Novel Andrew Sean Greer Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 196 pp., $22 “WE THINK we know the ones we love,” begins Andrew Sean Greer’s bewitching third novel, “The Story of a Marriage,” a book whose linguistic prowess and raw storytelling power is almost disruptive to the reader.

The destruction of Lisbon by a major earthquake in 1755 and its repercussions in Enlightenment Europe.

An examination of the fall of ancient civilizations and the likelihood that earthquakes were responsible.

A psychiatrist tormented by his autistic sister’s death embarks on what could be a healing romance.

The inclusion of unorthodox symbolism in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling

Guy de Maupassant, Vladimir Mayakovsky and two new books -- Frances Richey’s remembrance of her soldier son and a treatise on boat-building by Lawrence Cheek.

Fiction 1. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen ($13.95) 2.

Southland readings and book signings