Books
Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis by Al Gore 
Our Choice is a “grand compendium” of all the best thinking available about the actions that can be taken to avert global disaster.
Book of the week: Lit: A Memoir by Mary Karr
Fourteen years after The Liars’ Club, the Texan-born poet offers her fans a tour of her less-than-perfect adulthood.
Novel of the week: The Original of Laura (Dying Is Fun) by Vladimir Nabokov
The Original of Laura is Nabokov’s final project, which he had asked his wife to burn if he failed to finish it. He never finished it, she never burned it, and the Nabokov’s son has finally released it for publication.
Author of the week: Andre Agassi
Agassi's collaboration with journalist J.R. Moehringer, who taped 250 hours of interviews with the tennis hero, has resulted in a juicy and candid memoir.
Also of interest ... in keeping it short
Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith; The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis; Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman; What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell
'Unfriend': Word of the year?
Prompting disputes, the New Oxford America Dictionary has deemed the Facebook-derived term 2009's most influential word.
Fall fiction: New novels from four old favorites
New works by Stephen King, Barbara Kingsolver, John Grisham, and Philip Roth
Author of the week: Rhoda Janzen
Mennonite in a Little Black Dress is Janzen's hilarious account of returning, as a 43-year-old divorcée, to her parents’ conservative Mennonite household.
Also of interest ... in new business books
Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross; The Sellout by Charles Gasparino; Googled by Ken Auletta; The King of Oil by Daniel Ammann
The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy by Bill Simmons
The online sports columnist's 700-page treatise leaves no doubt that basketball will always come first, and it's a blast to listen when a “true fan” like Simmons is doing the talking.
Novel of the week: Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving
The “essential power” of Last Night in Twisted River proves strong enough that Irving’s excesses “do not overwhelm it,” said Floyd Skloot in The Boston Globe.
Book of the week: When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women From 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins
Collins’ ambitious survey of American women’s social and political progress over the past half-century is “remarkable.” Every signpost of the shift in women’s fortunes gets a fresh look.
Also of interest ... in past American battles
D-Day by Antony Beevor; The Big Burn by Timothy Egan; The American Civil War by John Keegan; Empire of Liberty by Gordon S. Wood
Author of the week: Irene Vilar
Now married with two children, Vilar's memoir, Impossible Motherhood, reveals the pathological desire for control over her body that led her to have 15 abortions in 15 years.
Glenn Beck: The new Oprah?
The power of the Fox News host to promote a certain kind of book
Agassi drug scandal: Tennis legends react
Andre Agassi has rocked the tennis world by confessing he used meth—and then lied about it. Will his reputation survive?
Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns
It’s about time someone wrote a “thorough and largely unbiased” biography of one of 20th-century America’s most influential political thinkers, said Brian Doherty in Reason.
Book of the week: Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance
Freakonomics authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner are back with another "beautifully contrarian" collection of data-driven arguments.
Novel of the week: The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk
The Nobel laureate's new book is a spellbinding love story about a young Turkish man who destroys his life pining for the woman he slept with just before marrying someone else.
Author of the week: Jonathan Safran Foer
It’s simply wrong, says Foer, that the “crudest” of human senses—taste—“has been exempted from the ethical rules” governing all other human desires. His new book, Eating Animals, advocates a veritable boycott of factory-farmed animals.
