The New York Times will publish their 2009 Notables list on December 6th.
One interesting development is the resurgence of the short story. Twelve collections make the list this year, and four biographies of short story writers make the non-fiction list.
All of the books below are either on the shelves here at Brilliant Books or can be shipped direct to you using our Free Shipping Service.
Thank you for supporting a local independent bookstore.
Enjoy!
NON-FICTION
$17.00
ISBN-13: 9781400095261
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Vintage, 11/2009
Gilder’s book brings the reader into a mix of ideas and personalities, which she handles with verve.
$40.00
ISBN-13: 9780375422225
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Pantheon, 7/2009
The twin energies of scientific curiosity and poetic invention pulsate through this study of “the second scientific revolution.”
$35.00
ISBN-13: 9780385513999
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: Nan A. Talese, 10/2009
Heller maintains critical perspective while conveying the conviction and odd charisma of Rand, whose angry message resonates today among the anti-Obama right
$25.95
ISBN-13: 9781594202315
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: Penguin Press HC, The, 8/2009
A memoir by The Times’s former restaurant critic, who writes of food, family, friendship and being fat.
$27.95
ISBN-13: 9780307269188
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Knopf, 9/2009
Armstrong, a former nun, wants to rescue the idea of the Deity from its cultured despisers and its more literal-minded adherents alike.
$35.00
ISBN-13: 9781400043941
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: Knopf, 3/2009
This detailed biography follows John Cheever’s path step by stumbling step, disclosing the addictive urges and bawling self-pity to which he subjected himself and those in his household.
$26.00
ISBN-13: 9781596914025
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Bloomsbury USA, 9/2009
Friends and sheer perseverance got the novelist through his years of desire, poverty and thwarted ambition.
$26.95
ISBN-13: 9780670020638
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: Viking Adult, 4/2009
In Queenan’s account of his life, the belligerent priests, the poverty, the girls and the music all pale beside the rages of his drunken, violently abusive father
$24.99
ISBN-13: 9780316042918
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: Little, Brown and Company, 7/2009
From the physics of absolute zero to the cold-resistant gluttony of small birds, Streever reports on the extreme regions of low temperatures and the scientists who love them.
$26.99
ISBN-13: 9780446546935
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: Twelve, 4/2009
Cullen’s nuanced account anatomizes the massacre, showing how readily truth was obscured by myth.
$30.00
ISBN-13: 9780743297431
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Simon & Schuster, 11/2009
How the 1840s paved the way to the Civil War
$30.00
ISBN-13: 9780374299248
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: Macmillan Audio, 10/2009
This copious, lively history treats the game, and the qualities it demands, as characteristically American.
$29.95
ISBN-13: 9780393072259
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: W. W. Norton & Company, 9/2009
Dickstein demonstrates how glorious entertainments thrived in a decade of crisis.
$35.00
ISBN-13: 9780393057300
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: W. W. Norton & Company, 10/2009
An absorbing, well-researched and highly political biography of a transformative figure in modern photojournalism.
$35.00
ISBN-13: 9780195039146
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Oxford University Press, USA, 10/2009
A grand, fascinating account of America’s first quarter-century, presented with great insight and scholarship
$25.99
ISBN-13: 9780316734912
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: Little, Brown and Company, 6/2009
In his careful yet provocative contemplation of religious history, Wright sees continuous positive moral change over time but denies the specialness of any individual faith
$32.00
ISBN-13: 9780679422846
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: Random House, 9/2009
Sheehan fully sets Schriever, a crucial figure behind the creation of America’s ICBM force, in the context of the cold war’s early years
$26.95
ISBN-13: 9780674029767
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Belknap Press, 12/2008
A Cambridge classics professor leads a fine tour, turning up surprises around every corner
$37.50
ISBN-13: 9780375415425
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Knopf, 4/2009
Stiles writes with care and panache about the quintessential “robber baron,” a man widely revered as well as hated
$30.00
ISBN-13: 9780316000666
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Little, Brown and Company, 2/2009
Witty, obsessed and almost inhumanly brave, O’Connor was peculiar, her work even more so. But Gooch strives to make it all quite normal
$27.50
ISBN-13: 9780805082364
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Metropolitan Books, 6/2009
Ford tried and failed to build an ideal American society on an Amazonian rubber plantation
$35.00
ISBN-13: 9780312378684
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: St. Martin's Press, 2/2009
Not dwelling on Barthelme’s dark soul or his uneven work, Daugherty has created a convincing narrative from a life that was engaged, passionate and maybe even fulfilled.
$26.00
ISBN-13: 9780374165734
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: Picador, 9/2009
Finkel’s harrowing chronicle of modern combat is based on the eight months he spent with an Army battalion in Iraq
$26.95
ISBN-13: 9781594488948
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Riverhead Hardcover, 9/2009
A senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission assails the Bush administration’s depiction of the event as so much public relations flimflam
$35.00
ISBN-13: 9780312378684
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: St. Martin's Press, 2/2009
Not dwelling on Barthelme’s dark soul or his uneven work, Daugherty has created a convincing narrative from a life that was engaged, passionate and maybe even fulfilled.
$28.00
ISBN-13: 9781416580515
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Scribner, 5/2009
An uplifting account of how Special Forces soldiers joined with mounted local militias to beat back the Taliban in 2001
$26.99
ISBN-13: 9780307459688
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Crown Business, 8/2009
A hair-raising tale of the race to stave off a depression
$25.99
ISBN-13: 9780060596989
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: Harper, 11/2009
Despite the deep seriousness of the topics here — motherhood, disintegrating marriage, alcoholism, depression, God — nothing can keep Karr from being funny.
$16.00
ISBN-13: 9781594484018
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Riverhead Trade, 9/2009
A satisfying genre-blending consideration of Joseph Priestley and his fertile ideas.
$35.00
ISBN-13: 9781439148938
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: Simon & Schuster, 11/2009
Pakula’s often absorbing biography presents Madame Chiang as far more complicated, awful and brilliant than we had imagined.
$18.00
ISBN-13: 9780143116806
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Penguin (Non-Classics), 12/2009
In a sweeping narrative built around four powerful central bankers, Ahamed describes the cascading series of events that led to the Great Depression
$24.99
ISBN-13: 9780446540940
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Twelve, 5/2009
In its moments of real ambivalence, this loving and funny filial memoir of Bill and Pat Buckley is surprisingly strong drink
$26.00
ISBN-13: 9781596917002
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Bloomsbury USA, 9/2009
Myerson interweaves powerful scenes of her son’s drug addiction with the story of a young consumptive who died in 1838
$27.50
ISBN-13: 9780385513531
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Doubleday, 2/2009
Grann follows the trail of the English adventurer/explorer Percy Fawcett, who disappeared in 1925
$24.95
ISBN-13: 9780385521284
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: Doubleday, 5/2009
The witty, self-castigating story of how Kirn’s schooling left him “not so much educated as wised up
$40.00
ISBN-13: 9780375423666
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Pantheon, 9/2009
An admiring biography of the Supreme Court justice as a reformer and legal innovator
$22.00
ISBN-13: 9781416567882
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: Scribner, 1/2009
Romm’s fury over her mother’s cancer is magnetic, with the power to both repel and attract, and here it is transformed into an instrument for pursuing truth
$25.00
ISBN-13: 9781596916500
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Bloomsbury USA, 6/2009
In his unnerving portrait of Oelwein, Iowa, Reding depicts a catastrophe of Chernobylish dimensions, precipitated by the loss of jobs and the rise of methamphetamines
$27.99
ISBN-13: 9780060598990
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: HarperBusiness, 6/2009
In this essential account, Fox zeroes in on the academics whose efficient-market theories enabled abuses
$27.99
ISBN-13: 9780316031424
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Little, Brown and Company, 11/2009
Evans was a large part of the era of British newspapers he describes, when journalists were literate buccaneers
$28.95
ISBN-13: 9780307268198
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Knopf, 11/2009
Bracingly devoid of triumphalist homily, Agassi’s is one of the most passionately anti-sports books ever written by a superstar athlete
$27.95
ISBN-13: 9780670021079
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: Viking Adult, 8/2009
A powerful work that offers an impassioned challenge to the social meaning of disasters
$26.00
ISBN-13: 9781400066513
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: Random House, 6/2009
Along with athletic ability, showmanship helped make Satchel Paige the most lasting symbol of black baseball
$35.00
ISBN-13: 9780743262453
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Scribner, 11/2009
Sklenicka’s biography is invaluable as a chronicle of Carver’s growth as a writer, particularly in its account of his difficult, ultimately poisonous relationship with the editor Gordon Lish
$26.00
ISBN-13: 9781416552406
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: Simon & Schuster, 2/2009
Much credit for success goes to Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly
$25.95
ISBN-13: 9781594202230
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Penguin Press HC, The, 5/2009
An encomium to manual skills, by a political philosophy Ph.D. who can rebuild VW engines
$29.95
ISBN-13: 9780465018277
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Basic Books, 8/2009
The quantum pioneer had an almost miraculous apprehension of the physical world, coupled with an innocent incomprehension of other people
$30.00
ISBN-13: 9780684831909
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: Free Press, 10/2009
A superbly textured, compassionate biography
$24.99
ISBN-13: 9780061721786
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: Harper, 3/2009
This elegantly told story weaves together the Iraqi past and present
$40.00
ISBN-13: 9781594202063
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: Penguin Press HC, The, 4/2009
This riveting final volume to Evans’s magisterial trilogy illuminates the endless human capacity for evil and self-justification
$27.99
ISBN-13: 9780316059541
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Little, Brown and Company, 10/2009
A Times columnist’s thorough, smart and often wry account of American women’s strides and the hurdles they still face
$29.95
ISBN-13: 9780195385564
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Oxford University Press, USA, 8/2009
The Brazilian writer was born to remorse, shaken by trauma and imbued with a deep sense of alienation
$34.99
ISBN-13: 9780060565282
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Harper, 8/2009
Roosevelt, as shown in this vast, energetic book, saw conservation as crucial to America’s military and moral standing
$24.00
ISBN-13: 9781934781630
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: McSweeney's Books, 7/2009
This suspenseful nonfiction account of what happened to a Syrian-American man and his family after Hurricane Katrina is a powerful indictment of Bush-era policies
$29.95
ISBN-13: 9781586487690
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: PublicAffairs, 10/2009
A sense of urgency runs through this disturbing exploration of the motives and actions that have led to mass murder.
$26.95
ISBN-13: 9780679444268
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Pantheon, 11/2009
Mallon’s fine meditation on the art of letter-writing embraces old friends — Flaubert, Freud, the Mitfords — and plenty of unknowns as well
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