Alfred A. Knopf

One minute to midnight; Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the brink of nuclear war.

A reporter for The Washington Post, Dobbs sets out a minute-by-minute account of the 13 days in October 1962 when the US and the Soviet Union were reported to be on the verge of unleashing nuclear weapons on each other because of Soviet missiles in Cuba. He combines the techniques of historian and journalist, and chose the moment when much archival material has become available, when many of the key players are still alive to talk, and when most American alive today were not born yet and have never heard of the crisis. The title refers to the Doomsday Clock, which the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist uses to indicate the risk of nuclear war by how many minutes are left until midnight; it has never been one. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

President Lincoln; the duty of a statesman.

Miller (public affairs scholar in ethics and institutions, U. of Virginia) examined Lincoln's early intellectual and moral development in his acclaimed "ethical biography" Lincoln's Virtues (2002). Here he presents a case study of the leadership of the celebrated 16th president as he weighed the issues of justice and freedom in confronting slavery and the Civil War. The final chapter samples the near-global grief over his assassination in 1865. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Relentless pursuit; a year in the trenches with Teach for America.

Foote, a freelance journalist, provides a narrative illustration of the Teach for America program within the framework of a poor, largely- neglected Los Angeles school. Teach for America, since its founding in 1990, has sought to provide better educational opportunities for disadvantaged children. The book chronicles a year in the life of the school through the eyes of four of Teach for America's briefly-trained, but idealistic corps members who relate their frustrating, maddening, and exhilarating experiences in the classrooms. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Semantic antics; how and why words change meaning.

After an introduction surveying the many reasons that words might change meaning over the years and centuries, lexicographer Steinmetz cites in dictionary fashion English words that used to mean something different than they do now. Entries are about a half page long. A glossary of names and terms is provided. Pronunciations are not indicated for anything. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Wallace Stegner and the American West.

Stegner's Angle of Repose and The Spectator Bird were just two of his masterpieces. His others include passionate pleas for the preservation of wildness and the retreat of concrete as he watched Silicon Valley stretch from horizon to horizon. Distinguished journalist Fradkin closely follows Stegner's hard years as a youngster in both the coldest and hottest locales of the West, the beginnings of his career at the U. of Iowa during the Depression, his founding and development of the Stanford Creative Writing Program, his mentorship of such writers as Ken Kesey and Edward Abbey, and his fight against charges of plagiarism despite his Pulitzer for Angle of Repose. The result is a clear assessment of how much locale can be built inside a human being. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)