Some early contenders of our favorite books of the year. Your nominations are welcome!

		E-mail Print
Select Item

	Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All, A New Zealand Story  •  Christina Thompson BIOGRAPHY/MEMOIR •  2008 •  HARD COVER  • 268 PAGES In this story of cultural collision, and ultimate harmony, Harvard Review editor Thompson interweaves memoir and history as she tells two stories: the western encounter with New Zealand's Maori tribe, and a personal lovestory about how she met her Maori husband. With an elegant touch, she examines racial stereotypes and cultural misconceptions. (NZL96, $24.99)
	Apples are from Kazakhstan, The Land That Disappeared  •  Christopher Robbins TRAVEL NARRATIVE •  2008 •  HARD COVER  • 304 PAGES In this richly observed portrait, the British journalist Christopher Robbins mixes tales of the Scythians and Sarmatians, of Eurasian steppe wolves and long-faced saiga antelope, his quest for apples and tulips, with travel, anecdote, impressions and a very evident appreciation for the diversity, beauty and future of Kazakhstan. And, yes, apples do come from Kazakhstan. Tulips too. It's a country the size of Western Europe, closed by the Tsars to foreigners in the 19th century and sealed off by the Soviets for 70 years. (CAS160, $24.00)
	Twenty Chickens for a Saddle  •  Robyn Scott BIOGRAPHY/MEMOIR •  2008 •  HARD COVER  • 464 PAGES A memoir of wildly unconventional childhood in Botswana and South Africa. Scott's parents, two eccentric, idealistic New Zealanders, chose eco-friendly mosquito nets over more effective chemical treatments, downplay the threat of snakebites, and make jokes about tuberculosis. Despite memorable brushes with the devestation of AIDS and post-apartheid rascism, Scott observes the continent and her free-spirited upbringing with enthusiasm and affection. (SAF203, $24.95)
	A Wildlife Guide to Chile  •  Sharon Chester FIELD GUIDE •  2008 •  PAPER  • 392 PAGES Sharon Chester, a talented lecturer and guide, hauled out expedition logs and field notes, consulted dozens of colleagues and spent many, many hours on hundreds of illustrations in this comprehensive guide to Chilean wildlife. From bats to butterflies, lizards to llamas, and ferns to flamingos this full-color, compact guide covers it all in detail. (CHI77, $19.95)
	Antarctica, Secrets of the Southern Continent  •  David McGonigal NATURAL HISTORY •  2008 •  HARD COVER  • 400 PAGES • COMING IN OCTOBER Both a gorgeous photographic portrait and a comprehensive, up-to-date primer, this oversize, illustrated survey of Antarctic history, exploration, wildlife, science and conservation features 600 spectacular color photographs and terrific maps, many by the well-traveled colleague and Antarctic expedition leader David McGonigal, who also rounded up dozens of experts to contribute. It's got it all: geology, geography and climate, wildlife, exploration, science and Antarctic today. We especially like the detailed maps of Anatrctic regions, icnluding the Gerlach Strait, which highlight popular visitor sites. (ANT167, $59.95)
	The Fruit Hunters, A Story of Nature, Obsession, Commerce and Adventure  •  Adam Leith Gollner SCIENCE •  2008 •  HARD COVER  • 288 PAGES The coco-de-mer, found only in the Seychelles, Asia's repugnant and coveted durian and all many exotic and wonderful fruits that you've never heard of take the starring role in this surprisingly juicy account of the history, pleasure and business of fruit. Admittedly addled, Gollner chronicles his travels all over the planet in search of Galangal, chempedak, salak, jambu, sapote, voavanga, farkleberry, ballion and other such marvels. (NAT138, $25.00)
	Roads to Quoz, An American Mosey  •  William Least Heat-Moon TRAVEL NARRATIVE •  2008 •  HARD COVER • COMING IN OCTOBER Least Heat-Moon, now with his wife, wander to out-of-the-way and just plain odd places in this marvelously digressive, captivating series of journeys on the trail of the 1804 Dunbar-Hunter Expedition and other forgotten and fascinating adventures. As in Blue Highways, apart from Least Heat-Moon's effortlessly delivered history and fact, the pleasure of this eccentric book is in the people he meets along the way. (USA329, $27.99)
	Sea of Poppies  •  Amitav Ghosh LITERATURE •  2008 •  HARD COVER  • 512 PAGES Ghosh conjures the tumult of the 19th-century Opium Wars and colonial India in this gripping saga, featuring an unforgettable cast of characters, Indian, Chinese and British. First in a planned trilogy, this is the tale of the Ibis and its crew, en route to Mauritius. (IDA529, $26.00)
	Nature of the Rainforest, Costa Rica and Beyond  •  Adrian Forsyth  •  E.O. Wilson  •  Michael Fogden NATURAL HISTORY •  2008 •  PAPER  • 200 PAGES • COMING IN OCTOBER Biologist Adrian Forsyth uses anecdote and example from his many decades in the tropics to illuminate the basic concepts of ecology, evolution and conservation in these marvelous essays. One hundred and ninety-one magnificent photographs of rare and wonderful birds, mammals and other creatures of the forest. by Michael and Patricia Fogden complement the text. (CRC67, $29.95)
	Venice Is a Fish  •  Tiziano Scarpa CULTURAL PORTRAIT •  2008 •  HARD COVER  • 154 PAGES In these marvelously digressive essays on the many moods and pleasures of La Serenissima, loosely organized around (get this) parts of the body (let your feet wander), the hugely popular Venetian writer makes his English-language debut. He calls it a guide, which it is not, though it is great fun. He appends a 40-page tribute to Venetian writers. (ITL964, $17.50)
	China, Portrait of a Country by 76 Chinese Photographers  •  Heung Shing Liu HISTORY •  2008 •  HARD COVER  • 360 PAGES This stunning photographic history of the People's Republic shows the nation's triumphs and hardships from 1949-2008. Liu, a pulitzer-prize-winning photojournalist who grew up in China, has brought together a range of photographers not well-known in the West. (CHN525, $59.99)
	Europe Between the Oceans: 9000 BC-AD 1000  •  Barry Cunliffe HISTORY •  2008 •  HARD COVER  • 520 PAGES In this magnificent book, distinguished archaeologist Barry Cunliffe views Europe not in terms of states and shifting political land boundaries but as a geographical niche particularly favored in facing many seas. These seas, and Europe's great transpeninsular rivers, ensured a rich diversity of natural resources while also encouraging the dynamic interaction of peoples across networks of communication and exchange. (EUR310, $39.95)
	The Open Road  •  Pico Iyer CULTURAL PORTRAIT •  2008 •  HARD COVER  • 288 PAGES A beautifully written, wide-ranging portrait of the Tibetan people and the aspirations of their leader, Iyer's remarrkable book includes chapters on daily life in Dharamsala, travels with the Dalai Lama, snippets of the history of modern Tibet. Iyer, who has known the Dalai Lama since his graduate student days, draws on his long association with the man and his ideas. (TBT118, $24.00)
	Long After Midnight at the Nino Bien, A Yanqui's Missteps in Argentina  •  Brian Winter LITERATURE •  2008 •  HARD COVER  • 336 PAGES Weaving politics and history with his own travails in seedy tango halls, Winters became, as he bemoans in the epilogue of this rollikcing portrait of Buenos Aires, "the most grotesque creature imaginable -- a Texan with an Argentine accent." He includes a memorable three-page riff on the famous La Biela Café, where he once saw Robert Duvall -- "one yangui son of a bitch who knew how to tango." (ARG80, $24.95)
	Wolf Totem  •  Jiang Rong LITERATURE •  2008 •  HARD COVER  • 496 PAGES Defiant, unyielding, feared, hunted and revered, the great Mongolian wolf is the heart and center of Jiang Rong's epic tale of a young man from Beijing and his encounters in this strange, ancient world on the Mongolian steppe. Winner of the first Man Asia Prize and hugely popular in China, it's a stirring epic, allegory and elegy for a vanished way of life with the emotional punch of Arseniev's Dersu the Trapper (SIB24, $16.00). Sent to Olonbulag in the 1969 during the cultural revolution, Rong spent ten year's living among the nomads of north-central Inner Mongolia. (CHN471, $26.95)

	Made in France, A Shopper's Guide  •  Laura Morelli   • GUIDEBOOK  •  Morelli's illustrated, personal guide to locally crafted, hand-made textiles, porcelain, crystal, digestifs and much more. (FRN706, $24.95)
	Beyond the Great Wall  •  Jeffrey Alford  •  Naomi Duguid   • FOOD  •  The globe-trotting husband-and-wife team weave their own tales of travel with politics, commentary, carefully documented recipes and gorgeous photographs for this sumptuous overview of the food and culture of Inner Mongolia, Tibet, Yunnan and other far-off regions of ethnically diverse China. A Gournet Cook Book Club selection. (CHN475, $40.00)
	Horse Song, The Naadam of Mongolia  •  Ted Lewin  •  Betsy Lewin   • CULTURAL PORTRAIT • FAMILY  •  Caldecott winners Ted and Betsy Lewin depict the splendor of the Naadam festival and the intricacies of Mongolian culture in this terrific, gorgeously illustrated account of their travels. Geared for children, enjoyable for the whole family. (MGL61, $19.95)
	Thousand-Mile Song, Whale Music in a Sea of Sound  •  David Rothenberg   • MUSIC  •  David Rothenberg and friends jam with cetaceans (Audio CD included) in this inventive, exuberant chronicle of the rich underwater universe of whale sound, skipping across the oceans to explore the music and lives of orca, humpback, beluga, minke and sperm whales from the Caribbean to the Arctic. (NAT144, $27.50)
	Blood River, Retracing Stanley's Journey to Africa's Broken Heart  •  Tim Butcher   • TRAVEL NARRATIVE  •  Correspondent for the Telegraph, Butcher retraces Stanley's 3,000-mile journey down the Congo in this harrowing, utterly absorbing and compassionate tale of hard travel through "the most daunting, backward country on earth." (AFR228, $25.00)
	China's First Emperor and His Terracotta Warriors  •  Frances Wood   • BIOGRAPHY/MEMOIR  •  Wood's astute biography -- enlivened with woodcuts, engravings, poetry and recipes from the period -- is a rich introduction Emperor Qin Shihuangdi (258-210 BC) and his times. (CHN492, $24.95)
	State by State  •  Matt Weiland  •  Sean Wilsey   • TRAVEL NARRATIVE  •  Modeled after the WPA-era American Guides, this delightful road trip pairs writerd with each of these 50 states. Includes essays by Rick Moody (Connecticut), Jhumpa Lahiri (Rhode Island) and Jonathan Franzen (New York). (USA325, $29.95)
	The Eaves Of Heaven, A Life in Three Wars  •  Andrew X. Pham   • BIOGRAPHY/MEMOIR  •  Pham recounts the story of his father's life during the French occupation, Japanese invasion and the American War, weaving such momentous events with anecdotes from his childhood and details of family, friends, food and daily life. (VNM120, $24.95)
	The Geography of Bliss, One Grump's Search For the Happiest Places in the World  •  Eric Weiner   • TRAVEL NARRATIVE  •  NPR corespondent Weiner's hilarious, well-informed and surprisingly profound tale of a quest in search of what makes us happy. (GEN430, $25.99)
	The Great Wall, The Extraordinary Story of China's Wonder of the World  •  John Man   • TRAVEL NARRATIVE  •  Off he went, across China and Mongolia, in search of the wall of history and legend, not continuous, built over millennia, in many places a faint hill or rammed earth, not necessarily a wall at all. (CHN533, $26.00)
	The Last Days of Old Beijing, Tales from the New City  •  Michael Meyer   • BIOGRAPHY/MEMOIR  •  Meyer's lovely memoir of the hutong (ancient lane), where he taught school, captures the rhythms, traditions and spirit of the alleyways, gardens and courtyard houses of Beijing's traditional neighborhoods south of Tiananmen. (CHN493, $25.99)
	China, A Traveler's Literary Companion  •  Kirk Denton   • ANTHOLOGY  •  An introduction both to China's finest modern writers and its diverse cultures, concerns and landscapes, this collection takes the reader from Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong to the mountains and streams of West Hunan, the silk-worm raising country of Zhejiang and the high plateau of western Sichuan. (CHN520, $14.95)
	How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone  •  Sasa Stanisic   • LITERATURE  •  Stanisic's powerful, vivid novel shows the calamity of war in the Balkans through the eye's of young Bosnian refugee from Visegrad. (BOS32, $24.00)
	People of the Book  •  Geraldine Brooks   • LITERATURE  •  Inspired by the stories she heard in Sarajevo during the war, March turns the tale of a real book, the Sarajevo Haggadah, hidden from the Nazi's and safely ensconced in a bank vault as the national library burned in 1992, into a exhilarating modern novel, with an Australian conservator -- and mystery -- at its center. (EUR284, $25.95)
	The Adventures of Amir Hamza  •  Musharraf Ali Farooqi   • LITERATURE  •  A deft new translation of the rip-roaring tales of the storied life and fabulous exploits of the Prophet Mohammed's uncle Hamza and his heroic encounters with emperors, merchants, viziers, courtesans, warriors and magical beings. (IDA391, $25.00)
	The Reserve  •  Russell Banks   • LITERATURE  •  Bank's absorbing tale of class, politics, family and lunacy set in the Adirondacks in the 1930s. (NYS69, $24.95)
	The Size of the World  •  Joan Silber   • LITERATURE  •  Set in wartime Vietnam, Thailand and Florida in the 1920s, Mexico, WWII Sicily and present-day Indiana, Joan Silber's loosely linked stories illuminate the difficulty of finding one's place in the world in just 300 heartfelt pages. Drawing on her travels in Asia (her characters often circle back to Thailand), Silber brings a depth of experience in the region to her richly imagined tales. (WLD143, $23.95)
	The White Mary  •  Kira Salak   • LITERATURE  •  Set in New Guinea, Salak's first novel -- the tale of a young reporter searching for a colleague -- captures the thrill and uncertainly of adventure. (PNG25, $25.00)
	The White Tiger, A Novel  •  Aravind Adiga   • LITERATURE  •  A terrifying story of the hard-earned success of one of India's downtrodden, toldin his own words beneath the backdrop of an apocalyptic New Delhi. (IDA542, $24.00)
	The Antarctic From the Circle to the Pole  •  Stuart Klipper   • NATURAL HISTORY  •  Make room in your collection for this exceptional book of Antarctic photography by NSF Office of Polar Programs Artists and Writers Program five-time grantee Stuart Klipper. The 110 large color photographs, beautifully bound in sturdy white covers, display Klipper's talent in translating scenery into art. With an introduction by Guy Guthridge, a marvelous essay on the transformation of ice into art by Stephen J. Pyne and a biographical essay on Klipper and his work by William L. Fox. (ANT282, $45.00)
	Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America  •  Roger Tory Peterson   • FIELD GUIDE  •  This revised combo edition of Peterson's classic field guides, published in celebration of the centennial of his birth, includes all new maps and digital enhancements to the master's original paintings. (NAM42, $26.00)

Here are some other groups of books that might interest you. Click to view a listing:

More Books