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And Bear In Mind


Published: May 30, 2004

(Editors' choices of other recent books of particular interest)

BIRTH OF THE CHESS QUEEN: A History, by Marilyn Yalom. (HarperCollins, $24.95.) A wide-ranging exploration of the origins of chess and of its most powerful piece, the queen. Chess was once queenless, and Yalom attributes the queen's arrival and empowerment to the rising status in medieval Europe of women like Toda of Navarre, Blanche of Castile and Eleanor of Aquitaine.

THE FAILURES OF INTEGRATION: How Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream, by Sheryll Cashin. (PublicAffairs, $26.) Though she is an ''ambivalent integrationist'' suffering ''integration exhaustion,'' Cashin, a law professor at Georgetown, still sees merit in some existing public schools, and denounces the damage done to education by opponents of ''acting white.''

SIR JOHN GIELGUD: A Life in Letters. Edited by Richard Mangan. (Arcade, $30.) What could they be but delightful, these 900-odd letters, dated 1912 to 1999, by an actor celebrated for his candor who took his art seriously indeed without letting it inhibit observation, gossip, generosity, snobbery and affection.

TRANSMISSION, by Hari Kunzru. (Dutton, $24.95.) A fast-paced up-to-date British novel whose protagonist, a shy young computer programmer in India, moves to America, where he finds the demand for his services far less than he had supposed; thwarted at work (and in love also), he launches a killer computer virus in the hope of becoming a hero by ultimately stopping it. Rotten idea.

PULL ME UP: A Memoir, by Dan Barry. (Norton, $24.95.) Barry, who writes the About New York column for The Times, presents himself as an ordinary guy who just does prose. That's true in a way -- he grew up in ordinary Long Island in the 60's, with lots of Irish and 60's inhibitions, and it took him a long time to get a decent job -- but his voice is so natural its honesty seems beyond question.

TRUE NORTH, by Jim Harrison. (Grove, $24.) David Burkett -- scion of a wealthy logging dynasty, narrator of this novel and son of a crooked, nympholeptic father -- inhabits a morass of guilt and self-loathing, all wrapped up in a grim comic struggle between his better self and an Oedipal fancy of killing his father.

ON PARADISE DRIVE: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense, by David Brooks. (Simon & Schuster, $25.) Brooks, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, examines and classifies the American population with the tools of social anthropology, instant dichotomy and heroic generalization, using techniques he perfected in his previous book, ''Bobos in Paradise.''

YOU HAVE TO BE CAREFUL IN THE LAND OF THE FREE, by James Kelman. (Harcourt, $25.) Jeremiah Brown, Kelman's hero in this novel, is a down-and-outer, authority hater and epic drinkist. Brought up Glaswegian, he has lived in the United States for 12 years and acquired the analytical powers that make this paranoid performance, set mainly in bars, a brilliant gloss on the political and social reverberations of 9/11 in this country.

Photos (Photographs by Reid Yalom; James Hamilton
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