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AFRICA Dispatches From a Fragile Continent By Blaine Harden Nonfiction Norton, $22.50
The captain, in crisp white pajamas with baby-blue polka dots, stalked the bridge. As his boat growled down river through a green-black rain forest, he shouted and whistled and pointed to the deck below. There, the beasts that had arrived in the night were being auctioned. Glaring white morning light poured over steaming heaps of mottled fur and squirming legs. It was already hot and the carcasses were ripening. The night's harvest was mostly monkeys, thousands of them, some smoked, some rotting, some freshly trapped and twitching. They came aboard in easy- carrying bundles-long tails lashed together with green vines. There also were antelope, bush buck, a couple of giant forest hogs, and several hundred river cat sh with long antennae-like barbels and puffy Mick Jagger lips. A well-muscled sailor with a sharp knife and blood-stained sneakers was methodically cutting throats. Roosters strutted amid the carnage, pecking at eyeballs and entrails.
TENDER By Mark Childress Fiction Harmony Books, $19,95
The lights go out all at once. Twenty thousand girls leap to their feet, screaming. Leroy stands just out of sight in the darkness, fingering the velvet edge of the curtain. He is lightning, getting ready to strike. He is Leroy Kirby, and all those girls are screaming for him. Three drummers make thunder on their drums. The horn players stand up to blast a fanfare. All the spotlights switch on at the same instant-fifty thousand watts blazing down on the white stage-but still Leroy does not appear. | Make them wait. Make them beg for it. Leroy knows how to do this. He has done it hundreds of times. Get them all hot and bothered. Stretch it out until they cannot stand it another second. Then stretch it some more, and watch their frustration melt into pure desire. He pushes a shock of hair from his eyes, hikes his jewel-studded belt, and trots out into the light.
IN SILENCE Growing Up Hearing in a Deaf World By Ruth Sidranksy Memoir St. Martin's Press, $18.95
If there were a way, if I could, I would write this book in sign language. I cannot. Signs do not transpose to the printed page; they are understood only in the flesh, hand to hand, face to face. And so I write in universal printed English, words to conjure the magic of my first language-words my mother taught me, words my father taught me-words told by the flick of a finger, the sweep of a hand. Sentences, liquid, rising not from the human voice but from the human body. My first memory is the memory of a word signed by my deaf mother. She signed the word baby for me, cradling an imaginary infant in her arms. She crooned the words with her voice, aloud, high-pitched and musical, to me. I was her baby, her firstborn.
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIC The Tangled Web of Dracula From Novel to Stage and Screen By David J. Skal Nonfiction Norton, $39.95
