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Paperback Picks of the Week
Big Sugar
Alec Wilkinson (Vintage)
This report on the
migrant workers of South Florida's sugarcane fields reveals a system
of exploitation so brutal you have to remind yourself that the events
in Wilkinson's book did not take place in some other era, some
distant country. A
Eden Close
Anita Shreve (Signet)
Twenty years ago, Eden
Close was raped and her father murdered. Now Andrew, her old
neighbor, is back to pick up the pieces. Shreve's gothic love story
is a reliable page-turner, but probably too pallid for Stephen King
fans. B
Russian Blood
Alex Shoumatoff (Vintage)
Here's a Chekhovian gentleness in Shoumatoff's family sketches. Taken
together, they form a remarkable record of the Americanization of his
Russian clan. Like his description of his grandmother's portraits,
Shoumatoff gives his subjects ''a radiance and a graciousness that
they might only have had once a year.'' A+
Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
Allan Gurganus (Ivy Books)
Lucy Marsden, 99, widow of the Civil War's last
surviving soldier, tells two centuries of Southern stories in this
eccentric epic. Gurganus is a master of Southern dialogue, but
readers may be disconcerted by his loquacious belle's digressive
tendencies. A-
Don't Miss
Coyote
Linda Barnes (Delacorte)
Move over, Spenser. Make
permanent room on the streets of Boston for another sleuth: Carlotta
Carlyle, a hard-boiled heroine with a mile-wide sentimental streak. A-
The Greatest-Ever Bank Robbery: The Collapse of the Savings and
Loan Industry
Martin Mayer (Scribner's)
Mayer is the first
chronicler of the S&L crisis to concentrate not on individual cases
but on Washington, D.C., where a combination of naivete, ineptitude,
bad faith, and cravenness made crookedness both likely and
inevitable. A
A Life on the Road
Charles Kuralt (Putnam)
A crisply written, episodic, often funny portrait of a painfully honest and
fundamentally decent man discovering himself as he discovers his
country. B+
The Music of Chance
Paul Auster (Viking)
High-toned and highly serious, Auster also offers all the great guilty pleasures of
popcorn fiction. A
Possession: A Romance
A.S. Byatt (Random House)
A sometimes dazzling, sometimes dutiful, always authentic-looking
collection of imaginary Victorian cultural bric-a-brac-poems,
letters, journals, scandals-around which Byatt weaves a story of
romantic possession. A
The Clip Art Book
Gerard Quinn (Cresent Books)
An enormous assortment of new and old illustrations and designs in the public domain, divided into 16 categories — from architecture to heraldry and armor. B
Susan Costner's Great Sandwiches: Sensational Recipes from Updown, Down Home, and Around the World
Susan Costner (Crown)
Costner, who knows her muffuletta from her poor boys, has raided some of the country's best kitchens for recipes: pork barbecue sandwiches from her Uncle Bill, lobster club sandwiches from New York's Arcadia restaurant, Jody Maroni's Haut Dog sandwich from Jody's Venice, Calif., stand. Great sandwich folklore, too. A
Wish You Were Here: A Tour of America's Great Hotels During the Golden Age of the Picture Post Card
Barry Zaid (Crown)
Highlights from the author's fabulous collection of tinted linen-finish cards from the '30s, '40s, and '50s. A
