This isn't a self-help book, but it is a book about how Geoff Dyer could do with a little help. In mordantly funny and thought-provoking prose, the author of "Out of Sheer Rage" describes a life most of us would love to live-and how much that life frustrates and aggravates him.

"... a lovely book, full of smart insights, effortless humor and faith in the redemptive power of being somewhere else, no matter how little you accomplish while you are there."

With an immediacy made possible only after 10 years of reporting, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc immerses the reader in the mind-boggling intricacies of the little-known ghetto world. She charts the tumultuous cycle of the generations, as girls become mothers, mothers become grandmothers, boys become criminals, and hope struggles against deprivation.

"The artistry of this frank, enthralling book lies in the utter simplicity - and careful, subtle selectivity - with which she plainly describes the determining events in what will now be unforgettable lives.... Yet Ms. LeBlanc also detects and illuminates indestructible bonds among her book's subjects. And what might have been a lurid, discouraging story winds up with backbone and hope...."

A dramatic, revisionist panorama of an age whose material triumphs and spiritual crises prefigure our own.

"Incapable of writing a dull sentence, and appearing to have read everything of pertinence to his vast subject, Wilson never shrinks from fully engaging his materials: from the Corn Laws to London's Kensal Green Cemetery, from the Crimean War to the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan."

Nuland's harrowing and empathetic account of his father's life, is equally revealing about the author himself. We see what it cost him to admit the inextricable ties between father and son and to accept the burden of his father's legacy.

"Intensely attuned to small gestures of suffering and consolation, Nuland studies his family's various illnesses and especially his father's gradual diminishment - along with his own hapless participation in that process - with pained, humane attentiveness. This is a supremely gentle book..."

In her fourth memoir, Diana Athill evokes a traditional English childhood unfashionably filled with happiness. Her candid and unsentimental account brings 1920s England vividly to life...

"I read this book when a pre-publication copy arrived a few months ago, and had decided not to review it (how many English writers can we cover?). But I've found myself unable to forget this gracefully written, clear-eyed, and beguiling reminiscence."

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America
by Erik Larson
$25.95

"The Devil in the White City" draws the reader into a time of magic and majesty, made all the more appealing by a supporting cast of real-life characters, including Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and others. In this book the smoke, romance, and mystery of the Gilded Age come alive as never before.

"At times the book reads like a 400-page treatment for the inevitable movie, and it occasionally shoots off on tangents -- like the one about the design of Chicago's Ferris wheel. But the heart of the story is so good, you find yourself asking how you could not know this already."

River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West
by Rebecca Solnit
$25.95

During a period of feverish creativity that commenced in 1872, Eadweard Muybridge succeeded for the first time in capturing and reanimating high-speed motion on film-the crucial breakthrough that made movies possible. He also continued his series of breathtaking photographs of the monumental landscape of the American West, served as official photographer of the grueling war against the Modoc Indians, and, in a blaze of publicity, stood trial for the murder of his wife's lover. In Solnit's taut, compelling narrative, Muybridge's life becomes a lens for a larger story about the transformation of time and space in the 19th century.

"Solnit has captured this freighted moment, with all its unexpected ramifications, in a book whose cantering intelligence keeps it, from first to last, airborne."

What Should I Do With My Life? The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question
by Po Bronson
$24.00

It's a question many of us have pondered with frequency. Author Po Bronson was asking himself that very question when he decided to write this book-an inspiring exploration of how people transform their lives and a template for how we can answer this question for ourselves.

"The tales are marvelous, in all their confusion and raggedness. Bronson has an unerring sense of the story that isn't the cliche.... What makes this book work is Bronson's voice."