Word: knopf
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...sold. Numerous competing volumes have crowded into this commercial niche. Now the birding world is aflutter over the near simultaneous arrival of two more, highly publicized guides: Kenn Kaufman's Birds of North America (Houghton Mifflin; 384 pages; $20) and David Allen Sibley's The Sibley Guide to Birds (Knopf; 544 pages...
...clan in question is particularly influential or glamorous--the Kennedys, Rothschilds, folks of that ilk--or when a family chronicler comes along who can tell tales so irresistibly engaging that the boundary between personal lore and public interest dissolves. That is what Nomi Eve accomplishes in The Family Orchard (Knopf; 316 pages; $25), a first novel in the form of an extended genealogy of the author's forebears, covering some 160 years...
...Kazuo Ishiguro has already done so brilliantly in the figure of Stevens, the self-deluding butler-protagonist of The Remains of the Day (1989). And it seems at first as if the author is up to the same sort of trick in his new novel, When We Were Orphans (Knopf; 336 pages; $25). Christopher Banks, who has become a prominent London detective during the 1930s, displays all of Stevens' careful, fussy punctiliousness in recounting the events of his life thus far: his childhood in Shanghai, where his father worked for a British trading firm; the mysterious disappearance of both...
...novel that begins with a man on the brink of being eaten by a crocodile stands a good chance of engaging a reader's attention. Moses Isegawa's Abyssinian Chronicles (Knopf; 462 pages; $26) not only opens with such a bang, or crunch, but also manages to sustain the narrative fireworks over a long, complex haul...
...turn to Stefan Kanfer's Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx (Knopf; 465 pages; $30) if you're looking for laughs. Kanfer, a former TIME critic, deserves no censure for failing to amuse with his large, serious and occasionally logy biography. For one thing, no writer could possibly explain what made Groucho Marx so funny. The printed page cannot show what he could do with a quick leap of his eyebrows, much less with his preposterous body, its upper half canted illogically forward from those scurrying legs. His voice? Let's not even...