Twilight garden : a guide to enjoying your garden in the evening hours

  by Lia Leendertz. To show how easily we can have inviting nighttime gardens, Leendertz (gardening columnist, Guardian, UK; Family Garden) highlights night-flowering plants, foliage that sparkles in soft lighting, and exotic scents and sounds that lure mysterious creatures. She explains the heightened importance of creating coziness and using intriguing silhouettes, whether in a front garden or a more private, contemplative one. Several party ideas are included, some with kid-friendly themes. The majority of the book is a plant directory, including color photos and USDA zone information for over 60 plants. As with other books originally published in Britain, U.S. gardeners should be careful here because, for example, building pergolas often requires permission and winter may not be your optimal planting time in northern states. Leendertz addresses things like moths, fireflies, and bats, but Peter Loewer (The Evening Garden) discusses attracting nocturnal wildlife and highlighting the night sky in greater detail. VERDICT Few books devoted to night gardening exist. This one is beautifully designed right down to the endpapers. Highly recommended to gardeners with any size garden. --Library journal (Check Catalog)

West of here : a novel

 by Jonathan Evison. Evison, author of this audacious historical novel, manages a near-impossible feat: first, he creates an almost absurdly complex narrative structure, bridging more than 100 years of life in Washington State and encompassing multiple points of view, and then he grounds the sublime architechtonic whole in the vividly realized daily lives of characters who exist completely in their individual moments but whose actions reverberate back and forth across time. The action swirls around the fictional town of Port Bonita, on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, and jumps between the 1890s, when various explorers and entrepreneurs were attempting to roll up their sleeves and put this place on the map, and 2006, when the descendants of those rugged individualists are in the process of dismantling the dam that their ancestors built. Yes, the tension between taming nature and restoring it drives the narrative, but it never pigeonholes it; rather, the interconnectedness of the structure expands to encompass the lives of the entrepreneur who built the dam and his ancestor who finds that failure tastes like gunmetal on his tongue; the explorer who prays for a life beyond fear, a life that got bigger, really got bigger, as it recedes ; and the factory foreman who is alternately obsessed with tracking Bigfoot and despondent over his inability to get a girl ( No woman in the history of the world had ever looked into a guy's eyes and said, You had me at Bigfoot' ). And countless others, who both support the parallels between eras and exist robustly in their own fully formed selves. Any one of Evison's numerous major characters could have owned his or her own novel; that they coexist perfectly in this one, undiminished but without overwhelming one another, is testament to the book's greatness. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Battle hymn of the tiger mother

 by Amy Chua. Chua (Day of Empire) imparts the secret behind the stereotypical Asian child's phenomenal success: the Chinese mother. Chua promotes what has traditionally worked very well in raising children: strict, Old World, uncompromising values-and the parents don't have to be Chinese. What they are, however, are different from what she sees as indulgent and permissive Western parents: stressing academic performance above all, never accepting a mediocre grade, insisting on drilling and practice, and instilling respect for authority. Chua and her Jewish husband (both are professors at Yale Law) raised two girls, and her account of their formative years achieving amazing success in school and music performance proves both a model and a cautionary tale. Sophia, the eldest, was dutiful and diligent, leapfrogging over her peers in academics and as a Suzuki piano student; Lulu was also gifted, but defiant, who excelled at the violin but eventually balked at her mother's pushing. Chua's efforts "not to raise a soft, entitled child" will strike American readers as a little scary-removing her children from school for extra practice, public shaming and insults, equating Western parenting with failure-but the results, she claims somewhat glibly in this frank, unapologetic report card, "were hard to quarrel with. --Publishers Weekly (Check Catalog)

The search : a novel

 by Suzanne Woods Fisher.  Lainey O'Toole is harboring secrets that could tear Bertha Riehl's family apart, but she's inescapably drawn into their circle when young Bess Riehl arrives in Stony Ridge, Pennsylvania, to spend the summer with her grandmother. Raised in Berlin, Ohio, by her widowed carpenter father, 14-year-old Bess finds much to interest her at Rose Hill Farm, especially handsome Billy Lapp, the farmhand. And when Bertha gets herself and Bess arrested to convince her son to return home, Jonah and Lainey find themselves keeping company more and more often, although she's necessarily cautious about sharing her thoughts with the one man she could hurt. Fisher's newest Amish romance is set in 1972, which makes the casual treatment of her bone-marrow-transplant subplot somewhat problematic, but overall this is a thought-provoking contribution to the genre, especially as it taps into recurrent themes of modern American women converting to Anabaptist ways, and into questions of genetics and nature versus nurture. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

The information : a history, a theory, a flood

 by James Gleich. Acutely sensitive to the human drama involved in pioneering thought and discovery, best-selling science and technology writer Gleick has developed an epic sense of humankind's quest for mastery of information, the vital principle. In this tour de force, the first book to fully chronicle the story of information and how it has transformed human thought and life, Gleick follows the path from the ingenious codes used by African drummers to the invention of the alphabet and writing, which made possible deep analysis and logic, the bedrock for information theory. As Gleick elucidates the roles cryptography, libraries, quantum physics, and molecular biology play in information science and tracks the cresting waves that rapidly delivered the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, computer, and Internet, he vividly profiles a compelling cast of geniuses. There's prescient Charles Babbage and witty, surpassingly gifted Ada Byron King, logic master George Boole, and the too-little-known Claude Shannon, whose elegant solutions include designating the bit as the smallest possibly quantity of information. Gleick is equally illuminating in his explications of such forces key to information as uncertainty, entropy, memes, and randomness. This is intellectual history of tremendous verve, insight, and significance. Unfailingly spirited, often poetic, Gleick recharges our astonishment over the complexity and resonance of the digital sphere and ponders our hunger for connectedness. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Destined to be a science classic, best-seller Gleick's dynamic history of information will be one of the biggest nonfiction books of the year. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Emily, alone : a novel

 by Stewart O'Nan. Upon completion of his psychologically rigorous, emotionally raw, yet deceptively buoyant giant of a domestic drama, Wish You Were Here (2002), O'Nan obviously had sufficient material and heart left over to once again visit the Maxwell family of Pittsburgh a few years on in time. In the previous novel, the matriarch, Emily, has just lost her husband, and she, her sister-in-law, her two grown children, and their children gather for the last time at the family summer home in Chautauqua, New York. Now, in this sequel, we follow Emily through her domestic pleasures, concerns, and crises as the calendar year moves from holiday to holiday, with Emily experiencing increased infirmity while also seeing the physical decline of her sister-in-law and even her beloved spaniel. Connection to her children remains tricky as they approach middle age, and establishing communication with her grandchildren seems beyond her ability, for they live in a young society whose tenets are unfamiliar to her. Emily's parental disappointment arises from her abiding sentiment that what one does for one's children is endless and thankless. O'Nan again proves himself to be the king of detail. What people eat, how they eat it, what they think and say in the midst of eating it this novel represents the almost minute mapping of the lay of the domestic land as O'Nan the sociological cartographer views it. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: An author tour and radio-publicity campaign will follow O'Nan's recent appearance as a panelist at the ALA/ERT Booklist Author Forum at ALA's Midwinter Meeting. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Bringing Adam home : the abduction that changed America

 by Les Standiford. This is the ultimate cold case tragic, high-profile, and, finally, successfully solved. Six-year-old Adam Walsh was abducted from a crowded Sears store in Hollywood, Florida, in 1981. Later, he was murdered and decapitated. Identifying Adam's killer took 25 years. His parents turned into tireless advocates for missing and abused children; Adam's father, John Walsh, moved from a sales job to being the executive producer and host of America's Most Wanted. This forceful account, written with Matthews, former sergeant with the Miami Beach Police Department, who worked the case for years, gives readers the ultimate insider's account of the grueling search for Adam's killer and for the evidence to convict him. While many true-crime books claim to shine a light on society by examining one particular case, this account actually does. No reader can come away from this without appreciating what it takes to keep pursuing an investigation, against the obstacles of police politics and bureaucracy. Wrenching and riveting. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Sing you home : a novel

 by Jodi Picoult. Popular author Picoult tackles the controversial topic of gay rights in her latest powerful tale. When music therapist Zoe Baxter's latest pregnancy ends in a stillbirth, her husband Max decides he can't handle any more heartbreak and leaves her. As she picks up the pieces of her life, Zoe is surprised to find herself falling for a school counselor who happens to be a woman. While Zoe is finding happiness with Vanessa, Max falls off the wagon and is helped by a pastor from his brother's evangelical church. Vanessa and Zoe wed in Massachusetts, and Vanessa offers to carry one of the fertilized embryos Zoe and Max stored. Excited by the prospect of being a mother, Zoe goes to Max to get him to release the embryos to her and is shocked when he instead sues her for custody of them, backed by his church. Told from the perspectives of all three major characters, Picoult's gripping novel explores all sides of the hot-button issue and offers a CD of folk songs that reflect Zoe's feelings throughout the novel. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The always topical Picoult plans a multimedia tour to more than two dozen cities with Ellen Wilber, who will perform the songs she and Picoult wrote together. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

The company we keep : a husband-and-wife true-life spy story

 by Robert Baer. When they met in Croatia in the early 1990s, he didn't know her real name. His alias was Howard, but he introduced himself as Bob. By that time, he was a seasoned CIA spook, with 15 years of international intrigue under his belt. Dayna, a relatively new field agent, was expecting that her new friend's veteran's counsel would increase her quickly growing knowledge of the spy game; she wasn't expecting to fall in love. This fascinating memoir, written by Bob and Dayna in alternating chapters, traces their lives from before they met she was carrying out security checks in L.A.; he was in Tajikistan, scoping out the former Soviet republic and follows them as they fell in love and began to build a life together. The book is full of insight into the world of international intelligence-gathering, and it contains some interesting surprises, too (at one point, after he resigned from the CIA, Bob came awfully close to taking a job in Kabul, working with the Taliban). An engaging narrative that should appeal to readers of spy-themed literature, factual or fictional. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Expect the publisher of this real-life spy and love story to take full advantage of the off-the-book-page human-interest angle. Comparisons to Mr. and Mrs. Smith and to Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson (and the recent biopic starring Sean Pean and Naomi Watts) won't hurt a bit. --Booklist (Check catalog)

Rodin's debutante

 by Ward S. Just.  Just extends his grand inquiry into family, honor, and injustice in his beguiling and unnerving seventeenth novel. Like An Unfinished Season (2004), this bildungsroman is set on Just's home ground, northern Illinois, where Tommy Ogden, a man of enormous inherited wealth, flagrant taciturnity, and an excessive avidity for shooting animals, turns his massive prairie mansion into an ill-conceived boys'school at the onset of WWI. Lee Goodell, the son of a judge, grows up in a nearby small town, a bucolic place until the Great Depression delivers tramps and a horrific sex crime. Lee, dreamy, kind, and willful, attends Ogden's school, then headed by a Melville fanatic, where he plays football and swoons over a sculpted bust by Rodin. Determined to become a sculptor, Lee rents a basement studio on Chicago's South Side, where a knife attack jeopardizes his artistic vocation and involves him in the lives of his poor, struggling neighbors and the mission of a compassionate African American doctor. Stealthily meshing the gothic with the modern, the feral with the civilized, in this mordantly funny yet profoundly mysterious novel, Just asks what divides and what unites us. What should be kept secret? Which teaches us more, failure or success? And of what value is beauty? HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Award-winning Just attracts more readers with each uniquely compelling novel. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Moonwalking with Einstein : the art and science of remembering everything

 by Joshua Foer. If you sometimes can't remember where you put your car keys or, like Foer, the car itself, don't panic. You're not alone, and you can do something about it. In this intriguing look at the nature of memory, Foer reassures us that we don't need to acquire a better memory; we just need to use the one we have more effectively. Foer introduces us to people whose memories are both astonishing, like the man who could memorize 1,528 random digits in order, and frightening, such as a man with such an extreme case of amnesia that he doesn't know his own age and can't remember that he has a memory problem. He explores various ways in which we test our memories, such as the extensive training British cabbies must undergo. He also discusses ways we can train ourselves to have better memories, like the PAO system, in which, for example, every card in a deck is associated with an image of a specific person, action, or object. An engaging, informative, and for the forgetful, encouraging book. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

The Madonnas of Echo Park

 by Brando Skyhorse. Echo Park, the Los Angeles neighborhood down the hill from Chavez Ravine, is the setting for this novel-in-stories a vivid portrayal of the lives of Mexican Americans who live and work there. Skyhorse (Mexican himself, but given his stepfather's last name) weaves his characters migrant farm workers, gardeners, dishwashers, bus drivers, house cleaners, gang members in and out of his stories in various time frames. These are the people we pass every day and never give much thought. Now Skyhorse demands our attention as he deftly humanizes their stories. We meet Felicia, the cleaning woman for a wealthy couple who becomes the wife's only real friend, and Felicia's mother, who sent Felicia away when she was four. And Efren, a bus driver whose strict adherence to the rules of the Los Angeles MTA insulates him from feeling remorse over a preventable tragedy, and his brother Juan, a gang member who escapes by joining the army. Each is trying to make a life where everything is paid for in cash and sweat. Eye-opening and haunting, Skyhorse's novel will jolt readers out of their complacence. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Wild Bill Donovan : the spymaster who created the OSS and modern American espionage

 by Douglas C. Waller. Waller brings to his latest biography the high skills as a biographer that he brought to A Question of Loyalty: Gen. Billy Mitchell and the Court-Martial That Gripped the Nation (2004). Donovan, the head of WWII's Office of Strategic Services, was a New York Irishman who won the Medal of Honor in WWI. Between the wars, he became successful on Wall Street and a personal friend of FDR. When President Roosevelt was looking for someone to head an intelligence agency not controlled by either the armed forces or the FBI, he called on Donovan. Donovan was at daggers drawn with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and the service intelligence branches, and also recruited too many Ivy Leaguers, but the OSS did pull its weight in wartime intelligence. Donovan also drank too much, chased too many women, lost too many relatives at early ages, and generally did not fit into the postwar world, where the CIA replaced his OSS. Exhaustively researched but not exhaustingly written, this will probably stand as the definitive biography of a seminal figure in the history of American intelligence. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Pale demon

 by Kim Harrison. *Starred Review* The ninth Rachel Morgan novel finds our tough and feisty witch on a mission to get her shunning rescinded, which requires traveling to the annual witch convention in San Francisco. But the coven doesn't want her to make her appointment, so they've put her on the no fly list, which is why she has to accept Trent's offer of a cross-country car trip. The rich elf has his own reasons for traveling cross-country, telling Rachel and Ivy that he is on a traditional elf quest. Fans of the series will recognize that simply having Trent, Jenks, Ivy, and Rachel on a road trip is enough to make for a good story, but that is merely the beginning of an action-packed tale that finds Rachel coming fully into her demon magic powers and reevaluating her long-held impressions of Trent. Ending with hints of some major character developments and changes in Rachel's life, this is an excellent entry that is guaranteed to satisfy Harrison's legion of followers. (Should there be any overlap between Clint Eastwood and Kim Harrison fan clubs, that subset will certainly enjoy Harrison's allusions here to Eastwood's Pale Rider.) The Rachel Morgan series is fast becoming one of the hottest tickets in the urban-fantasy subgenre. --Booklist (Check catalog)

The sound of a wild snail eating

 by Elizabeth Tova Bailey. *Starred Review* At age 34, Bailey was stricken with a mysterious virus while on a trip to Europe. Her healthy life had been full of activity, and now just the thought of getting up to get something was exhaustive. When a friend found some violets and brought her one in a pot, she also added a live snail below the violet's leaves. Bailey wondered why she needed a snail, but after square holes began to appear in a letter propped on the violet's pot, it occurred to Bailey that the snail needed food. She put a withered flower in the saucer below, and when the snail began to eat, Bailey realized that she could hear it eating it was the sound of someone very small munching on celery. Soon the author realized she was attached, the snail providing an oasis of calm for her frantic and frustrated thoughts. She worried that the snail's world was too artificial, so her caregiver created a woodland terrarium. Not only did the snail have a new home but Bailey had a new game: hide-and-seek with a snail. She began to read about snails, learning from scientists, early naturalists, poets, and writers, and found herself beginning to understand a snail's world. And when her snail began to lay eggs, Bailey discovered that she might be the first person to record observations of a snail tending its eggs. This beautiful little book will not only make snail lovers of its readers, it will make them appreciate the small things in life. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

A discovery of witches

 by Deborah E. Harkness. *Starred Review* Diana Bishop is the last of the Bishops, a powerful family of witches, but she has refused her magic ever since her parents died and, instead, has turned to academia. When a new project takes her to Oxford, she is looking forward to several months in the Bodleian, investigating alchemical manuscripts. Her peace is soon interrupted when one of the books she finds in the library turns out to have been lost for 150 years and is wanted desperately by the witch, daemon, and vampire communities so desperately that many are willing to kill for it. But the very first creature to approach her after her discovery is Matthew, a very old vampire and fellow scholar, who seems only to want to protect her. Harkness creates a compelling and sweeping tale that moves from Oxford to Paris to upstate New York and into both Diana's and Matthew's complex families and histories. All her characters are fully fleshed and unique, which, when combined with the complex and engaging plot, results in one of the better fantasy debuts in recent months. The contemporary setting should help draw a large crossover audience. Try suggesting the novel to readers of literary mysteries like Lauren Willig's Pink Carnation series, as well as to those who enjoy epic and fantastic romances including Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series and Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel novels. Essential reading across all these genres. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Final Jeopardy : man vs. machine and the quest to know everything

 by Stephen Baker. Forget chess-a television game show is the ultimate test of a thinking machine. Former Business Week technology writer Baker (The Numerati) delivers a sprightly account of IBM's quest to create a computer program, dubbed Watson, that can win at Jeopardy. Baker deftly explores the immense challenge that Jeopardy-style "question answering" poses to a computer, which must comprehend the nuances, obscurities, and puns of natural language and master everything from Sumerian history to Superbowl winners. Watson is both an information-processing juggernaut, searching millions of documents per second, and a child-like naïf with odd speech impediments that thinks the Al in Alcoa stands for Al Capone (one embarrassing gaffe in a practice match prompted programmers to install a profanity filter). Like a cross between Born Yesterday and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Baker's narrative is both charming and terrifying; as Watson's intelligence relentlessly increases, we envision whole job sectors, from call center operators and marketing analysts to, well, quiz-show contestants, vanishing overnight. The result is an entertaining romp through the field of artificial intelligence-and a sobering glimpse of things to come. The book's final chapter, covering the actual games, which will air in mid-February, was not seen by PW. --Publishers Weekly (Check Catalog)

The weird sisters

 by Eleanor Brown. Three sisters, a scholarly father who breaks into iambic pentameter, and an absentminded but loving mother who brought the girls up in rural Ohio may sound like an idyllic family; however, when Rosalind, Bianca, and Cordelia return home ostensibly to help their parents through their mother's cancer treatment readers begin to see a whole different family. A prologue introduces characters and hints of the dramas to come, while the omniscient narrator, seemingly the combined consciousness of the sisters, chronicles in the first-person plural events that occur during the heavy Ohio summer and end in the epilogue, which describes an (overly?) hopeful resolution. Brown writes with authority and affection both for her characters and the family hometown of Barnwell, a place that almost becomes another character in the story. A skillful use of flashback shows the characters developing and evolving as well as establishing the origins of family myth and specific personality traits. There are no false steps in this debut novel: the humor, lyricism, and realism characterizing this lovely book will appeal to fans of good modern fiction as well as stories of family and of the Midwest. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Cinderella ate my daughter : dispatches from the frontlines of the new girlie-girl culture

 by Peggy Orenstein. Orenstein's Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap (1994) was a watershed best-seller, and she has continued to write extensively both in print and online about the hazards of growing up female in contemporary America. Here she explores the increasing pinkification of girls' worlds, from toys to apparel to tween-targeted websites, and she writes not only as a detached, informed journalist but also as a loving, feminist mother, bewildered as her daughter, as if by osmosis, learns the names of every Disney princess, while her classmate, the one with Two Mommies, arrives daily at her Berkeley preschool dressed in a Cinderella gown. With a bridal veil. Orenstein skillfully integrates extensive research that demonstrates the pitfalls of the girlie-girl culture's emphasis on beauty and play-sexiness, which can increase girls' vulnerability to depression, distorted body images and eating disorders, and sexual risks. It's the personal anecdotes, though, which are delivered with wry, self-deprecating, highly quotable humor, that offer the greatest invitation to parents to consider their daughters' worlds and how they can help to shape a healthier, soul-nurturing environment. --Booklist (Check Catalog)