The great A&P and the struggle for small business in America

 by Marc Levinson. The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company was a trendsetter and market leader from its founding in 1869. It capitalized on the growing tea trade and innovative marketing approaches to become the first retailer anywhere to sell $1 billion of merchandise in a single year. Levinson shows how, through expanded product lines, trading stamps, branding, and financial control, astute management drove the company's success in reinventing itself in response to changing market conditions. It portrays the colorful personalities of the men who ran A&P in the early days and their effectiveness as leaders. It also cites the missed opportunities, beginning in the 1950s, that resulted in the company's downfall. The A&P story is a fascinating case history within the evolution of the U.S. grocery industry. Levinson makes it read like a novel, full of interesting anecdotes and references to a large bibliography. Anyone interested in the retail industry may find this book a great study of responding to the need to adapt to market and economic pressures to survive. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

City of whispers

 by Marcia Muller.  *Starred Review* Muller's sleuth, Sharon McCone, has a new, intensely personal case. Still feeling some residual effects from being shot in the head (Locked In, 2009), Sharon receives an e-mail from her mentally ill half-brother, Darcy Blackhawk, asking for help. When he fails to reply to her response, she gets worried and looks for him. The message came from a computer at an Internet cafe in San Francisco, a city that Darcy has never visited. As Sharon searches for him, she finds the body of a young woman at the Palace of Fine Arts. A witness says that Darcy was heading there. The search widens, and Sharon finds links to the unsolved murder of a banking heiress. She needs to solve both cases to find her brother and ensure his safety, putting herself and her family in danger. The case makes Sharon appreciate her diverse, sometimes dysfunctional family and reinforces her love for her husband, Hy. As Sharon celebrates another birthday, devoted readers will appreciate all the more both the groundbreaking nature of this series (the first to star a female PI in hard-boiled fiction) and the fact that, throughout her long run, Sharon has aged gracefully and matured as a heroine and a woman. --Booklist (Check catalog)

Don't shoot : one man, a street fellowship, and the end of violence in inner-city America

 by David M. Kennedy. In a matter-of-fact, street-smart style, coming from years of working with police officers, gang members, and community workers in some of America's most dangerous neighborhoods, Kennedy, professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, explains his remarkably effective strategies for combating violent crime. When research showed that only a disproportionately small number of criminals commit most of the most serious crimes, Kennedy had the police identify gang members on parole or probation and urge them to come to a meeting. At the gathering were members of the gangs' families, community service providers, and the police, who explained the legal risks the perpetrators faced (most gang members didn't know)-and demanded that shootings stop. If the killings continued, the perpetrators would not receive another chance; instead, they'd be met with severe punishment, and their entire gang would be targeted. When this program, called Operation Ceasefire, was first tried in Boston in the '90s, violence plummeted by almost two-thirds, and Kennedy chronicles the difficulties in implementing the program to meet the needs of 50 other cities. Warning against the country's "orgy" of incarceration, which disproportionately targets black males in America's most vulnerable neighborhoods, this heartfelt book shows what can happen when police, gangs, and communities come together to address some of America's most intractable social problems. --Publishers Weekly (Check catalog)

The brass verdict : a novel

 by Michael Connelly. *Starred Review* It hasn't gone well for L.A. lawyer Mickey Haller since the events described in The Lincoln Lawyer (2005). The recovery from being shot was slow, and the addiction to prescription drugs was worse than the recovery. But Haller has kicked the pills and is ready to practice law again when his friend and fellow attorney Jerry Vincent is murdered, and Mickey inherits all Vincent's cases, including a career-maker: the trial of a studio executive accused of killing his wife and her lover. Quickly, Mickey realizes he's caught in the middle: defending the mogul requires concealing facts that could help solve the Vincent murder. OK, Mickey's used to playing fast and loose with the cops, but the investigating officer, Harry Bosch, knows when he's being played. Careful Connelly readers will know that there's a connection between the author's two heroes, Bosch and Haller, even though this is the first time the two costarred together (see The Black Light, 1993). Connelly plays the dueling characters off against one another effectively, especially for those familiar with the previous books, but it isn't all about backstory. Like Lincoln Lawyer, this is a fine legal thriller, full of both electric courtroom scenes and fascinating behind-the-scenes stuff about the business of lawyering. Connelly is justly celebrated for his characters and his ability to create mood from the sights and sounds of L.A., but he's also a terrific plotter, and that skill is in high relief here. Essential for fans; a great read for anybody. --Booklist (Check catalog)

Five chiefs : a Supreme Court memoir

 by John Stevens. Stevens' law professor, Nathaniel Nathanson, who served as law clerk to Justice Louis Brandeis, whose seat Stevens later inherited, instilled in him a curiosity about the mystery of the law, the unresolved issues constantly coming before the U.S. Supreme Court. In fond memory of the professor, Stevens aims to convey the kinds of insights routine in Nathanson's class. He succeeds without the ponderousness of legal studies. Stevens briefly reviews the first 12 chief justices and the pressing judicial and political issues of their times before focusing on the 5 with whom he had personal contact, Fred Vinson (as his clerk), Earl Warren (as a practicing lawyer), Warren Burger (as a junior justice), William Rehnquist (as a colleague), and John Roberts (as the senior associate justice). Stevens' personal contact with those 5 adds texture and insights to the biographical sketches through anecdotes and fascinating behind-the-scenes details. He ends with his own perspective as the third-longest-serving justice in U.S. history and the senior associate justice. second among equals on the high-court bench. Photographs enhance this engaging look at the Supreme Court. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: When he resigned last June, Justice John Paul Stevens was the third longest-serving justice in American history; this behind-the-scenes look at the Court is sure to get plenty of media attention. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Feast day of fools : a novel

 by James Lee Burke. *Starred Review* Bad guys in James Lee Burke's fiction tend to be very bad, human incarnations of evil, manifestations of something deep in our lizard brain, something that will not be civilized, that craves only chaos. In this latest Hackberry Holland title, starring the seventysomething reformed drunk and whoremonger, now sheriff in a small southwest Texas border town, the bad guys are still very bad, but they have become more multidimensional, human impulses at war with the lizard core. Chief among the antagonists this time is Preacher Jack Collins, Holland's nemesis, presumed dead at the end of Rain Gods (2009) but now risen from the desert, still toting the Thompson machine gun with which he attempts to exorcise a lifetime of demons. But this is anything but a mano-a-mano conflict. Holland and his chief deputy, Pam Tibbs, are tracking a disaffected Homeland Security scientist in possession of secrets that a wealth of bad guys Mexican drug dealers, Russian mobsters would happily peddle to al-Qaeda. At the center of it all is a mysterious Chinese woman, Anton Ling, who operates a kind of underground railroad for illegals but who is an object of fascination for all the principals, from Holland to Preacher Jack to a Mexican gang leader obsessed with finding a way to bless his dead children. As Burke steers the elaborately structured narrative toward its violent conclusion, we are afforded looks inside the tortured psyches of his various combatants, finding there the most unlikely of connections between the players. This is one of Burke's biggest novels, in terms of narrative design, thematic richness, and character interplay, and he rises to the occasion superbly, a stand-up guy at the keyboard, as always. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Who's afraid of post-blackness? : what it means to be Black now

 by Touré Toure, journalist and commentator and a member of the post-civil rights era generation, addresses the complexities of the contemporary meaning of black identity. The term postblack is often but not intended to be confused with postracial, meaning beyond race or racism. But postblack asserts the continuation of black identity in a broader, more inclusive format. Toure interviewed more than 100 successful blacks in arts, politics, business, and other arenas to gain a broader perspective on racial identity. Among his subjects: Reverend Jesse Jackson, Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, Kara Walker, Melissa Harris-Perry, Harold Ford Jr., Questlove, and Chuck D. The result is a cross section of perspectives, interweaving Toure's own perception that the narrow expectations of blackness and black identity from whites, as well as blacks, is no longer appropriate. Toure examines how blacks, in their aspirational quest, use black identity as a filter, not as a definition. For example, being identifiably black affects a person's experience or perspective on life but does not dictate his or her opinion or position. A compelling book in the age of Obama and struggles with the notion of a postracial society. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Changó's beads and two-tone shoes

 by William Kennedy. *Starred Review* Kennedy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning bard of Albany, is  back with a jazzy, seductive, historically anchored novel of politics and romance, race and revolution. Young Daniel Quinn awakens one night in 1936 to watch his amiable father, George, preside over a jam session involving Jimmy, a prominent black club owner; Cody, an exceptional black piano player; the future mayor of Albany; and Bing Crosby. Turn the page, and it's 1957. Quinn, now an impulsive and romantic newspaperman, is in Havana, drinking with Hemingway and falling hard for Renata, a rich and daring gunrunner of hyperventilating beauty and perpetual intensity and mystical need. The reporter and the femme-fatale revolutionary meet Castro and marry in a Santeria ceremony invoking Chango, the god of thunder. When next we see them, it's 1968 and racial tension in profoundly corrupt Albany is on the boil. Quinn and Renata tend to personal crises as Jimmy and Cody's civil-rights-activist sons and a rebel priest get caught up in the violence, and George, now senile but still charming, becomes the waltzing ghost of Albany past, positively Shakespearean in his munificent delusions. Music, rapid-fire dialogue, lyrical outrage, epic malfeasance, trampled idealism, and a bit of autobiography drive Kennedy's incandescent and enrapturing tale of the heroic and bloody quest for justice and equality and the gamble of love.. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: This gripping addition to Kennedy's celebrated Albany Cycle, which includes Ironweed (1983) and Roscoe (2002), is literary news of the highest order. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

The better angels of our nature : why violence has declined

 by Steven Pinker. Readers will understandably question psychology professo. Pinker's basic premises that violence has declined significantly and that we are living in the most peaceable era of human existence. But he makes the case with data and trend lines indicating that despite the horrors of our modern age terrorism, genocide, everyday mayhem we are actually killing and maiming less frequently than in earlier history. Pinker takes a very long view, drawing on history and psychology to examine a very hopeful trend. He begins by looking at six historical trends that have led to advancements from hunting to agriculture to commerce and governance, resulting in greater prosperity and ease. In the arena of psychology, he explores five inner demons and how they have been fueled and calmed by historical factors. Finally, he examines fou. better angel. forces, including empathy, self-control, morality, and reason, that have historically kept us from eliminating our species. This long, well-researched, comprehensive tour-de-force provides a helpful look at the human condition. --Booklist (Check Catalog)