Word: mifflin
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...could call Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake (Houghton Mifflin; 291 pages) a multigenerational saga of the immigrant experience, but that makes it sound like a tedious prime-time mini-series instead of what it is: a delicate, moving first novel. It begins in Cambridge, Mass., with the birth of a son to the Gangulis, an Indian couple who recently arrived in America. New England seems a chilly dreamworld to them compared with their native Calcutta. "Ashoke and Ashima live the lives of the extremely aged," Lahiri writes, "those for whom everyone they once knew and loved is lost, those...
...years there, attending classes, doing 10-mile slogs in the rain and watching the 4,000 or so cadets polish their shoes, get drunk, cry and grow up. When it was over, the cadets were lieutenants in the U.S. Army, and Lipsky was the author of Absolutely American (Houghton Mifflin; 317 pages), which, despite its Army-issue title, is a fascinating, funny and tremendously well written account of life on the Long Gray Line...
Reefer Madness (Houghton Mifflin; 310 pages) is the title of Schlosser's new book, and in it he widens his scope from a single industry to take on the entirety of what he calls America's "underground economy"--that vast, shadowy realm of financial activity that goes unrecorded because it's either illegal or unsavory or both. Like the fast-food business, the underground economy has ballooned over the past 30 years, to about $1 trillion, and Schlosser aims to find out why. He's hunting big conceptual game here, nothing less than America's troubled, hypocritical soul...
...before it was published as a book, biologist Rachel Carson's eloquent, rigorous attack on the overuse of DDT and other pesticides--she called them "elixirs of death"--had already upset the chemical industry. Velsicol, maker of two top bug killers, threatened to sue the book's publisher, Houghton Mifflin, which stood firm but asked a toxicologist to recheck Carson's facts before it shipped Silent Spring to bookstores...
...Kock surprised the psychologist, and she has recorded the complex course of their encounters in A Human Being Died That Night: A South African Story of Forgiveness (Houghton Mifflin; 193 pages). First, De Kock appealed for permission to meet with the widows of several black policemen--men whose executions he had arranged. De Kock wanted to apologize to them privately. One of the women told Gobodo-Madikizela, to the surprise of both, "I was profoundly touched...