Book Blurbs

Ever wonder what books to buy for your kids or grandkids, nephews or nieces--and how to encourage them to read? Duncan has the answers in this overview of the best in kid lit from picture books to teen fiction. An award-winning children's author (and the wife of Stanford Alumni Association President Bill Stone), Duncan says she became hooked on kids' books when she began the nightly ritual of reading Goodnight Moon to her first child, then just weeks old. In Joy of Reading, she discusses or mentions more than 600 titles and offers chapters on summer reading, library excursions, poetry and, yes, "Books Even Boys Like" (she's the mother of three girls). Duncan ends with "101 Favorite Books," a list she compiled with help from her daughters. The message throughout: Read aloud to your kids--from the time they're born until they're teens.

On April 1, 1945, four months before the end of war with Japan, the USS Queenfish sank the Japanese merchant ship Awa maru off the coast of China. It was an incident Dingman describes as "the greatest submarine error of World War II." A dense fog, limiting visibility to less than 200 yards, had forced the Queenfish to depend on its radar. The crew was, therefore, unable to visually identify the Awa, which had been given a guarantee of safe passage by the United States to deliver Red Cross supplies to Allied prisoners held by the Japanese. Of the 2,000 Japanese civilians on board, only one survived. Dingman, who teaches history at USC, reconstructs the tragic incident in detail and examines its repercussions on the U.S. crew and on Japanese-American relations.

The book's slender dimensions, its subtitle and the gilded flourishes on the dust jacket suggest a light romance. But this first novel tackles
a weighty topic. Dolores Meredith and Austin Barclay are fortyish professionals whose lives have reached a turning point when they meet in a small town in Northern California. Barclay has retreated from a Manhattan law firm to teach and indulge his passion for mountaineering. Meredith, who long ago gave up her literary aspirations to become a successful realtor, is ending a seven-year affair with a married man and starting a poetry workshop for underprivileged children. Just as a happy ending seems assured, an HIV-positive blood test changes everything. Villegas uses Emily Dickinson's poetry to set the tone of each chapter, and the two main characters take turns as narrator.

Women receive about half of undergrad math degrees, but they go on to earn only a quarter of PhDs and account for just 5 percent of full-time university math faculty. Those were the numbers that intrigued Henrion as she finished her math PhD in 1985. She set out to write a book that would shatter some of the myths about women in her field. Through essays and profiles of 11 women, she probes the culture of the math world, where top thinkers are supposed to be intellectual cowboys and women are often considered "too normal" to fit in. Henrion chose profile subjects who represent a range of specialties, ages, and racial and ethnic backgrounds. "This book," she writes, "is simply one step toward addressing women's invisibility so that there can be no doubt that women can, and do, do mathematics."