Elsewhere In The Land of Parrots
(Hartcourt, Inc.)
When reclusive San Francisco poet David Huntington receives a wild parrot- an unwanted gift from his father –his carefully sheltered life comes undone. The destructive behavior of the parrot drives away the first woman he met in months, because of that he throws the bird out the window and follows it into the world. His guilty search takes him to Telegraph Hill, where a chance encounter with a familiar screech leads him to the flock that makes its home there. Inexorably, David is drawn even farther, lured to South America by rumors of ancient flock in the wild mangrove swamps. There he meets the lovely and levelheaded Fern, and American scientist who has her own reasons for searching for these same birds. Created by Jim Paul, this story tells a tender, eccentric romance, told with wit and subtlety, about having the courage to heed the messages that the world sends you and to welcome unexpected love (Xavier Sibaja)


Coiled In The Heart
(G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
Seven years old Tobias Caldwell, the last in the line of proud, if declining, southern aristocrats, finds a cotton-mouth in a creek on the family’s shrinking estate. Soon afterwards he meets Ben Wilson, a boy his age who has moved into one of the first houses going up in a subdivision on what used to be Caldwell land. Imagining he is defending himself and his creek against a bully and an intruder, Tobias leads Ben into an encounter with the snake and later discovers, with Ben’s twin sister Merrit, the boy’s lifeless body face down in the creek. Years later Tobias reencounters Merritt, and the bond between them, forged in their first immediate experience of death, is electric. As he falls in love with her, Tobias must come to terms with the guilty secret of his childhood. Smart, sophisticated, and luminous, this book wrestles with the integration of the old and the new while exploring the force of love, the power of guilt, the eccentricities of family and the cumbersome burden of the past (Ana Lilia Cortes)


21 Days To Baghdad
(Time Books)
In this hardcover compilation, photographers and correspondents from Time magazine provide exclusive eyewitness accounts of Operation Iraqi Freedom. It was a historical campaign; in just three weeks, U.S. and British forces made a 350-mile run, from the Kuwaiti border to downtown Baghdad. Time’s journalists were there reporting the action as Third Infantry Division soldiers fended off suicidal attackers in Najaf, rode in the lead humvee when Marines took the city of Kut, transversed mountains with Special Forces units as they hunted down Iraqi fighters. The images in this book also chronicles the lives of regular Iraqi citizens as well, when the photographers cover the urban battlefield of Baghdad, Basra, and Kirkuk, bearing witness to the impact of war into ordinary people’s lives. All told, “21 Days to Baghdad” is a gripping testimony on a new kind of war, from some of the best photojournalists and reporters in the world. The book is historic in and of itself, preserving the enduring images of the most controversial war of the new century, or so we hope against hope that it remains so for a very long while. (Martin Lazzarini)


The Third Life of Grange Copeland
(Harcourt)
Alice Walker’s first novel marked the auspicious debut of a new voice in American contemporary literature. Here, in a story full of compassion and grace, a black tenant farmer in Georgia follows a harrowing destiny. Despondent over futility of life the South, the same place where the stories of William Faulkner and Carson McCullers take place, Grange Copeland leaves his wife and son in Georgia to head North. After meeting an equally humiliating existence there, he returns to Georgia years later to find his son Brownfield imprisoned for the murder of his wife. As the guardian of the couple’s youngest daughter, Grange Copeland faces a third and final chance to free himself from spiritual and social enslavement. About this splendid work the San Francisco Chronicle went so far as to affirm that “Alice is a marvelous writer because she shrinks from no moral or emotional complexity.” We cannot but concur.
(Sheherezade Aleman)