New & Recommended New & Recommended (November 05, 2003)

This month's picks by Karen Pennington, book buyer at Kepler's, include books on the English imagination and how it has pervaded American consciousness, a book about modern medical plagues and how we are creating them, a book on the history of doubt, a definitive dictionary of music, and more.

"Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination" by Peter Ackroyd and Nan A. Talese examines how that country's unique perspective and imagination developed from diverse sources. Much of that has also been part of our culture, by extension.

"Six Modern Plagues and How We Are Causing Them" by Mark Jerome Walters is a sobering look at six diseases and how they have spread to alarming degrees despite the best efforts to contain them. Those include AIDS and SARS, which jumped from animals to humans and spread through international travel.

"Doubt: A History" by Jennifer Hecht may sound light-hearted or frivolous, but the book celebrates doubt as an engine of creativity. The notables in the book include Socrates, Jesus Christ, Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickenson.

"The New Harvard Dictionary of Music" edited by Don Michael Randel is the third edition of what has become the definitive source of its kind. The new edition, with contributions from 70 scholars, has been expanded to include more recent music.

"The Rise and Fall of the Press Box" by Leonard Koppett was completed just before the author's death earlier this year. Palo Altan Koppett, a former New York Times sportswriter and later editor of the now defunct Peninsula Times Tribune, had long been lauded for his insight into sports.

"The Girl Who Played Go" by Sa Shan is a novel set in 1930s Manchuria about a 16-year-old girl in a small village who was a brilliant player of the Chinese game Go. The story is how she played against a Japanese soldier, who tell their stories in alternating chapters.

"Train" by Peter Dexter is a novel told from the point of a view of a black golf caddy who gets caught up in a murder mystery, set in 1953 Los Angeles.

"The Great Unravelling: Losing Our Way in the New Century" by Paul Krugman is a collection of New York Times columns by the Princeton economist which is selling fast at Kepler's. The columns were written over the last three years and cover corporate scandals and the collapse of the boom economy.

"Fallingwater Rising" by Franklin Toker is the story of the famous Frank Lloyd Wright house, Fallingwater, and the impact it has had. The author is an architectural historian.

"Mountains Beyond Mountains: Healing the World" by Tracy Kidder is the story of Dr. Paul Farmer, who has made a heroic effort to improve health care in Haiti since 1982. He founded a nonprofit organization that is the only source of health care for many of the country's poorest people. .

--Don Kazak