"Securing Japan"

Coming soon from Cornell University Press: Securing Japan: Tokyo's Grand Strategy and the Future of East Asia.

About the book, from the publisher:

For the past sixty years, the U.S. government has assumed that Japan's security policies would reinforce American interests in Asia. The political and military profile of Asia is changing rapidly, however. Korea's nuclear program, China's rise, and the relative decline of U.S. power have commanded strategic review in Tokyo just as these matters have in Washington. What is the next step for Japan's security policy? Will confluence with U.S. interests — and the alliance — survive intact? Will the policy be transformed? Or will Japan become more autonomous?

Richard J. Samuels demonstrates that over the last decade, a revisionist group of Japanese policymakers has consolidated power. The Koizumi government of the early 2000s took bold steps to position Japan's military to play a global security role. It left its successor, the Abe government, to further define and legitimate Japan's new grand strategy, a project well under way-and vigorously contested both at home and in the region.

Securing Japan begins by tracing the history of Japan's grand strategy — from the Meiji rulers, who recognized the intimate connection between economic success and military advance, to the Konoye consensus that led to Japan's defeat in World War II and the postwar compact with the United States. Samuels shows how the ideological connections across these wars and agreements help explain today's debate. He then explores Japan's recent strategic choices, arguing that Japan will ultimately strike a balance between national strength and national autonomy, a position that will allow it to exist securely without being either too dependent on the United States or too vulnerable to threats from China.

Samuels's insights into Japanese history, society, and politics have been honed over a distinguished career and enriched by interviews with policymakers and original archival research. Securing Japan is a definitive assessment of Japanese security policy and its implications for the future of East Asia.

"The Rest of Her Life"

New this month from Hyperion: Laura Moriarty's The Rest of Her Life.

About the book, from the publisher:

In The Rest of Her Life, Laura Moriarty delivers a luminous, compassionate, and provocative look at how mothers and daughters with the best intentions can be blind to the harm they do to one another.

Leigh is the mother of high-achieving, popular high school senior Kara. Their relationship is already strained for reasons Leigh does not fully understand when, in a moment of carelessness, Kara makes a mistake that ends in tragedy -- the effects of which not only divide Leigh’s family, but polarize the entire community. We see the story from Leigh’s perspective, as she grapples with the hard reality of what her daughter has done and the devastating consequences her actions have on the family of another teenage girl in town, all while struggling to protect Kara in the face of rising public outcry.

Like the best works of Jane Hamilton, Jodi Picoult, and Alice Sebold, Laura Moriarty’s The Rest of Her Life is a novel of complex moral dilemma, filled with nuanced characters and a page-turning plot that makes readers ask themselves, “What would I do?”

Visit Laura Moriarty's website to read an excerpt from The Rest of Her Life.

"War in Darfur and the Search for Peace"

Coming soon from Harvard University Press: War in Darfur and the Search for Peace, edited by Alex de Waal.

About the book, from the publisher:

Since it sprang from obscurity to international headlines in 2004, the name "Darfur" has become synonymous with war, massacre, and humanitarian crisis. The crisis had, however, been brewing for far longer, its causes neglected by both scholars and Sudanese leaders.

War in Darfur and the Search for Peace is a series of essays by leading Sudanese and international specialists on Darfur, combining original research and analysis. The book provides in-depth analysis of the origins and dimensions of the conflict, including detailed accounts of the evolution of ethnic and religious identities, the breakdown of local administration, the emergence of Arab militia and resistance movements, and regional dimensions to the conflict.

The study also focuses on the search for peace, with contributions by those most closely engaged in local and international efforts to resolve the conflict. This includes documentation and analysis of the warring parties' ideologies and agendas and how they have changed in the course of the conflict, and examination of the efforts made by Sudanese civil and political leaders, the African Union, and other international actors to bring the war to an end.

"Bearing the Body"

New from Farrar, Straus and Giroux: Ehud Havazelet's Bearing the Body.

About the book, from the publisher:

Growing up, Daniel seemed like a model son: a student activist blessed with easy charm and a fluid intelligence, who believed that he was heir to a better and brighter future. When that dream faded, he drifted from his family and into a rootless life, marked by wasted possibility.

Bearing the Body begins when Daniel’s younger brother, Nathan, a medical resident in Boston, learns that Daniel has died in San Francisco. The circumstances are unclear, and the police are involved. Nathan, who suffers from chronic anger and uncontrollable compulsions, travels to New York to inform their father, Sol, of Daniel’s death. Sol is an Auschwitz survivor who has spent most of his adult energy compiling an archive of the fates of Hitler’s victims. Due in part to this obsessive research, he has lost touch with his sons. He nevertheless decides to join Nathan on a trip to the West Coast, where both men hope to learn more about Daniel’s untimely death. In San Francisco they meet Abby and her son, Ben, who were Daniel’s companions in a life that his family never knew about or shared.

A moving study of isolation and its costs, Bearing the Body is a book about history and memory, about family and loss. Most of all, it is a book about the past, which, far from receding quietly, weighs ever more heavily on those who hope to leave it behind.

"Echo Objects"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Barbara Maria Stafford's Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images.

About the book, from the publisher:

Barbara Stafford is at the forefront of a growing movement that calls for the humanities to confront the brain’s material realities. In Echo Objects she argues that humanists should seize upon the exciting neuroscientific discoveries that are illuminating the underpinnings of cultural objects. In turn, she contends, brain scientists could enrich their investigations of mental activity by incorporating phenomenological considerations — particularly the intricate ways that images focus intentional behavior and allow us to feel thought.

This, then, is a book for both sides of the aisle, a stunningly broad exploration of how complex images — or patterns that compress space and time — make visible the invisible ordering of human consciousness. Stafford demonstrates, for example, how the compound formats of emblems, symbols, collage, and electronic media reveal the brain’s grappling to construct mental objects that are redoubled by prior associations. On the other hand, she compellingly shows that findings in evolutionary biology and the neurosciences are providing profound opportunities for understanding aesthetic conundrums as old and deep-seated as the human urge to imitate, the mapping of inner space, and the role of narrative and nonnarrative representation.

As precise in her discussions of firing neurons as she is about the coordinating dynamics of image making, Stafford locates these major transdisciplinary issues at the intersection of art, science, philosophy, and technology. Ultimately, she makes an impassioned plea for a common purpose — for the acknowledgement that, at the most basic level, these separate projects belong to a single investigation.

"The Tunnels"

New from Mira Books: Michelle Gagnon's The Tunnels.

About the book, from the author's website:

An old, abandoned tunnel system beneath a prestigious New England college becomes the gruesome stalking ground of a serial killer…. The crime scenes are grim and otherworldly. The bodies of two female students are found mutilated and oddly positioned in the dark labyrinth beneath the school-haunting symbols painted on the walls above them. In her decade tracking serial killers, FBI special agent Kelly Jones has seen some of the worst humanity can inflict. Yet the tragedy unfolding at her alma mater chills her to the bone. Evidence suggests there is a connection between the victims-daughters of powerful men. And elements of the killings point to a dark, ancient ritual. As the body count rises, so do the stakes. The killer is taunting Kelly, daring her to follow him down a dangerous path from which only one can emerge.

"A Good and Happy Child"

New this summer from Shaye Areheart/Crown: A Good and Happy Child by Justin Evans.

About the book, from the author's website:

Thirty-year-old George Davies can’t bring himself to hold his newborn son. After months of accepting his lame excuses and strange behavior, his wife has had enough. She demands that he see a therapist, and George, desperate to save his unraveling marriage and redeem himself as a father and husband, reluctantly agrees.

As he delves into his childhood memories, he begins to recall things he hasn’t thought of in twenty years. Events, people, and strange situations come rushing back. The odd, rambling letters his father sent home before he died. The jovial mother who started dating too soon after his father’s death. A boy who appeared one night when George was lonely, then told him secrets he didn’t want to know. How no one believed this new friend was real and that he was responsible for the bad things that were happening.

Terrified by all that he has forgotten, George struggles to remember what really happened in the months following his father’s death. Were his ominous visions and erratic behavior the product of a grief-stricken child’s overactive imagination (a perfectly natural reaction to the trauma of loss, as his mother insisted)? Or were his father’s colleagues, who blamed a darker, more malevolent force, right to look to the supernatural as a means to end George’s suffering? Twenty years later, George still does not know. But when a mysterious murder is revealed, remembering the past becomes the only way George can protect himself – and his young family.

A psychological thriller in the tradition of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History – with shades of The Exorcist – the smart and suspenseful A Good and Happy Child leaves you questioning the things you remember and frightened of the things you’ve forgotten.

"Red Moon Rising"

Coming in September from Henry Holt and Times Books: Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age by Matthew Brzezinski.

About the book, from the publisher:

For the fiftieth anniversary of Sputnik, the behind-the-scenes story of the fierce battles on earth that launched the superpowers into space

The spy planes were driving Nikita Khrushchev mad. Whenever America wanted to peer inside the Soviet Union, it launched a U-2, which flew too high to be shot down. But Sergei Korolev, Russia’s chief rocket designer, had a riposte: an artificial satellite that would orbit the earth and cross American skies at will. On October 4, 1957, the launch of Korolev’s satellite, Sputnik, stunned the world.

In Red Moon Rising, Matthew Brzezinski takes us inside the Kremlin, the White House, secret military facilities, and the halls of Congress to bring to life the Russians and Americans who feared and distrusted their compatriots as much as their superpower rivals. Drawing on original interviews and new documentary sources from both sides of the Cold War divide, he shows how Khrushchev and Dwight Eisenhower were buffeted by crises of their own creation, leaving the door open to ambitious politicians and scientists to squabble over the heavens and the earth. It is a story rich in the paranoia of the time, with combatants that included two future presidents, survivors of the gulag, corporate chieftains, rehabilitated Nazis, and a general who won the day by refusing to follow orders.

Sputnik set in motion events that led not only to the moon landing but also to cell phones, federally guaranteed student loans, and the wireless Internet. Red Moon Rising recounts the true story of the birth of the space age in dramatic detail, bringing it to life as never before.

"Bronx Noir"

New this month from Akashic Books: Bronx Noir, edited by S.J. Rozan.

About the book, from the publisher:

Brand new stories by: Jerome Charyn, Lawrence Block, Suzanne Chazin, Terrence Cheng, Pat Picciarelli, Abraham Rodriguez Jr., Kevin Baker, S.J. Rozan, Steven Torres, and others.

The Bronx is the only New York City Borough on the mainland of North America. Which doesn't stop it from being a country all its own. As any Bronxite will tell you, being from Da Bronx is a permanent condition, no matter where you end up, and Bronx Geography is played from Alaska to Florida, from Paris to Trinidad. Originally a huge farm estate belonging to one Jacob Bronck ("Yonkers? Where's that?" "Just north of the Broncks'." Get it?), the borough has as many diverse social ecosystems as the Amazon has biological ones.

For a time in the '70s and '80s the name was synonymous (to non-Bronxites) with a vast urban maelstrom of lawlessness and decay. But the place was always more complicated than that. There's the Bronx Zoo, and the Botanical Garden; there are universities and Yankee Stadium, grand estates and squalid housing projects, the sinking Concourse and nautical City Island.

This is not to say crime isn't, potentially, everywhere. Just that the Bronx has more everywheres than most people imagine. The writers represented in Bronx Noir know the borough so well that, reading the book, you'll smell it, feel it, see it, hear it. The sights and scents will be multitudinous and as distinct as the neighborhoods. And everyone of them, in all their glorious mutual contradiction, is the Bronx.

"The First Word"

New from Viking Books: Christine Kenneally's The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language.

About the book, from the publisher:

A compelling look at the quest for the origins of human language from an accomplished linguist

Language is a distinctly human gift. However, because it leaves no permanent trace, its evolution has long been a mystery, and it is only in the last fifteen years that we have begun to understand how language came into being.

The First Word is the compelling story of the quest for the origins of human language. The book follows two intertwined narratives. The first is an account of how language developed — how the random and layered processes of evolution wound together to produce a talking animal: us. The second addresses why scientists are at last able to explore the subject. For more than a hundred years, language evolution was considered a scientific taboo. Kenneally focuses on figures like Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker, along with cognitive scientists, biologists, geneticists, and animal researchers, in order to answer the fundamental question: Is language a uniquely human phenomenon?

The First Word is the first book of its kind written for a general audience. Sure to appeal to fans of Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct and Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, Kenneally’s book is set to join them as a seminal account of human history.

Visit Christine Kenneally's website.