New releases -- including comedy and the Colts
This is shaping up to be a good week. We'll see a new book about the greatest game ever played, which everyone here knows was the Baltimore Colts win in the 1958 NFL championship. Also on tap is one of my favorite humor writers, David Sedaris, and a few thrillers. The lineup:
Monday: The Garden of Last Days, by Andre Dubus III (Norton, $24.95). Set in the seamy underside of American life, it juxtaposes lust for domination with hunger for connection, sexual violence with family love.
Tuesday: When You Are Engulfed in Flames, by David Sedaris (Little, Brown, $25.99). Sedaris' essays proceed from bizarre conundrums of daily life to the most deeply resonant human truths.
Rumors: A Luxe Novel, by Anna Godbersen (HarperCollins, $17.99). As old friends become rivals, Manhattan's most dazzling socialites find their futures threatened by whispers from the past.
Plague Ship, by Clive Cussler with Jack DuBrul (Putnam, $26.95). In the fifth Oregon Files thriller, Capt. Juan Cabrillo, who heads a covert military company for hire, takes on a group known as the Responsivists.
War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq, by Richard Engel (Simon & Schuster, $28). NBC News' award- winning Middle East bureau chief offers an unvarnished and often emotional account of his time in Iraq.
The Best Game Ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL, by Mark Bowden (Atlantic Monthly, $23). Mark Bowden, the author of seven books, including Black Hawk Down, looks at the football game that changed history 50 years ago.
Death and Honor: An Honor Bound Novel, by W.E.B. Griffin and William E. Butterworth IV (Putnam, $26.95). The solid fourth Honor Bound thriller picks up where Secret Honor left off, with OSS agent Cletus Frade still tangling with high-level Nazis in supposedly neutral Argentina in 1943.
Nothing to Lose, by Lee Child (Delacorte, $27). A man with no fear, no illusions, and nothing to lose goes to war against a town that not only wants him gone, it wants him dead.
Me of Little Faith, by Lewis Black (Riverhead, $24.95). Black turns a cynical eye toward politicians who don the cloak of religious rectitude to cover up their own hypocrisy.
The Reapers, by John Connolly (Atria, $26). A small boy witnesses an unspeakable crime and is forever changed by the cruel and brutal nature of the act.
1434, by Gavin Menzies (Morrow, $26.95). Historian Gavin Menzies argues that China set the European Renaissance ablaze.
Resolution, by Robert B. Parker (Putnam, $25.95). This is a powerful tale of the Old West from the acknowledged master of crime fiction.
While she always preferred The Hardy Boys to Nancy Drew, 
