text: By ELSA DIXLER JAN. 9, 2009
  THE SENATOR'S WIFE, by Sue Miller. (Vintage Contemporaries, $14.95.) Two women inhabit Miller's new novel — the elegant, stoical wife of a philandering liberal senator and the young woman next door, who has mixed feelings about her pregnancy and a creepy fascination with her neighbor. The senator and his wife live mostly separately after years of his public cheating, but their love for each other survives until he finally betrays her in an unforgivable way. Miller is "a clever storyteller with . . . a talent for depicting . . . the regrettable instances of excessive self-indulgence that can destroy a world in a blink," Judith Warner wrote in the Book Review.
  BEAUTIFUL BOY: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction, by David Sheff. (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin, $14.95.) Nic Sheff used drugs, often methamphetamine, on and off for a decade beginning in high school; he lied to and stole from his parents and was in and out of rehab. This memoir by his father depicts the "collateral damage" a child's addiction can cause, as the elder Sheff describes his guilt and anguish and his own health crises along the way to learning that "we cannot choose for our children whether they live or die."
  THE FALL OF TROY, by Peter Ackroyd. (Anchor, $14.95.) Ackroyd's fictionalized version of the discovery of the city of Troy centers on a German archaeologist who resembles Heinrich Schliemann. The character's passion for the ancient world brings it alive for him and us; at the same time, there is something sinister in his genius. Our reviewer, David Leavitt, called this "a novel that is engaging, disturbing, intellectually complex and just a little kitschy."
  DAY OF EMPIRE: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance — and Why They Fall, by Amy Chua. (Anchor, $16.95.) Chua makes a case that all the world-dominant powers in history, from Achaemenid Persia on, have prospered by embracing diversity and difference; the death of empire, she believes, is intolerance and exclusivity, an insistence on racial "purity" or religious orthodoxy. The American example is never far from her mind.
  GEORGE KENNAN: A Study of Character, by John Lukacs. (Yale, $15.) The architect of America's cold war policy of containment, Kennan (1904-2005) had a bleak assessment of our capacity to shape the world according to our wishes. Lukacs, a distinguished historian of 20th-century Europe who knew and admired Kennan, braids his life and work in this old-fashioned "study of character."
  THE REDBREAST, by Jo Nesbo. Translated by Don Bart­lett. (Harper, $14.99.) This "elegant and complex thriller," as Marilyn Stasio called it in the Book Review, takes the form of a police procedural set in Oslo. But the crimes investigated by Nesbo's cop protagonist reveal a pattern that reaches all the way back to the German occupation of Norway during World War II. Nesbo shows that "suppressing history is an open invitation for history to repeat itself," Stasio said.
  SELLOUT: The Politics of Racial Betrayal, by Randall Kennedy. (Vintage, $13.95.) " 'Sellout' is a disparaging term that refers to blacks who knowingly or with gross negligence act against the interest of blacks as a whole," Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law School, writes. He argues that the label demonizes both messenger and message and inhibits dialogue about ideas and actions that don't conform to racial orthodoxy.
  THE SEVENTH WELL, by Fred Wander. Translated by Michael Hofmann. (Norton, $13.95.) "What keeps a man alive?" Wander's anonymous narrator, a young man imprisoned at a Nazi death camp, wonders. The answer, for him, is affection for others, memories of home, language itself. Originally published in East Germany in 1971, this powerful novel is now available in a superb new translation.
  AN UNCERTAIN INHERITANCE: Writers on Caring for Family, edited by Nell Casey. (Harper Perennial, $14.99.) These 19 essays by writers like Helen Schulman, Sam Lipsyte, Julia Alvarez, Andrew Solomon, Abigail Thomas, Jerome Groopman and Julia Glass offer honest and deeply felt descriptions both of taking care of family members and of needing such care oneself.
  STARBUCKED: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture, by Taylor Clark. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $14.99.) This entertaining book combines an account of Starbucks's rise and an analysis of the ethical issues surrounding the company — the way it treats its employees, its relationship with third-world coffee growers, its homogenization of the culture. An afterword assesses Starbucks's current troubles: "If you want to be a luxury coffee company, it's a good idea to, you know, have good coffee."
  THE PLEASURES OF THE DAMNED: Poems, 1951-1993, by Charles Bukowski. Edited by John Martin (Ecco/HarperCollins, $16.99.) "I am not inclined to make elaborate claims for Bukowski, because there is no one to compare him to, plus or minus," our reviewer, Jim Harrison, said. This long and well-edited collection is likely to stand as the definitive volume of Bukowski's poems with their "hard-found music of the streets."