Books

Sometimes it pays to let yourself be manipulated. My first instinct upon seeing Hilma Wolitzer's new novel was to pooh-pooh it as a bald appeal to book clubs across the land.

Author Tara McKelvey interviewed former prisoners from Abu Ghraib for her book Monstering: Inside America's Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War McKelvey is senior editor at The American Prospect and a research fellow at the NYU School of Law's Center on Law and Security.

Steven Bach's biography Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl examines the filmmaker who celebrated the Nazi ideal and created the Third Reich's iconic images in Triumph of the Will and Olympiad. Bach details Riefenstahl's ruthless, opportunistic ambition, analyzes her "self-righteous entitlement," and explores her relationships with Hitler, Goebbels and Albert Speer. What emerges is a compulsively readable and scrupulously crafted work.

Arnold Rampersad's new biography re-examines the life of Ralph Ellison, the influential cultural critic and author of Invisible Man, and offers insights about why Ellison never produced a second masterpiece.

Ever since word got out that Don DeLillo was working on a novel about Sept. 11, anticipation has been building. After all, DeLillo has claimed plots and conspiracies as his literary subject. Book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review of DeLillo's new novel, Falling Man.

It's been eight years since Nathan Englander's award-winning short-story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, was published. Since then, he's been working on a novel, and if nothing else, his knack for intriguing titles is intact: His debut novel, set in Buenos Aires during the Argentina's '70s-era "dirty war," is called The Ministry of Special Cases.

British writer Jon Savage wrote England's Dreaming, a landmark book on the punk era. Now, in Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture, he's chronicled what he calls the "prehistory of the teenager."

Best known for the landmark Stanford Prison Experiment — in which student volunteers in a mock prison transformed with startling speed into sadistic guards or emotionally broken prisoners — Philip Zimbardo has written a book on the psychology of the unspeakable. It's called The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.

Distinguished biographer Hermione Lee is known for her writings on the lives of Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather, among other subjects. Now her much-anticipated biography of Edith Wharton has been published, and book critic Maureen Corrigan has just resurfaced after a long, long read.

Walter Isaacson, former managing editor of Time magazine and author of best-selling biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Henry Kissinger, has turned his attention to the 20th century's scientific poster boy: Albert Einstein, whose family life was as difficult as his career was distinguished.

Isaacson's book Einstein: His Life and Universe represents the first complete history of the theoretical-physicist-turned- refugee to draw upon all of Einstein's papers, many of which were unsealed last summer.