The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846-1876,...

The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846-1876, Robert V. Bruce (Knopf), is “chockablock with details and stories of experimenters and scientists whose long-forgotten contributions deserve to be recalled” (Lee Dembart).

George C. Marshall: Statesman, 1945-1959, Forrest C. Pogue (Viking). A “monumental” work, the last in the author’s four-volume biography of “perhaps the greatest American our nation has produced in this century” (Larry Collins).

Prize Stories 1987: The O. Henry Awards, edited by William Abrahams (Doubleday). “The range of voices, styles, themes and locales is wonderfully varied. . . . This vigorous collection makes it indisputably clear that the short story is alive, well and living in America” (Don Skiles).

Wyrms, Orson Scott Card (Arbor House). “In the stereotypical and sometimes slipshod world of science fiction, here is a writer who stands, eyebrows slightly arched, in a literary pose struck by elegance and polish. . . . His pen sits like the diamond needle on a slowly turning record, and the melody and lyrics that you hear are magical and inescapable and ancient” (Ingrid Rimland).