New dangers lurk on America's bookshelves, with hurricane, fire and flood lying in wait for the unwary reader.
Fear not, however. Actual disasters aren't at hand -- only new nonfiction books about them.
Accounts of three famous catastrophes of 20th-century America -- the Northeast hurricane of 1938, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 and the molasses flood that struck (and stuck) Boston in 1919 -- join novels by John Grisham, Nicholas Sparks and Terry Brooks on the roster of new hardcover books.
On Sept. 21, 1938, the fastest-moving hurricane on record zoomed along the East Coast from Cape Hatteras, N.C., to Canada in only one day, striking hardest in seven Northeast states. R.A. Scotti describes that anonymous storm -- the custom of naming hurricanes hadn't begun yet -- in "Sudden Sea: The Great Hurricane of 1938" (Little, Brown). Newspaper stories, photos and eyewitness testimony help tell the tale of the storm whose winds of up to 188 mph and walls of water 50 feet high caused $4.7 billion in damage (in current dollars) and killed 682 people.
The death toll was 146 in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of March 25, 1911. But, as David von Drehle points out in "Triangle: The Fire That Changed America" (Atlantic Monthly Press), this deadly conflagration sparked some positive events. It exposed the dangerous working conditions in sweatshops, and inspired changes on the labor and political fronts. The book looks at the wave of Jewish and Italian immigrants during the century's early years who supplied garment factories with cheap, mostly female, labor; and the ensuing trial, which acquitted the factory owners despite their failure to provide fire safety measures.
Jan. 15, 1919, was a gooey day in Boston's North End. Shortly after noon, a 50-foot steel tank collapsed, unleashing its contents -- 2.3 million gallons of molasses. In "Dark Tide" (Beacon Press), which claims to be the first book on the subject, Stephen Puleo describes the sticky stuff's stroll through Boston's streets, reaching speeds of 35 mph and waves 15 feet high. In the end, 21 people were killed and 150 injured, and the entire waterfront was destroyed. Puleo cites fire department files, newspaper accounts and court records as he describes the chain of events that led to the spill and the long legal action that followed.
In a departure from his popular legal thrillers, Grisham offers "Bleachers" (Doubleday), a novella about the importance of high school football in small-town America. Messina's team, the Spartans, have been winners for years and the center of the town's social life and pride. As revered coach Eddie Rake lies dying, several former players have returned to keep vigil in the football field's bleachers, where they share memories, anecdotes and a couple of beers as they wait for the field lights to dim -- the signal that Rake has died.
In his eighth novel, "The Wedding" (Warner), Sparks offers a follow-up to his best-selling first novel, "The Notebook" (1996). Set in New Bern, N.C., "The Wedding" focuses on Wilson Lewis, a lawyer whose "workaholism" has damaged his 30-year marriage to the point that his wife, Jane, considers leaving him. Following the advice of Noah, his happily married father-in-law featured in "The Notebook," Wilson tries to win back Jane by courting her again.
Further adventures await followers of Brooks' long-running "Shannara" fantasy series in "High Druid of Shannara: Jarka Ruus" (Del Rey). This first book in a planned trilogy picks up 20 years after the previous trilogy, "Voyage of the Jerle Shannara," ended. Grianne Ohmsford has denounced her life as the tyrannical Ilse Witch and become the High Druid of Shannara, dedicated to protecting the Four Lands from anarchy and war. She still has enemies, though, and when she is kidnapped, it's up to her teenage nephew and his companions to rescue her.
Other fiction
The South is the setting in "Four Spirits" (Morrow), Sena Jeter Naslund's story about four young women who become civil rights activists in 1960s Birmingham, Ala.; "Lunch at the Piccadilly" (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill), Clyde Edgerton's comic caper in which restless residents at a North Carolina convalescent center take a joyride in a stolen car; and "The Rabbit Factory" (Free Press), Larry Brown's misadventure featuring a cast of eccentrics, including an ex-con, a runaway, the flirtatious wife of a wealthy, much-older man, and a variety of critters.
Disappearing acts appear in "Lost" (Atria), Joy Fielding's story about a woman who learns some unsettling truths when she searches for her missing adult daughter; and in "The Hotel Riviera" (St. Martin's Press) by Elizabeth Adler, in which the proprietor of a French hotel might lose it unless she tracks down her husband, who has vanished without a trace.
In "Saul and Patsy" (Pantheon) by Charles Baxter, a high-school teacher and his wife in a small Midwestern town become the obsession of one of his teenage students. Three teenage students -- one the son of a U.S. intelligence officer -- attending school in West Germany in 1961 are held by the secret police on their day trip to East Berlin in "Secret Father" (Houghton Mifflin) by James Carroll.
Writers are written about in "The Mistressclass" (Henry Holt) by Michele Roberts, about sisters, both authors, forced to deal with a long-ago, life-changing betrayal when one's father-in-law dies; and in "She Is Me" (Little, Brown) by Cathleen Schine, about a young screenwriter who returns home to Los Angeles only to be greeted by her family's persistent questions about her personal life.
A troubled woman sets out to destroy an invisible, murderous force terrorizing a small town in Washington in "The Good House" (Atria) by Tananarive Due.
Other nonfiction
In "Middletown, America" (Random House), Gail Sheehy reports on the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in Middletown, N.J., home to more victims (50) of the World Trade Center collapse than any city other than New York. Gerald Posner investigates the errors and oversights by government and law-enforcement that failed to prevent the attacks in "Why America Slept" (Random House).
Biographies include "The Art of Burning Bridges" (Knopf), Geoffrey Wolff's profile of novelist John O'Hara; "Mountains Beyond Mountains" (Random House), the life of infectious-disease specialist and humanitarian Paul Farmer as told by Tracy Kidder; and "Madame Secretary" (Miramax), a memoir by Madeleine Albright, President Clinton's secretary of state (on sale Sept. 16).
Henry Kissinger, secretary of state under Presidents Nixon and Ford, analyzes two major U.S. foreign policy crises -- the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973 -- in "Crisis" (Simon and Schuster). John Keay tells how events during the first half of the 20th century have made the Middle East such a volatile region in "Sowing the Wind" (Norton).
In "The Smoking Gun" (Scribner), criminal defense attorney Gerry Spence describes the murder trial of an Oregon woman and her son. In "The Bounty" (Viking), Caroline Alexander debunks the popularized version of the mutiny aboard the British ship Bounty in the South Pacific in 1789.
And in "My Turn at the Bully Pulpit" (Crown), cable-TV news anchor Greta van Susteren airs her views on topics ranging from the death penalty to plastic surgery -- her own!
