Arellano, a contributing editor to The Times' Op-Ed pages, grew up in Orange County and describes it as home to "Rep. Robert Dornan and Mickey Mouse, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and extraterrestrial basketballer Dennis Rodman, not to mention the largest community of Vietnamese outside of Vietnam."
Pictures at
a Revolution
Five Movies and the Birth
of the New Hollywood
By Mark Harris
Penguin Press
Harris uses the five Academy Award nominees for best picture of 1967 as a window on a revolutionary moment in Hollywood, when the focus of the studios shifted, and film became more gritty and political.
Posthumous Keats
A Personal Biography
By Stanley Plumly
W.W. Norton
It took Plumly, an award-winning poet in his own right, more than 20 years to get a handle on this meditation on John Keats' life, but the book is, as our reviewer noted, "very much worth the wait."
The Soiling
of Old Glory
The Story of a Photograph That Shocked America
By Louis P. Masur
Bloomsbury
Many have seen the photograph: a white man, outside Boston City Hall during a 1976 anti-busing protest, about to spear a black lawyer with an American flag. Here, Masur tells the story behind that image.
The Suicide Index
By Joan Wickersham
Harcourt
In this understated memoir, Wickersham recalls the suicide of her father and her inability to come to terms with it. Her book resonates with the complexity of love and the inability of memory to sustain us, even (or especially) when it's all we've got.
The Ten-Cent Plague
The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America
By David Hajdu
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
The battle over comic books in the late 1940s and 1950s was really a battle over the soul of America, with the forces of tradition on one side and an anarchic youth culture on the other.
This Republic
of Suffering
Death and the American Civil War
By Drew Gilpin Faust
Alfred A. Knopf
The Civil War, Faust argues, was a turning point not just in the nation's history, but also in the way we dealt with issues of "death and dying -- how Americans prepared for death, imagined it, risked it, endured it and worked to understand it."
The Three of Us
A Family Story
By Julia Blackburn
Pantheon
The daughter of a poet and a painter, Blackburn was raised in a narcissistic household, rent by her parents' battles. Here, she tells that story with an unflinching clarity.
