Nonfiction

Whatever It Takes

Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America

By Paul Tough

Houghton Mifflin

Tough offers an inspiring look at Geoffrey Canada, who created the Harlem Children's Zone, a program to provide children with the support they need from birth until graduation from high school.

Words in Air

The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell

Edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Bishop and Lowell met in 1947 and remained confidants until Lowell's death 30 years later. "Words in Air," our reviewer wrote, is "not only an intimate, detailed history of American literary life . . . it's also an exhilarating document on the art of friendship."

The World

Is What It Is

The Authorized Biography

of V.S. Naipaul

By Patrick French

Alfred A. Knopf

French's biography of the Nobel laureate may be authorized, but it is hardly sanitized. Rather, this is a candid account of the 20th century's unlikeliest literary giant.