Book Review

Rachel Renee Russell is the bestselling author of the "Dork Diaries" series, which will continue in October with book No. 5, "Tales From a Not-So-Smart Miss Know-It-All. " We asked the lawyer-turned-writer what she's been reading. Her answer: "Merits of Mischief Book One: The Bad Apple," by T.R. Burns. Here's Russell's review: "Quiet and shy Seamus Hinkle is a normal 12-year-old just trying to survive middle school - until the unfortunate apple incident with his substitute teacher in the lunchroom.

June 18, 2008 At 82, Gore Vidal is America's most formidable man of letters. The page of previously published work included in the front matter of this latest volume -- "The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal" -- lists 24 novels, a nonfiction book, two collections of short stories, six plays, 11 volumes of essays and two memoirs. It's a formal list that leaves out the screenplays and collaborations done as work for hire, much of it of some distinction. This is a body of work that fairly seethes with contention and indignation, but what animates -- and elevates -- it is the unmatched beauty of the prose.

Back in 2004, when James Mann wrote "Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet," he took full advantage of the sarcastic nickname that President George W. Bush's foreign policy advisors gave themselves. It not only captured their ideological zeal and outsized egos, but was an inside joke: the neo-cons liked the allusion to "Star Trek's" über - rational humanoids, and future Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had grown up near a statue of another Vulcan, the Roman god of fire.

Gold Chris Cleave Simon & Schuster: 336 pp., $27 There are undoubtedly fans of Chris Cleave who will pick up his new novel, "Gold," and enjoy it as much as they did his blockbuster bestseller, "Little Bee. " There is the possibility, however, that some will find it as much of a slow-moving soap opera as I did. Which is too bad, really, for a book about two Olympic cyclists. The two women, Zoe and Kathy, are friends and rivals (heavy on the rivals). Their lives are knit together onward from the age of 19, when they first face off competitively and are taken on by the same coach, Tom. The two women have markedly different personalities.

It says "memoir" on the jacket of this book, and this time, it's true. Anna Quindlen has been the diarist of baby boomers, and women boomers especially, since she began writing at the age of 18 for the New York Times, where her columns won a Pulitzer Prize and whence she launched a second career as author and novelist. Quindlen helps to tidy up the word "memoir" from the grime it acquired at the hands of "memoirists" like James Frey and Margaret Seltzer, the word winding up in that fantasist's dictionary where the definition of "memoir" is "stuff I just make up. " "Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake" is certainly her own: She turned 60 on Sunday.

In his superbly reported new book, "The Admirals: Nimitz, Halsey, Leahy, and King — The Five-Star Admirals Who Won the War at Sea," historian Walter R. Borneman tackles the essential question of military leadership: What makes some men, but not others, able to motivate a fighting force into battle? It's a question as old as Hannibal and as fresh as Helmand province. All four of the admirals were Annapolis graduates, but their personalities and styles were widely different.

American Grown The Story of the White House Kitchen Garden and Gardens Across America Michelle Obama Crown: 272 pp., $30 Michelle Obama can recall a time when she "had no idea that tomatoes didn't come in green plastic trays, covered by cellophane and that they could be any color other than pale red. " She's come a long way, and now she is working to bring the rest of us with her. Her efforts to garden on the White...

When I Was a Child I Read Books Essays Marilynne Robinson Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 232 pp., $24 Marilynne Robinson, the Pulitzer-winning novelist, is a confounding writer in today's political alignment. Her new essay collection, "When I Was a Child I Read Books," is - despite the sentimentality of its title - fundamentally a leftist political manifesto and lament for America's loss of faith in government. Yet it grants a central argument of many religious conservatives - that America's virtues are indeed steeped in biblical thought.

There's a good chance you're familiar with Randy Pausch, a computer-science professor who delivered a poignant speech in September 2007 while he was dying of pancreatic cancer. It resulted in an incredible 2008 bestseller, "The Last Lecture," and a video that has racked up nearly 15-million views on YouTube. It's no surprise why so many people have been touched by Pausch. In the lecture and book, he exhibited incredible optimism, humor, courage, wisdom and charm in the face of an illness that took his life 10 months later.

The Newlyweds A Novel Nell Freudenberger Alfred A. Knopf: 342 pp., $25.95 Two-thirds of the way through Nell Freudenberger's second novel, her Bangladeshi narrator, Amina, wonders, "Why were some people attracted to what was unfamiliar, and others to what they knew?" Amina, born into a Muslim family in Haibatpur, her grandmother's village, falls into the first category. Since girlhood, Amina has studied English and forged a determined path toward the U.S. At the beginning of "The Newlyweds," she has been married for six months to George, a methodical and bland electrical engineer she met on the dating website AsianEuro.com.