The Art of Quartet Playing: The Guarneri...

The Art of Quartet Playing: The Guarneri Quartet in Conversation With David Blum, David Blum (Knopf). “A book such as this . . . could easily emerge as a dry-as-dust treatise.” What makes it come sparklingly alive is the musical insight and imagination of David Blum and “the spontaneity of the four performers, who throw themselves into the discussions with zest” (Henri Temianka).

A Hollywood Education: Tales of Movie Dreams and Easy Money, David Freeman (Putnam’s). “The best book anybody has ever written about Hollywood.” The short stories are “cruel and kind and record things about the movie business--directly and indirectly--that have never been put in print before” (Carolyn See).

A Late Chrysanthemum: 21 Stories From the Japanese, translated by Lane Dunlop (North Point Press), “is notable for the marvelous control and subtlety of the translations.” The better pieces remind us that modern Japanese fiction is a powerful and continuous story about survival and the difficulties of keeping a culture alive” (Paul J. Anderer).

Kate Vaiden, Reynolds Price (Atheneum). In this first-person-singular novel, written as the autobiography of a woman coming of age in the South during the Depression and war years, “the pattern of an individual woman’s life becomes a contemporary American odyssey. . . . (The book is) an extraordinary tour de force” (Elaine Kendall).

Judging the Jury, Valerie P. Hans and Neil Vidmar (Plenum). A trenchant book that explains why the jury system hasn’t been abolished and illustrates how efforts to come up with a profile of the “right” kind of jury have been unsuccessful” (Lee Dembart).

Writing to Read: A Parents’ Guide to the New, Early Learning System for Young Children, John Henry Martin and Ardy Friedberg (Warner), “puts forth a simple but revolutionary argument: that children can learn to write everything they can say and to read everything they can write. And they can do both at an earlier age than they’re allowed” (Milton Chen).