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This month’s best and brightest must-reads

words by > Michael J. Bandler

The Shape Shifter

Tony Hillerman

Southwestern novelist Tony Hillerman was, by his own account, a “very green” crime reporter in the Texas Panhandle in the late 1940s when he met a young sheriff who was “wise and humane” in police matters. That officer became the model, years later, for the character of Lieutenant Jim Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police. Leaphorn and colleague Jim Chee have been the heroes of a dozen and a half evocative police procedurals that have taken legions of readers to a quite unfamiliar terrain—the world of Native America, with its attendant mysticism, symbolism and legend. A rug’s design, for example, conjures up the image of a spirit that transforms order into chaos and peril. In The Shape Shifter (epic number 19), Leaphorn is impelled to come out of retirement when that distinctive rug weaving—a “tale teller,” in Native American tradition—brings a cold case back to the docket. (HarperCollins Publishers, $25.95)

The Great Escape

Kati Marton

A half century after the Hungarian Revolution, Kati Marton—a childhood refugee—revisits an earlier era, in The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World, to glimpse nine men of vision and imagination who fled Hungary as Hitler ascended. Some of the names—atom scientist Edward Teller and combat photographer Robert Capa—will be familiar. Examples of others’ creativity— Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon—have become integral parts of our cultural landscape. These were individualists who marked indelibly the worlds of physics, cinema, literature, photography and mathematics for all time. As she seamlessly weaves their stories across the years, Marton underscores the particular dreams that took them far from their birthplace, even as it remained part of their souls. (Simon & Schuster, $27)

Too Soon to Say Goodbye

Art Buchwald

Art Buchwald’s Too Soon to Say Goodbye is a book that never should have been written. Yet we’re all the richer for it. Early this year, this beloved humorist and Washington bon vivant was holding court, day after day, for famous friends in his hospice suite, having chosen death over dialysis as his kidneys failed. But a funny thing happened. The jovial 80 year old held on, even taking leave of the hospice for his beloved Martha’s Vineyard. All along, he continued writing periodic columns, keeping his fans abreast of his news—alternating the sunny with the sober. Then, with numerous anthologies of his writings and other books already to his name, he decided to pen one more. So once more—quite unexpectedly—here’s Buchw ald.
(Random House, $17.95)