Non-Fiction: A North Country Life by Sydney Lea

Vermont poet laureate Sydney Lea puts both his talent and his love of the sporting life front and center in A North Country Life (Skyhorse).

This is not a politically correct look at the world out of doors. Lea is a lifelong hunter and fisherman whose appreciation for outdoor life is unhampered by contemporary social mores. So imagine Bryson’s AWalk in the Woods, but overlaid with poetic

Holiday Gift Guide: The Official NASCAR Trivia Book by John C. Farrell

Clearly, if the person on your list is a big NASCAR fan, there are only so many gift ideas available, especially if you live off the beaten NASCAR track. An easy (and easy to ship!) answer is The Official NASCAR Trivia Book (Fenn & M&S) by NASCAR insider John C. Farrell.

As much of a game as it is a book, as the title suggests, The Official NASCAR Trivia Book rounds up a whole lot of NASCAR

Holiday Gift Guide: Reel Terror: The Scary, Bloody, Gory, Hundred-Year History of Classic Horror Films by David Konow

It should not be surprising that the author of the definitive guide to heavy metal music should come back with another, similar guide, this time devoted to what some would say is the film world’s heavy metal equivalent.

Reel Terror: The Scary, Bloody, Gory, Hundred-Year History of Classic Horror Films (St. Martin’s Press/Thomas Dunne) takes a long, loving look behind the scenes at the century

Holiday Gift Guide: Jack Kerouac Collected Poems

Looking over our shoulders, it’s easy to underestimate the poetic art of Jack Kerouac. We remember little beyond On the Road, one of the defining works of the Beat Generation. The book celebrated a life of drugs and jazz on the road in an elegant stream of consciousness screed. Helping the idea that there was little to the writer beyond The Road is the fact that Kerouac himself died too young. He

Fiction: Doppler by Erlend Loe

In a world gone mad for all literature with the smack of Scandanavia, Doppler (Anansi) seems at first like a sharply sweet joke. Canadian publisher, Anansi, calls Doppler an “enchanting, subversive, and very unusual story of one man and his moose.” Think of Doppler as Jonathan Livingston Seagull for the 21st century, but with a moose calf called Bongo, Scandinavian hipster attitude and a sharper

Non-Fiction: Darwin’s Devices by John Long

Robotics viewed through a biologist’s lens, that’s a bit of what Darwin’s Devices: What Evolving Robots Can Tell Us About the History of Life and the Future of Technology (Basic Books) boils down to. But with scientific precision from a professor/author with a poet’s soul. It’s intensely exciting stuff.

Long is a professor of biology and cognitive science at Vassar where he has famously used his

Non-Fiction: Gifts of the Crow by John Marzluff and Tony Angell

Think about it: few creatures are as misunderstood as the crow. Their black plumage and watchful demeanor can evoke fear and even shadows of future evil. But in reality, contend authors John Marzluff and Tony Angell, in many ways crows are much more like us than most people would care to admit. “The gifts of the crow are physical, metaphorical, and far-reaching,” they write in Gifts of the Crow

Fiction: The Sea Is My Brother by Jack Kerouac

First, let it be understood that Jack Kerouac’s first but-until-now-unpublished novel, The Sea Is My Brother was never actually lost. And, having never been lost, it can not now be found. Kerouac himself never tried to get the novel published. In fact, by all accounts, he didn’t really think much at all of the work. In Kerouac by Ann Charters, she quotes the author as saying that the book was “

New Today: Care to Make Love in that Gross Little Space Between Cars? Amy Sedaris, Judd Apatow, et al

Three months into the year and I’m already fairly certain that Care to Make Love in that Gross Little Space Between Cars? (Vintage) will be among my picks for best of the year. And why? Because it’s aberrant. Off-the-wall. Well-drawn. And very, very funny.Since 2005, Amy Sedaris has had a column in The Believer magazine called “Sedaratives.” It’s silly -- though sometimes thoughtful -- stuff, as

Holiday Gift Guide: The Year of the St. Louis Cardinals: Celebrating the 2011 World Series Champions

If the person on your list is a baseball fan, you have a lot of options. But if your ball fan is also a St. Louis fan, you maybe only have one: The Year of the St. Louis Cardinals (Fenn/M&S) is very like a high quality souvenir program: one that, of course, couldn’t have been produced on the day.The book includes the Cardinals’ rise to the top of the league, a recap of all of their post-season

Holiday Gift Guide: The Last Testament: A Memoir by God with David Javerbaum

In the beginning, I took a lunch with Daniel Greenberg of the LevineGreenberg Literary Agency.For the future of print was without hope, and void; and darkness had fallen upon the face of the entire publishing industry.There is something pitch perfect about the tone and tenor of The Last Testament: A Memoir by God (Simon & Schuster). Something so frankly charming, as well as funny, it’s hard not

Holiday Gift Guide: My First NHL Goal by Mike Brophy

Though sports journalist Mike Brophy’s My First NHL Goal (McLelland & Stewart) is ostensibly about the goal that marked the beginning of 50 hockey player’s professional career, it’s actually about so much more. Most of this it due to Brophy who knows the game about as well as anyone can and who has, through his career, had access to the top players in the land. Well, in any land, and that’s