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Each week Entertainment Weekly reviews a small selection of popular new books. Titles available for the Kindle reviewed in the October 8th issue include:

Washington, A Life, by Ron Chernow. Penguin Press, 2010. Print length: 928 p. BIOGRAPHY. EW's slant: "...turns constitutional debates and bureaucratic infighting into riveting reading." Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (3 reviews). Kindle edition $19.99. (Hardcover: $21.60)
Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"Despite the reverence his name inspires, Washington remains a lifeless waxwork for many Americans, worthy but dull. A laconic man of granite self-control, he often arouses more respect than affection. In this groundbreaking work, based on massive research, Chernow dashes forever the stereotype of a stolid, unemotional man. A strapping six feet, Washington was a celebrated horseman, elegant dancer, and tireless hunter, with a fiercely guarded emotional life. Chernow brings to vivid life a dashing, passionate man of fiery opinions and many moods. Probing his private life, he explores his fraught relationship with his crusty mother, his youthful infatuation with the married Sally Fairfax, and his often conflicted feelings toward his adopted children and grandchildren. He also provides a lavishly detailed portrait of his marriage to Martha and his complex behavior as a slave master. At the same time, Washington is an astute and surprising portrait of a canny political genius who knew how to inspire people. Not only did Washington gather around himself the foremost figures of the age, including James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, but he also brilliantly orchestrated their actions to shape the new federal government, define the separation of powers, and establish the office of the presidency." - Publisher.

Ron Chernow is the prize-winning author of five previous books. His first, The House of Morgan, won the National Book Award. His two most recent books, Alexander Hamilton and Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., were both nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography.

World and Town, by Gish Jen. Knopf, 2010. Print length: 384 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...thick, satisfying sprawl of a read..." Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (1 review). Kindle edition $14.82. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Cherished novelists are often those who combine humor with humanism, a feat Jen performs with particular aplomb as she choreographs telling cultural collisions. Her fourth sparkling yet deeply inquisitive novel portrays Hattie Kong, a retired high-school biology teacher who grew up in China, the daughter of an American missionary and a Chinese father descended from Confucius. After the deaths of her husband and best friend, Hattie seeks peace in the small New England town of Riverlake. But her father’s relatives are anxiously petitioning her to move her parents’ remains to the ancestral family graveyard; her great unrequited love, neuroscientist Carter, has resurfaced; and a church group has settled a traumatized Cambodian immigrant family on the property across from Hattie’s..." - Donna Seaman for Booklist.

Great House, by Nicole Krauss. W. W. Norton, 2010. Print length: 289 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...loftily conceived, ultimately confounding follow-up to 2005's acclaimed The History of Love..." Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (2 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"For twenty-five years, a reclusive American novelist has been writing at the desk she inherited from a young Chilean poet who disappeared at the hands of Pinochet's secret police; one day a girl claiming to be the poet's daughter arrives to take it away, sending the writer's life reeling. Across the ocean, in the leafy suburbs of London, a man caring for his dying wife discovers, among her papers, a lock of hair that unravels a terrible secret. In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer slowly reassembles his father's study, plundered by the Nazis in Budapest in 1944. Connecting these stories is a desk of many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or have given it away... Great House is a story haunted by questions: What do we pass on to our children and how do they absorb our dreams and losses? How do we respond to disappearance, destruction, and change? Nicole Krauss has written a soaring, powerful novel about memory struggling to create a meaningful permanence in the face of inevitable loss." - Amazon.

Bloody Crimes: The Chase for Jefferson Davis and the Death Pageant for Lincoln's Corpse, by James Swanson. Harper Collins, 2010. Print length: 464 p. NONFICTION: HISTORY. Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (12 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"It's April 1865 and General Lee's troops have officially surrendered. Abraham Lincoln, looking forward to rebuilding the nation, celebrates with an evening - his last alive - at the theater. On the other side of the Mason-Dixon Line Jefferson Davis plans to move the Confederate government to North Carolina, away from Union troops that have captured Richmond. Under much different circumstances, both men embark on a dramatic final journey depicted by James. L. Swanson in Bloody Crimes, a gripping account of the weeks following Lincoln’s death and the end of the Civil War. While arguments erupted about where and how Lincoln’s burial should take place, Jefferson Davis - refusing to let the South succumb - attempted to rally his people despite being hunted by Northern troops who suspected his involvement in Lincoln’s assassination. Using relics and key documents of the day, Swanson juxtaposes the travels of Davis and Lincoln, weaving a fast-paced narrative that lures readers in from the get-go." - Jessica Schein for Amazon.
James Swanson is the Edgar Award-winning author of the New York Times bestseller Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase to Catch Lincoln's Killer. Born on Lincoln's birthday, he has studied and collected books, documents, photographs, art, and artifacts from Abraham Lincoln's life - and death - since he was ten years old.

The False Friend, by Myla Goldberg. Doubleday, 2010. Print length: 288 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...does a scarily fine job describing the mean dynamic in a clique of five 11-year-olds..." Amazon customer rating: 3 1/2 stars (2 reviews). Kindle edition $14.27. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Celia Durst decides, after 20 years, to come clean. At the age of 10, she was responsible for the disappearance of her unpredictable best friend, Djuna. Traipsing with their girlhood clique through an unfamiliar forest, only Celia saw Djuna fall into a hole in the ground, but hot-headed from the fight the two were having, she decided to tell everyone that Djuna was picked up by a stranger. Now thirtysomething and successful, Celia leaves Chicago to replant herself in her childhood home and confess to her family and the other girls involved. It turns into an agonizing process, however, when no one believes Celia’s “new” story—especially not the other three girls, who all claim to have seen the car Djuna got into..." - Annie Bostrom for Booklist.

NEW IN PAPERBACK AND KINDLE EDITIONS:

Cherries in Winter: My Family's Recipe for Hope in Hard Times, by Suzan Colon. Knopf, 2009. Print length: 224 p. MEMOIR. EW's slant: "...inspiration for scrapping by in lean times." Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (77 reviews). Kindle edition $13.17. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"As the economy tanked throughout 2008, magazine editor Colón began strategizing and was better prepared when she lost her job. At her mother's suggestion, she unearthed her grandmother's recipe file, and with it a greater sensitivity about a family history that spanned the hardest years of the 20th century. The resulting book is half cooking memoir with recipes, some more practical than others, and partly family chronicle..." - Publishers Weekly.

A Good Fall: Stories, by Ha Jin. Pantheon. Print length: 256 p. SHORT STORIES. EW's slant: "...luminous tales from the National Book Award winner." Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (9 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"In The Bridegroom (2000), his last collection of short stories, Ha Jin, a National Book Award winner, captures the paradoxes of life under China’s Communist regime. In his new stories, sharply etched works remarkable for the contrast between their directness of expression and complexity of feelings, he creates a mirror-image set of tales about a Chinese immigrant community in Flushing, New York. Ha Jin’s ear and eye for Chinese American life are acute, as is his sense of how one life can encompass a full spectrum of irony, desperation, and magic..." - Donna Seaman for Booklist.