Best of 1991

NONFICTION

1 PATRIMONY by Philip Roth.

Writing of how he cared for his dying father, Roth gives us that rarest of reads: a narrative of piercing clarity and emotional impact about one of life's crucial events. The son finds himself a parent to his own father, a stubborn 86-year-old who puts up a gallant fight against the brain tumor that daily robs him of his strength and dignity. In Herman Roth, the novelist discovers the source of his own tenacious character. There are no literary feints or false notes here, only the steady, frank voice of a writer who has mastered his craft and come to know and enjoy who he is and what he came from.

2. A LIFE OF PICASSO, VOL. I by John Richardson.

Probably the last serious biography of the artist by someone who knew him intimately, this first volume brings Picasso from childhood through the Blue and Rose periods, just as the 25-year-old was preparing to radically alter the course of 20th century painting with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. With the help of art historian Marilyn McCully, Richardson explores areas untouched by earlier biographers. He is a born storyteller and writes in a classic style that employs the full palette of ideas and personalities that ushered in the era of Modernism.

3. THE PROMISED LAND by Nicholas Lemann.

Between 1940 and 1970, in the second great migration of the 20th century, some 5 million black Americans moved from the farms and hamlets of the South to the cities of the industrial North, and the massive relocation left the nation transformed. Documenting this population shift with scholarship and anecdote, the author makes a major contribution to the understanding of the relationship between public policy and urban poverty.

4. VLADIMIR NABOKOV: THE AMERICAN YEARS by Brian Boyd.

Like the author's previous The Russian Years, this concluding volume benefits mightily from the cooperation of Nabokov's widow and son. But their assistance should not overshadow biographer Boyd's ability to penetrate the mysteries of , the great novelist's art and life with uncommon insight and elegance. On his arrival in America, writes Boyd, Nabokov "would have to abandon entirely ((his)) hard-earned fame and to win respect over again from scratch, at midcareer, in a new language, at a time when to be a Russian emigre seemed deeply suspect to much of the American literary intelligentsia."

5. DEN OF THIEVES by James B. Stewart.

Never have so few plundered so much from so many as did those financial buccaneers of the 1980s, Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, Martin Siegel and Dennis Levine. And not often has a story of white-collar crime been told in such juicy detail as in this best seller by the Wall Street Journal's front-page editor.

LESSER MOMENTS IN PUBLISHING II

Narrative that best exemplified the Which side are you on? dilemma, or Who is more disagreeable, subject or author?: Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography, by Kitty Kelley

Book that is least likely to attract a pass-along readership: Final Exit, the how-to suicide manual by Derek Humphry

Title that most admirably, if unintentionally, displayed truth in advertising: Exposing Myself, by Geraldo Rivera