Hot Type

Vroom, vroom— what a chassis! Finally, a date for KITT the wonder car. G.M. has peeled the wraps from its remarkable new ride, the Impact, and MICHAEL SHNAYERSON'S The Car That Could: The Inside Story of GM's Revolutionary Electric Vehicle (Random House) takes us under her bodacious hood.

From auto's bio to autobio: the indestructible Chevy Nova of newspaper columnists, JIMMY BRESLIN, has written I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me (Little, Brown), a meditation on life and all its noble vagaries. The only Gingrich I'd pull into my lifeboat is CANDACE GINGRICH, whose The Accidental Activist: A Personal and Political Memoir (Scribner) courageously takes on her hypocritical homophobe brother and lends insight into the former U.P.S. truck loader's life. This month's biographies include JANET WALLACH'S Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell (Doubleday), a tribute to the powerful and adventurous woman behind T. E. Lawrence's military successes; NELL IRVIN PAINTER'S Sojourner Truth (Norton), the story of an ex-slave who transformed herself into a radical abolitionist; CHARLES WINECOFF'S Split Image: The Life of Anthony Perkins (Dutton), which probes the public and private personas of the man whose face still haunts women showering in roadside motels; and PHILIP NORMAN'S Rave On: The Biography of Buddy Holly (Simon & Schuster), which gushingly immortalizes the nerdy 50s god of the Fender Stratocaster.

Also consider: Bad-boy novelist LARRY BROWN'S riveting Father and Son (Algonquin) pits an angry, evil man against a righteous sheriff. The wonderful white world of Waspy lawyers dominates LOUIS BEGLEY'S About Schmidt (Knopf). A happily married tabloid columnist is enchanted by a beautiful dame's siren song in COLIN HARRISON'S Manhattan Nocturne (Crown). A century's worth of landscapes devastated by war are excavated in DONOVAN WEBSTER'S Aftermath (Pantheon). Art, politics, and the masses— MARGARITA TUPITSYN'S The Soviet Photograph, 1924-1937 (Yale) is the First published history of avantgarde Soviet photography. Finally, the Rat Pack of poetry-SEAMUS HEANEY, DEREK WALCOTT, and the late JOSEPH BRODSKY—do a Nobel-laureate poets' roast of that emblematic Yankee wordsmith, in Homage to Robert Frost (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Man, that Bobby Frost, he was one swinging cat!

ELISSA SCHAPPELL