HOT TYPE ELISSA SCHAPPELL

Break out your Fred Perrys and the red-white-and-blue tube top—it's summertime in America! Roger Rosenblatt salutes Where We Stand (Harcourt), putting forth 30 reasons for loving America. In commemoration of D-day, remember Our Finest Day (Chronicle), in which historian Mark Bowden marshals the troops that stormed Normandy's beaches on June 6, 1944. Eric Haney, a founding operator of the highly specialized elite army counterterrorist unit, exposes the intense discipline required to get Inside Delta Force (Delacorte). Howell Raines and Janny Scott present Portraits 9/11/01, the collected "Portraits of Grief" from The New York Times (Times Books). Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and V.F. contributing editor David Halberstam immortalizes the firefighters lost in Engine 40, Ladder 35, on September 11, and the unspeakable tragedy their families endure every day, in Firehouse (Hyperion).

Also this month: Grand-slam motormouth John McEnroe backhands his critics and the contemporary tennis world in You Cannot Be Serious (Putnam), with linejudging by James Kaplan. Reynolds Price lays it down old-school in Noble Norfleet (Scribner), a riveting fictional portrait of an ex-army medic forced to revisit the mysterious death of his entire family 30 years earlier. The hero of Thomas Dyja'sMeet John Trow (Viking) is a deranged Civil War re-enactment buff. Highly imaginative historical novelist Darin Strauss puts up his dukes in The Real McCoy (Dutton), the story of the turn-ofthe-century champion boxer, jewel thief, charlatan, and most married man in America. Madeline heir John Bemelmans Marciano lets loose his own frisky, bright-eyed heroine, Delilah (Viking), a tractor-loving lamb. First-time novelist Gary Shteyngart'sThe Russian Debutante's Handbook (Riverhead) is a terrifically charming tale of a young Russian immigrant's capitalist and carnal aspirations. Grab an aisle seat for Shoppers (Perennial), two plays by Denis Johnson. Prepare to be ignited by the base female desire the fearless Catherine Millet exposes in her autobiography, The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (Grove). Works on Paper (Counterpoint) finds the peerless biographer Michael Holroyd attacking his craft— his target: the ethics and values of nonfiction. In The Old Religion (Overlook), David Mamet channels Leo Frank, a Jew who was railroaded into a life sentence for a murder he didn't commit, then abducted from prison and lynched. Mambo king Oscar Hijuelos returns to his twin passions—music and Cuba—in A Simple Habana Melody (HarperCollins). Leslie Brenner goes behind the swinging doors of New York's elite watering hole Daniel, documenting the obsessive Chef Boulud's quest for The Fourth Star (Clarkson Potter). Francisco Mattéoli checks into Hotel Stories (Assouline), a photographic pleasure dome featuring hideaways such as Garbo's refuge in Berlin and the Mexican hacienda where Frida Kahlo trysted with Trotsky. Jessica Helfand is Reinventing the Wheel (Princeton Architectural Press), the slidable information wheels devoted to such sciences as calculating cocktails and charting nuclear-bomb blasts. You'll never look at a Ritz cracker the same—in The Silent Takeover (Free Press) Noreena Hertz reveals the dangers of companies' becoming more powerful than government. Write this down—Dr. Gary Small'sThe Memory Bible (Hyperion) prescribes strategies to strengthen the brain and keep it young. In Sarah Mower'sOscar (Assouline), style-setter Oscar de la Renta muses on 40 years of glamming up women. The black-and-white images of photographer Jerry Dantzics New York (Edition Stemmle) are an ode to the city in the 1950s. James Gavin'sDeep in a Dream (Knopf) is a sad, cool riff on the romantic life and violent death of Chet Baker. Let's get lost ...