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FANFAIR

Novels about war-ravaged Africa have long been the province chiefly of male writers. Now Susan Minot brings us Thirty Girls (Knopf), a haunting portrayal of two women: Esther, an abducted teen turned child soldier, and Jane, the privileged white American journalist on a mission to capture the voices of these children. Bobbed, liquored up, and looking for danger, Flappers (Sarah Crichton) were both glamorized and demonized by 1920s society. Judith Mackrell toasts six of the era’s most extraordinary rebel girls. Here’s a touchy subject: Why are some cultural groups in America—such as the Mormons, Cubans, Indians, and Chinese—succeeding and amassing wealth while others (we know who we are) are not? Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld argue that certain traits—a sense of superiority, inferiority, and impulse control—make up The Triple Package (Penguin Press) dictating whether a group rises or falls. Annie Jacobsen cracks Operation Paperclip (Little, Brown), the covert post-W.W. II program of bringing former Nazis, the Reich’s greatest scientific minds, to America. V.F. contributing editor Howard Blum'sDark Invasion (Harper) throws light on the war of espionage and terror Germany waged against the U.S. in 1915. Dasa Drndic honors the lives of Italian Jews imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp in Trieste (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). The last of W. G. Sebald's major works to be translated into English, A Place in the Country (Random House), pays tribute to six artists who shaped his vision, and is a memoir of the great author’s emigration and artistic maturation. Photographer Builder Levy'sAppalachia USA (David R. Godine) does for today’s coal miners what Walker Evans did for sharecroppers and tenant farmers in the Dust Bowl. William Burroughs, one of the most provocative, influential, and innovative writers of our age, would have hit 100 this month. To celebrate, score Barry Miles'sCall Me Burroughs (Twelve). Love: no subject is more mystifying. Love Illuminated (Morrow), by Daniel Jones, editor of The New York Times’s “Modern Love” column, is a valentine to those who simply can’t get enough of other people’s love lives. Meaning pretty much everyone.

ELISSA SCHAPPELL