People

Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (Random House) -- a vivid and often heartbreaking memoir by a daughter of white farmers who moved from Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to Malawi to Zambia -- has been drawing the sort of praise from reviewers and booksellers that first-time authors dream of.

A brilliant young lawyer practices in a small town in the Deep South; respected and beloved, he's elected to the state legislature. He continues practicing law while serving in the House of Representatives for years until a case about rape and revenge changes his life forever.

Mark Kurlansky has become a veritable regular on the Book Sense 76 List. The hardcover edition of his The Basque History of the World (Walker) appeared on the November/December list in 1999; the hardcover edition of The White Man in the Tree: And Other Stories (Washington Square Press) was on the January/February 2001 list; and The Basque History of the World paperback (Penguin) was featured on the March/April Book Sense 76 in 2001.

"Like son, like father," Alabama Booksmith owner Jake Reiss III describes his foray into bookselling to BTW. His son Jake IV sold books door-to-door; son Frank became manager of Acorn Books in San Francisco then moved to Atlanta and opened the still thriving A Capella Books in the late '80s. Jake's brother Norman also sold books, at Malone's Bookstore in Tuscaloosa.

Ernest Hebert, novelist and Dartmouth professor of writing, has taken to the open road for a book tour with stops at about 15 Book Sense stores. His work of historical fiction, The Old American (Hardscrabble, University Press of New England), set in the New England frontier during the French and Indian Wars, is based on the true story of an English settler kidnapped by an Algonkian king, Caucus-Meteor.

Karl Kilian, owner of Brazos Bookstore in Houston, is determined to try to put his city and his store on the literary map. "[The University of] Houston has this very good writing program … and it's made serious inroads to the consciousness of the city. But we still don't figure in nationally," he told BTW. "When times were better, [Brazos] bookstore itself could hold events ... but we're off the map in terms of author tours."

Tony Earley, author of Somehow Form a Family Photo Credit: Jim Herrington by Tony Earley

By Susan Salter Reynolds Los Angeles Times Staff Writer Poetry is in the front hall. Music in the living room. Books on books in the dining room. Science under the piano in the family room. Classics are in the little wooden bookshelf with glass-paneled doors, but only run through Aristotle before they spill over into the den. There are 4,000 books inside the house, 10,000 more in storage. Once, the pantry held cans and plates and no books. Now, the shelves are filled with pages.