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Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11
by Thomas Friedman

Longitudes and Attitudes is made up of the columns Friedman has published about September 11, the most momentous news story of our time, as well as a diary of his private experiences and reflections during his reporting on the post-September 11 world, as the author travels from Afghanistan to Israel to Europe to Indonesia to Saudi Arabia. More than any other journalist writing, Friedman gives voice to America's awakening sense of a radically new world and our own complex place in it.

Back When We Were Grownups
by Anne Tyler

At 53, Rebecca Davitch- mistress of The Open Arms, a crumbling 19th-century row house in Baltimore where giving parties is the family business-suddenly asks herself whether she has turned into the wrong person. Is she really this natural-born celebrator; joyous and out-going?

Certainly that's how Joe Davitch saw her 30-some years ago. And that's why this large-spirited older man, a divorce with three little girls, swept her into his orbit. Before she knew it, she was embracing his extended family (plus a child of their own) and hosting endless parties in the ornate, high-ceilinged rooms where people paid to celebrate their family occasions in style.

But can Beck (as she is known to the Davitch clan) really recover the person she has left behind? A question that touches us all-and one that Anne Tyler explores with characteristic humor and wisdom in a novel one wishes would never end.

False Memory
by Dean Koontz

Martie Rhodes is a young wife (happily married to Dustin for three years), a video game designer, and a compassionate woman who takes her agoraphobic friend Carol to therapy sessions. Carol is so afraid of leaving her apartment that the trips are grim ordeals for both women - but bonding experiences as well.

Then one morning Martie experiences a sudden fear of her own, a brief but disquieting terror of...her shadow. The episode it over quickly. It leaves her shaken but amused. Then, as she is about to check her makeup, she realizes she is terrified to look in the mirror and confront her own face.

As the episodes of this traumatic condition - autophobia - build, the lives of Martie and her husband change drastically. Frantic to discover the trigger for her descent into hell, Dustin begins to look into the background of a respected therapist. As he comes closer to the truth about this strange and troubled "healer," Dustin finds himself afflicted with a condition even more bizarre and terrifying than Martie's.