The Spectator Bird.  It won the 1977 National Book Award.  Joe Allston is a retired literary agent whose parents and only son are dead, and who feels that he has been a mere spectator through life. Then a postcard from a friend causes him to return to the journals of a trip he took to his mother's birthplace to search for his roots; memories of that journey reveal that he is not quite spectator enough. Winner of the National Book Award.

The Last of the Wine. It is Mary Renault's first novel set in Ancient Greece, the setting that would become her most important arena. The novel was published in 1956 and is the second of her works to feature male homosexuality as a major theme.

The book is a convincing portrait of Athens at the close of the Golden Age and the end of the Peloponnesian War with Sparta. The Last of the Wine engages the mores and culture of Classical Greece, including symposia (drinking parties), the treatment of women, the importance of athletic, military and philosophical training among young men, marriage customs, and daily life in war and peace.

It's News to Me: The Making and Unmaking of an Editor. In this smart and savvy memoir, Kosner tells of his life in the news business. He traces his career in publishing, from his first break in 1958 just out of college at the New York Post (where he later schooled Pete Hamill) to his prickly relationship with publishing icon Katharine Graham at Newsweek (she fired him) and his meteoric rise running some of publishing's most stellar venues. As editor of New York magazine and Esquire, Kosner vaulted those magazines to their zeniths. And Kosner was at the editor's helm of the New York Daily News the day the twin towers fell. A scrawny smart-ass from Manhattan's Washington Heights, Kosner has rubbed many a publisher the wrong way, including Graham, Rupert Murdoch and Mort Zuckerman; yet he was a consummate newsman and intuitive editor who helped shaped 40 years of New York journalism. Full of political and impolitic detail and leaving no magnate undished, Kosner bridges the time between Remingtons, cold type and the blogosphere.

The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University.  Why do professors all tend to think alike? What makes it so hard for colleges to decide which subjects should be required? Why do teachers and scholars find it so difficult to transcend the limits of their disciplines? Why, in short, are problems that should be easy for universities to solve so intractable? The answer, Louis Menand argues, is that the institutional structure and the educational philosophy of higher education have remained the same for one hundred years, while faculties and student bodies have radically changed and technology has drastically transformed the way people produce and disseminate knowledge.

Utopia. There were utopias before this book that Thomas More wrote in the early 1500s, including Plato's Republic. This, however, is the book that gives us the word 'Utopia.'

 'Utopia' is a radical document. It anticipates the modern idea of communism, with private property at a minimum; it is generations ahead in the idea of equality of the sexes and freedom of religion. This may seem a remarkable statement from someone who will go to his death supporting the Roman hierarchy, but in historical irony, had religious freedom been respected in England at the time, More would have had nothing to fear. This translation from More's original Latin is modern and smoothly readable.