Carolyn Alessio

EXPECTING ADAM By Martha Beck Times Books, 242 pages, $22.95 Martha Beck was 25 when she found out that the child she was carrying had Down syndrome. The pregnancy was...

Ritalin pills come in a range of chalky colors according to their strength--lemon yellow for 5 milligrams; pale green for 10; light yellow for 20; and white for 20-SR or...

CHOCOLAT By Joanne Harris Viking, 242 pages, $22.95 Dentists will despise this novel. When a single mother and her daughter move into a small French village and open a chocolaterie...

CRIMES OF THE CENTURY By Gilbert Geis and Leigh B. Bienen Northeastern University Press, 230 pages, $24.95 Too often, writing about true crime takes on the sensational tone of its...

DESIRE LINES By Christina Baker Kline Morrow, 343 pages, $24 Anovel involving a vanished and, of course, stunning young woman is hardly a new concept, but Christina Baker Kline artfully...

DAUGHTER OF THE RIVER By Hong Ying, translated by Howard Goldblatt Grove Press, 278 pages, $24 Hong Ying was born on the wrong side of the Yangtze in Chongqing during...

Author Bharati Mukherjee was born in 1940 in Calcutta and came to the United States in 1961 to study in the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Since then she has published nine...

FLIGHT DREAMS By Lisa Knopp University of Iowa Press, 286 pages, $22.95 A book with the subtitle "A Life in the Midwestern Landscape" may sound impossibly placid, but Lisa Knopp...

CHICAGO STORIES By James T. Farrell Edited by Charles Fanning University of Illinois Press, 256 pages, $17.95 paper James Farrell, best known for his "Studs Lonigan" trilogy and chronicling of...

MARTINI, STRAIGHT UP By Lowell Edmunds Johns Hopkins University Press, 192 pages, $24.95 The martini, a descendant of the gin cocktail, appeared in the 1870s but didn't reach its status...