You’re Only Old Once: A Book for...

You’re Only Old Once: A Book for Obsolete Children by Dr. Seuss (Random House) “takes an uneasy old man (who is us) through the anxieties, indignities, boredom, outrages and sheer terrors of a thorough examination in that advanced technological machine, a modern hospital. . . . (Theodor Seuss Geisel) is not a gloomy prophet or philosopher. He has exorcised the world’s real monsters by filling it with his own. . . . In the same way, this new book, ostensibly written for old people, may help them face up to the perils of hospitalization� (Jack Smith).

Moments of Reprieve, Primo Levi (Summit) “collects the saints, fools, schemers, clowns and crooks that Levi encountered or imagined in the concentration camp. . . . Where other Holocaust accounts--’Shoah,’ for instance--find every scrap of atrocity essential for a monument whose inscription is ‘Never Again,’ Levi scavenges every scrap of triumph for a monument whose inscription, roughly, is ‘What a Piece of Work Is Man’ � (Richard Eder).

Tap City, Ron Abell (Little, Brown). This first novel, about a three-day, seven-card-stud poker tournament, “has the structure of a murder mystery: Put a limited number of antagonists around the poker table (or dinner table) and try to guess who will be eliminated (or killed) and who will emerge victorious. . . . (Ron) Abell is obviously a poker player himself and a keen observer of the ever-growing tournament scene� (David M. Hayano).

The Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes; Tobias Smollet, translator; Carlos Fuentes, introduction (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). “Smollett as novelist had a fondness for the raffish, the ribald, the squalid, and the extreme in society, and a masterfully comic, mock-ornate language for their depiction.� The appearance of this work, out of print for a century, is “a genuine literary event� (Jack Miles).

Sea Dangers: The Affair of the Somers, Philip McFarland (Schocken). “As a portrait of a turbulent time, as naval history, as human tragedy, and as proof that the authors of American classics sometimes breathed fire and brimstone, ‘Sea Dangers’ is a tremendous success� (Brian Burns).