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In his memoir, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate, Bird describes his childhood experience growing up near a checkpoint that separated Israeli and Arab sections of Jerusalem. "These are two people who are filled with victimhood," he tells NPR's Robert Siegel.

Gabrielle Burton's near lifelong obsession with Tamsen Donner — the wife of the leader of the fatal expedition — has produced a haunting novel, Impatient with Desire, and a must-read memoir, Searching for Tamsen Donner. Critic Maureen Corrigan says the stories are unforgettable.

Private Life, the new novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley, follows the life of a midwestern woman who moves with her new husband, an astronomer, to California at the start of the 20th century. Reviewer Maureen Corrigan says the story, which spans a half-century, is beautifully observed.

The summer sun may be shining, but vampires don't seem to be going anywhere. NPR's Margot Adler has read more than 100 vampire books this year, and gives a heads-up on two bloodsucking books expected to be summer blockbusters: Christopher Farnsworth's Blood Oath and Justin Cronin's The Passage.

In April of 1943, the body of a British Royal Marine washed ashore in Spain, carrying top secret letters about Allied plans to invade Greece and Sardinia. Or so it seemed. In reality, the body was that of a homeless Welsh laborer, and the letters were fakes designed to direct German attention away from the real Allied invasion target: Sicily.

Railroad tycoon Leland Stanford drove the golden spike that connected the country's first transcontinental line in 1869, setting off decades of fierce competition for routes to the Pacific. Historian Walter Borneman follows the rails in his new book, Rival Rails: The Race to Build America's Greatest Transcontinental Railroad.

Dinaw Mengestu's How to Read the Air is an unsentimental meditation on the immigrant experience and the illusory idea of asylum. With lyrical prose, he reassesses the by-your-bootstraps mythology associated with American mobility.

Authors Philip Furia and Laurie Patterson share the stories behind Hollywood's most beloved songs — from Casablanca's "As Time Goes By" to the melodies from Mary Poppins — in their book The Songs of Hollywood.

Author Yoko Ogawa's Hotel Iris, published in Japanese in 1996, is the latest of her books to be translated into English. Critic Maureen Corrigan says the story, about a 17-year-old girl who begins an intense, sometimes violent affair with a tenant of her mother's rundown hotel, is decadent and profoundly sad.

Before the BP explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, the worst domestic oil spill was the 1989 Exxon Valdez in Alaska. The accident gave the oil giant a jolt and prompted the company to rethink its approach to safety. Now, Exxon does considerably better than the industry average on several safety-related measures.