Louis Bayard's Roosevelt's Beast blends historical fiction with horror in a suspenseful imagining of an American president and his son facing down a nightmare in the dense jungles of Brazil.

Though aging former president Theodore Roosevelt is known for his adventuring, his wife insists their second son accompany him on an Amazonian expedition in 1914. The journey goes poorly from the beginning. When a lack of food leads Theodore and Kermit to hunt too far from camp, father and son are kidnapped by an Amazon tribe and expected to save their captors from an elusive beast that disembowels its victims. Aided by a longtime captive named Luz and her son, Thiego, the Roosevelts stalk and slay the Beast, but Kermit finds himself unable to join wholeheartedly in the tribe's celebration. A sixth sense tells him that the animal they killed was a red herring, that the Beast still lives and now inhabits one of his companions.

Bayard (The School of Night) reimagines the real-life Roosevelt expedition--as recounted in Candace Millard's The River of Doubt--in a tense and brooding manner that never fails to deliver chills and peril in a claustrophobic jungle atmosphere. His ability to capture the delicate relationship between a giant of a man and the son who struggles to come into his own brings an unexpectedly touching aspect to an often-brutal story. This journey into darkness strikes enough notes that a variety of readers will find an element to tempt them, whether it's the terrifying unknown or the simple desires of the human heart. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

Daniel Levine's debut novel, Hyde, comes with Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde appended to the back of the book. It's an unusual move, but one that enables Levine--in his introduction to the classic story--to discuss why he was inspired to create a new take that attempts to craft "a convincing psychological model to explain Jekyll's plunge into self-annihilation."

Levine's tale, which takes place in London over four days in March 1886, begins "Henry Jekyll is dead," picking up where Stevenson left off. Though told from Hyde's perspective, it's more a strange tale of Hyde and Jekyll. Levine's Hyde exists alongside Jekyll's consciousness; inside Jekyll's head, he can reflect on all of his counterpart's thoughts and actions, as well as his own actions as Hyde. He recalls that, shortly after the transformations began, he used Jekyll's money to buy a house and hire a charwoman: "Just like that," he writes, "I was a legitimate human being." Sex, murder and debauchery follow. Now, two years since Jekyll first "ejected me into the world," Hyde says the change "has never felt so smooth before." But Jekyll is gone, dead--and Hyde is alone.

Levine's version of Stevenson's story uncovers a dark, perverse "father" theme that haunts both men. Hyde is masterfully told, with plenty of damp and spooky London gothic atmosphere. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Inappropriate Behavior is full of unpleasantness. These are miserable, excellent stories, featuring conspiracy theorists, perverts, depressive psychopaths and uncontrollable adolescents. Bad things happen to good people, good people do bad things and bad people just keep on being bad.

Murray Farish is fascinated with the most sordid corners of American history, especially presidential assassinations: in "The Passage," a young man catching a ride to France in 1959 finds himself sharing a berth with an abrasive man named Lee Harvey Oswald; the narrator of "The Alternative History Club" is a young woman who believes she's seeing JFK's real killer everywhere decades after the assassination (hint: it's not Oswald). "Lubbock Is Not a Place of the Spirit" features a protagonist recognizable as would-be Reagan assassin John Hinckley, Jr. The title story, which is also the best of the collection, focuses on more mundane dysfunction, as an underemployed father whose son has myriad undiagnosed behavioral issues watches his comfortable life spiral slowly, sadly away, one more casualty of the great recession.

Farish plays with stream-of-consciousness narration, sliding in and out of his characters' deranged psyches. The stories often begin with a straightforward recollection of events, then end on a disconcerting, surreal note. For all its darkness, though, this is a funny book. Farish sets out to prove that you don't have to be an optimist to be happy, nor do you have to be successful to be interesting. Inappropriate Behavior is America the beautiful, in all its ugly glory. --Emma Page, bookseller at Wellesley Books in Wellesley, Mass.

The 1961 disappearance of 23-year-old Michael Rockefeller off the coast of New Guinea triggered decades of dark rumors regarding his possible fate at the hands of cannibals. Though Rockefeller was officially declared dead by drowning, no physical evidence was ever found of his doomed attempt to reach shore from his capsized boat. Carl Hoffman's Savage Harvest presents a nearly conclusive chronicle of Rockefeller's disappearance, reopening the case with new evidence--gleaned in part through months spent among descendants of the Asmat tribesmen who likely killed and consumed the young explorer.

Western New Guinea of the late 1950s and early 1960s was a largely ungoverned Netherlands colony, an isolated expanse of Stone Age tribes with a handful of Dutch missionaries and administrators. The Asmat, an ethnic group on the Arafura Sea, still practiced their ancient traditions, including ritualized cannibalism, despite an unenforceable ban by the Dutch. Just three years before Rockefeller's arrival, an overzealous Dutch administrator had killed five Asmat men during an armed patrol. The tribe members believed their slain relatives could not find peace until their deaths were "balanced," a debt incurred by usually untouchable white men--which suddenly became repayable when they found an exhausted Rockefeller.

Hoffman's own journeys through modern Asmat mix introspective travelogue with historical investigation. His findings are fascinating, if never quite conclusive. Even a month living in an Asmat village fails to elicit any confessions or physical proof of Rockefeller's fate. However, Hoffman's evidence, though circumstantial, is the strongest indication yet Michael Rockefeller was one of the final victims of headhunting in Asmat. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer

Evelyn Barish's The Double Life of Paul de Man is an amazing biography, an age-old story of hubris and the fall of one of the 20th century's most influential literary critics.

Along with Jacques Derrida, de Man created deconstruction, a very difficult and obscure theory of literary analysis. Barish observed de Man's classes in the 1960s; she couldn't understand what he was talking about, she admits, but "he had a magnetic pull." When he died in 1983, the New York Times ran his obituary on the front page. Five years later, it came out that the Belgian native had collaborated with the Nazis during World War II and had written an anti-Semitic article. The revelations rocked the academic world; Newsweek even put the story on its cover.

Barish (Emerson: The Roots of Prophecy) was determined to find out who de Man really was. Her research in Belgium revealed that he was a bigamist who embezzled funds from his own postwar publishing company, yet he occasionally gave assistance to the Resistance even while he was working with the Nazis. The de Man she discovered was a "chameleon," easily changing colors when it suited his purpose, escaping time and again--eventually to the United States, where he kept his past a secret and rose to the highest levels of academia. As Barish writes, each new revelation in this mesmerizing exposé leads to "new and more tangled mysteries" about its subject's life. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

When the 2011 tsunami killed 15,000 people, damaged almost a million buildings and all but wiped out the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the world saw yet another example of modern Japan's resilience in the face of disaster. David Pilling, the Asia editor for the Financial Times, traces the modern history of Japan's many rebounds in the engaging Bending Adversity. Beginning with the humbling postwar occupation by American forces, his analysis takes us through the Kobe earthquake, the Tokyo subway sarin attack, the bursting of the nation's real estate bubble in 1990 (which left "lost decades" of economic hardship in its wake) and the devastating earthquake that led to 2011's tsunami, where Tokyo skyscrapers "lurched toward each other like bamboo in the wind." Samuel Beckett ("I can't go on, I'll go on") had nothing on Japanese existential perseverance.

Recounting one disaster after another, Pilling demonstrates the incredible endurance of the Japanese--their "gamanzuyoi" (steadfast patience), built on what one playwright described as "an intriguing tradition of forging onward while holding on to a sense of our own impermanence." No fawning Nipponophile, Pilling notes that many of the factors that give Japan its resilience (reverence for the past, a homogenous population, an ingrained respect for courtesy and order) have also mired its people and economy in a sluggish, inward-looking miasma while China, Korea and other Asian countries have bolted full speed into the 21st century.

Bending Adversity is the definitive Western insider's look at Japan as it is today--a country and people that, Pilling concludes, "it would be foolish to count out just yet." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kans.

Detroit may be today's poster child for Rust Belt decay, but according to David Giffels, Akron, Ohio, began rolling downhill long before Detroit fell on hard times. Once home to all of the country's major tire companies and proudly wearing the tag "Rubber Capital of the World," Akron's population has dropped 30% from its peak in the 1960s and '70s, its factories reduced to totem smoke stacks. The Hard Way on Purpose collects a potpourri of Giffels's musings on the things that make old Midwest cities like Akron special. As he asks its emigrants, "Hamburgers and ice cream and bowling and rock music and soap-box racers and Chuck Taylors and football.... Why are you leaving here?"

In these linked essays, Giffels (All the Way Home) riffs on the loss of Akron-born LeBron James and rock star Chrissie Hynde, the fickle, often harsh weather, the dearth of pro sports championship titles in nearby Cleveland, professional bowling, the "four-chord rock riff" of the "Akron sound," real estate gentrification and the city's ubiquitous thrift stores. In one of the best pieces, he wanders the local Goodwill in his Gold Circle sneakers ("unabashed knockoffs of the Adidas Country") looking for a vintage bowling shirt. To Giffels, thrift stores define the Rust Belt. In the aisles of Goodwill, he finds the history of his home town--"the high-school-band sweatshirts and hospital-sponsored 5K freebie T-shirts and Myrtle Beach souvenirs." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

When asked why the atmosphere in Washington is so acrimonious, Bill Clinton once responded that "too many members of the Congress in both parties are sleep deprived… it clouds your judgment, and it undermines your ability to be relaxed and respectful in dealing with your adversaries."

Clinton's theory echoes mental health counselor Kat Duff's own observations of her clients, which, along with her "lifelong love of sleep," prompted her to write The Secret Life of Sleep, a multidisciplinary, multitudinous exploration of slumber's various aspects, from the biological to the spiritual.

In addition to her own experiences with sleep and dreaming, Duff (The Alchemy of Illness) noticed that when her clients addressed their sleep problems, other issues inevitably became more manageable. She analyzes the cognitive effects sleep has on our emotional and physical well being, including a section on how the popular "Ferber" method of teaching infants to sleep independently may affect their future happiness (and encourage a predilection for anxiety and guilt).

"I have come to think of sleep in our day and age as a wild creature that has been taken into captivity," Duff writes, "trying desperately to adapt to a radically changed habitat. It is alive but struggling, showing signs of stress from the effort to adjust to new and constraining conditions: impossible schedules, nighttime lights, overseas flights, a chemical soup of stimulants and sedatives, and hyper-vigilant nervous systems, to name a few." With The Secret Life of Sleep, Duff helps her readers tame sleep and embrace healthy habits. --Kristen Galles from Book Club Classics

A deceptively simple narrative structure reveals the myriad ways birds prepare for their offspring's arrival.

Jennifer Ward describes their approaches in four-line stanzas. For the woodpecker, "Mama built a little nest/ inside a sturdy trunk./ She used her beak to tap-tap-tap/ the perfect place to bunk." Long gray lines on the black wings of the birds emphasize the tree's vertical majesty and make the hollowed-out home pop on the page. Next, a hummingbird builds "a cup so wee and snug," its "walls of moss" so tactile in Steve Jenkins's (My First Day) collage that readers will want to touch it. Near each stanza, a brief scientific explanation offers more facts. The story may be read straight through, or the reader can linger to take in more information about the scene pictured. Ward also gives examples of mothers who lay eggs in nests "another made"; fathers who serve as "living nest[s]" (the emperor penguin); and even a "Daddy [who] built a little nest./ And then he built another./ And another. And another--/ hoping to impress my mother" (wrens). Some nests float (grebes); others are scraped out of a high ledge (falcons).

Ward brings the book back to the child in the closing lines: "You have a nest--your very own!/ A place to rest your head..." Jenkins depicts a robin's nest outside a child's bedroom window, then, with a turn of the page, shows the nest as the child would view it from inside the house. This excellent first science book doubles as a bedtime story. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Wendy Townsend (The Sundown Rule) convincingly portrays a high school student who spends a life-changing summer caring for endangered blue iguanas on Grand Cayman Island.

Clarice, who narrates, cares so much for animals that she must leave her favorite teacher's biology class rather than dissect a frog. She practices what she preaches: she is vegan and will not wear leather goods. When Clarice decides to spend the summer at the Blue Iguana Recovery Program in the Cayman Islands, readers learn about this unusual habitat right along with Clarice. She describes the rough karst terrain as she accompanies two researchers attempting to find out where a blue iguana named GRG (Green-Red-Green, referring to her markings) has stashed her eggs, the sweltering heat inland, and the smell of the ocean on a windy day. Readers also learn about the lizards' diet, their life expectancy and how many eggs they typically lay. Before her trip, it seemed impossible for Clarice to imagine being a marine biologist and eating fish, as is the case with one of her new friends, but she begins to see there's room for balance and interconnectedness in the world.

Readers will grow to care as much for the blue iguanas as Clarice and the other volunteers do. When tragedy strikes the preserve, it may well feel as devastating to readers as it is for the volunteers. Give this absorbing read to any nature lover. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness