Richard Leroy and Etienne Davodeau, two men in their 40s living in France, come to appreciate their differing, but remarkably similar, viewpoints on the creation of art when they exchange jobs and engage in a spirited discussion of ideas in Davodeau's quiet, philosophical graphic novel, The Initiates.

The story begins in Leroy's Montbenault vineyard, as he shows Davodeau the basics of pruning grapes. Through four seasons, as Leroy educates Davodeau about the art of winemaking, Davodeau develops Leroy's sensibilities in the area of comics. Leroy views wine as the link between earth and man--and his vineyard as another living, breathing incarnation of himself. Davodeau has trouble grasping this "living" concept initially, but through energetic discourses about art, comics and wine with his "master"--and a nose-to-the-ground crash course in wine-growing--he begins to appreciate the analogies between the two seemingly dichotomous professions.

In one beautifully rendered scene, this understanding is brought to fruition when Leroy equates barrel-making to book-printing; both wine and novel must leave the inventor's hands and become dependent on others for its final output. Later, as Davodeau sits at his drafting table completing a drawing with Leroy looking over his shoulder, Leroy ties the "art" arising from Davodeau's fingers to the manual "artistry"--pruning, weeding, feeding, plowing--required to bring the vineyard to full bloom.

Davodeau's lines are clean and economically sparse, but powerful enough to forge the bonds that tie both professions together. He concludes that books, like wine, bring people together and cultivate new friendships based on mutual understanding. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

Linda Greenlaw's identity was tied to her island home. As a fishing boat captain and an author (The Lobster Chronicles), she writes in Lifesaving Lessons, she "longed for home while at sea as much as [she] longed for the sea while at home." Although her list of friends was small, her relationship with a man tenuous, she was relatively happy. Little did she know how hiring quiet, hardworking 15-year-old Mariah to work on her boat one summer would change her insular life. When Greenlaw learned that Mariah was a victim of pedophilia, she reacted instinctively, taking Mariah into her home and heart and becoming the abused girl's legal guardian.

The sudden flood of maternal, protective feelings caught Greenlaw off-guard. "I had been struggling for some time with the seemingly contradictory impulses of pulls from the sea and shore, and trying to find the right balance," she admits. "Mariah's presence in my life made finding it that much more difficult. I was never so tempted to hop aboard a boat and leave my troubles behind as I always had as I was now." With frankness, Greenlaw describes the emotional turmoil of the next three years as ward and guardian navigated the oftentimes rough waters of their new life together. Greenlaw was determined to make her new life as a parent work, however, and Lifesaving Lessons is a heartwarming testament to the tenacity of one woman to make a difference in the life of a child. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

Born in Yokohama, Leslie Helm found himself a gaijin, or foreigner, growing up as an outsider in both Japan and the United States, straddling two cultural identities without belonging to either one. This identity crisis, and the challenges of raising adopted Japanese children with his wife in an outwardly looking Caucasian home, ultimately prompted the Los Angeles Times correspondent to rediscover his family's roots.

Yokohama Yankee traces five generations of Helm's family in Japan, starting with his German great-grandfather Julius' immigration to Yokohama in 1869. Julius and his Japanese wife, Hiro, had eight children, many who would go on to influence and steer the powerful Helm Brothers company through pivotal moments in Yokohama's history. Increasingly insular and xenophobic policies enacted by the Japanese during World War II resulted in the family's ultimate rejection of their Asian heritage, seeking to avoid both Japanese political prisoner camps and U.S. internment camps.

Helm draws upon his great grandfather's unpublished memoir and primary source material from the Japanese government archives, personal letters, artifacts and interviews with surviving employees of Helm Brothers and family members to bring his poignant and heartbreaking homecoming to life. Through his research and his relationships with the Japanese people, Helm comes to view Japan not as the isolationist country of his foreign correspondent days, but as the warm, embracing presence that welcomed a German outsider and helped him succeed beyond the strictest of racial and political constraints. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

For Rachael Hanel, death is business, the cycle of life. With We'll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down, a girl "who grew up in cemeteries" and "ran around the necropolis, the city of the dead, taking in the fresh air, living and breathing and laughing as those below me no longer could" has written a humorously heartbreaking, philosophically engaging, intellectually stimulating and spiritual story that reads like a slap in the face--poignant, brooding yet ever hopeful. It is a tale of childhood innocence lost and found, of relationships fractured and reformed, of faith and recovery.

Hanel's memoir revolves around her father, a farm laborer turned gravedigger who adopts the name Digger O'Dell. Death becomes a daily ritual, and young Rachael weaves in and out of burial plots with the exuberance and innocence of youth; by adolescence, death has become less mysterious and more tangible, prompting Hanel to build a defensive mental wall around it. Hanel is 11 when her father purchases the family gravestone and 15 when he dies suddenly. In death, she finally understands the gravity of sorrow and grief, "the part the story left out."

Hanel takes readers on a transformative journey that weaves together her Catholic faith with the burdens that death leaves behind, adeptly handling a subject many still consider taboo. Any reader will be thankful for the naked honesty and craft they encounter in this fine memoir. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

Nothing quite matches minor league baseball for reflecting the historical ambience of small-town America--unless it's the even smaller town version known as "semi-pro." Journalist Tom Dunkel taps the semi-pro mother lode in his first book, Color Blind, as he captures the bizarre history of the Bismarck Churchills, the first integrated professional baseball team.

Bismarck, N.Dak., is the last place one might expect Alabama-born Satchel Paige to hang his glove, but he was lured to the city that William Clark (of Lewis & Clark) described as "more cold than I thought possible for man to endure" by the checkbook of Neil Churchill, a local car dealer and former ballplayer. Churchill liked to win, and if that meant the stars from the Negro League, he was unafraid of racial fallout. He knew that if he fielded a winning team, the fans would come.

Churchill first recruited catcher Quincy Troupe as a way to entice Paige, then signed power hitter Charles "Red" Haley, followed by two white sluggers, "Beef" Ringhofer and "Sock" Johnson. When he persuaded talented pitcher/catcher Ted "Double-Duty" Radcliffe to join his team in 1935, he had the whole package. Bismarck closed the season by winning the first semi-pro national tournament in front of an overflow crowd in racially sensitive Wichita, Kan., where local sportswriters struggled to describe the superiority of the team's "colored boys." Full of colorful baseball lore, as well as social commentary, Color Blind is both first-rate history and an entertaining underdog sports story. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Moses Gates is no ordinary traveler, nor is he a typical memoirist. Hidden Cities is a recollection of his urban explorations in the greatest cities of the world over a 10-year period. It begins in New York City, as Gates moves in with the woman he would soon marry. In love with his new home and his new wife, he enrolls in graduate school for urban planning and starts poking around old subway tracks, abandoned observation decks and massive bridges.

While Gates's passion for urban exploration grows, his marriage suffers; after his divorce, he's free to expand his adventures to other cities. He descends to the catacombs beneath Paris and a limestone quarry under Odessa, climbs to the bell tower of Notre Dame, travels along one of London's "lost" rivers, explores the underground of Naples and tours an abandoned coffee baron's mansion in Sao Paulo. The accounts of these journeys are often accompanied by historical facts and intriguing profiles of the fellow urban explorers he meets along the way, and the occasional documentation of the artwork Gates finds in the most unexpected of places is also wonderfully surprising.

Gates's travelogue does more than introduce the reader to the gritty undergrounds and highest climbing spots of the world's greatest cities--Hidden Cities ultimately celebrates the urban history and architectural evolution of mankind. For those of us who will never get to experience such places, Gates is a perfect travel companion. --Roni K. Devlin, owner, Literary Life Bookstore

This fifth book in the Olympians series from author-artist George O'Connor lives up to the exceedingly high standards he set with his launch title, Zeus. Each entry stands alone, but O'Connor also rewards fans of the series with references that allow connections between the Olympians' stories.

Here he begins, "The war against the first gods, the Titans, had just ended." Readers who've been with O'Connor since the beginning will get the reference to Zeus, and those just entering the series need no further explanation as Poseidon begins his narrative. An opening sequence of panel illustrations establishes Poseidon's power over the seas, and his hatred for Odysseus because he blinded Poseidon's son. O'Connor uses his palette and panel layouts to clearly delineate past and present, when Poseidon flashes back to the story of each of his offspring's birth. A central thread involves his child with Aethra of Troezen, Theseus. Poseidon tells the legend of the Minotaur (and connects it back to Hera's story). Expanding images cleverly lay out Theseus's impossible task of surviving the labyrinth, were it not for some key tools from Ariadne (a sword and spool of thread). O'Connor riffs on this visual motif with a series of vertical panels that brilliantly conveys the shift of power from the Minotaur to Theseus in their climactic conflict.

Detailed endnotes help readers connect other references between Poseidon's story and other entries in the cartoonist's tales of the Olympians. A suspenseful, gripping addition to a stellar series. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

This playful picture book pays tribute to the joyous effect art can have on the viewer.

The endpapers give a hint of the fine art to follow. Eggplant-colored watercolors suggest works by Van Gogh, da Vinci and Picasso, among others. Then, emulating the style that he established with The Dot, Peter H. Reynolds strips away all but the girl and the art that inspires her. "When I see a work of art, something happens in my heart," begins the text, in rhyming couplets, by debut author Susan Verde. He puts the girl in a spin when faced with Van Gogh's Starry Night ("Now I'm all twirly-whirly, twinkly, sparkly, super swirly"). Rodin's sculpture "The Thinker" causes the heroine to ape his pose ("Hmmm... I think I'll analyze the whos and whats and wheres and whys"). Author and artist vary the moods for humorous effect, too. The heroine skips past a trio of floral landscapes--"Fragrant, soft, and so delightful"--and winds up in front of Munch's "The Scream"--"Suddenly, it's all so frightful!"

The climax occurs in front of a giant empty canvas that dwarfs the girl: "Is this a joke? I shut my eyes, and something happens, to my surprise." She sees elements from some of the previous paintings, then realizes she can fill her own canvas. It's the best kind of inspiration, a call to creative action. The only thing missing is a key to the artwork the heroine has witnessed, to allow children to explore more from the artists previewed here. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness