IN BRIEF (Page 19)

Pearl Buck in China: Journey to The Good Earth, by Hilary Spurling (Simon & Schuster)

Pearl Buck (1892-1973), the daughter of missionaries and the first US woman to win a Nobel for literature, spent nearly all of the first 42 years of her life in China, and her childhood was marked by poverty and social upheavals. Spurling traces the biographical background of Buck's prodigious writing: In addition to her Pulitzer-winning novel, The Good Earth, Buck wrote dozens of novels, memoirs, stories and magazine articles. Times reviewer Stacy Schiff called this book "an extraordinary portrait".

One More Theory About Happiness: A Memoir, by Paul Guest (Ecco/HarperCollins)