Designing Impact, Approaches to Practical Research (Foreign Language Press)

The bilingual book is a collection of the most successful design and research programs from students, academics, artists and designers at China Central Academy of Fine Arts and Sheffield Institute of Arts in the United Kingdom.

"Design encourages people who are from different countries and cultures to share ideas and feelings," Dave Huxtable, the first secretary of the cultural and education section of British Embassy, said at the book launch on Oct 24. "People can communicate through design, even deeper than language."

He also notes it is a "roadmap" that other universities or institutes could follow.

Case studies in the book include Cutting Edge, a major piece of public art in the center of Sheffield, advances in medical prostheses, the design of medals for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing and Chinese traditional costumes.

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, written and illustrated by Jerry Pinkney (Brown & Company)

Pinkney, who won a Caldecott Medal in 2010 for The Lion and the Mouse, brings a similar sumptuous, color-saturated aesthetic to this re-imagining of the familiar bedtime lullaby, here expanded by a few verses from its most well-known version.

A pleasingly expressive chipmunk why is this rodent's particular cuteness overlooked in children's books? stars in a free-form journey from woodland to dreamland, traveling at one point in a flying boat.

His trajectory is confusing, but children are likely to view it as just another one of night's mysteries.

Stars, by Mary Lyn Ray and illustrated by Marla Frazee (Beach Lane Books)

Does anyone illustrate the facial expressions, postures and movements of children with the same gloriously authentic exuberance as Marla Frazee (The Seven Silly Eaters, Everywhere Babies)? Here, a star takes many forms - in the night, on a wand, as a snowflake or in the wilds of a young imagination. Well matched, Ray (Mud, Red Rubber Boot Day) grounds her text in the everyday experiences of young children. "A star is how you know it's almost night," she explains. "And the dark that comes doesn't feel so dark."

The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance, by Edmund de Waal (Picador)

De Waal, a distinguished English ceramist who inherited a collection of 264 netsuke intricate, thimble-size Japanese carvings (including the hare of his title) ingeniously puts the figurines at the heart of this account of his family's survival in Nazi-occupied Europe.

The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood, by Jane Leavy (Harper Perennial)

In Sandy Koufax (2002), Leavy alternated an inning-by-inning account of that great pitcher's perfect game in 1965 with a deeply researched study of his life. The Last Boy is an episodic tour of Mantle's athletic achievements - three MVP awards, the triple crown in 1956 - and his physical and emotional traumas.

"Leavy comes as close as perhaps anyone ever has to answering 'What makes Mantle Mantle?,"' Keith Olbermann writes in the Book Review.

"She transcends the familiarity of the subject, cuts through both the hero worship and the backlash of pedestal-wrecking in the late 20th century."

Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, by Edwidge Danticat (Vintage)

Danticat, whose books include the story collection Krik? Krak! and the novel Breath, Eyes, Memory, grew up in Haiti in the 1970s, under the Duvalier dictatorships (she has lived in the United States since the age of 12). These essays reflect on the Haitian diaspora and artists who create despite the horrors that drove them from their homelands.

The Adults, by Alison Espach (Scribner)

As Emily Vidal, the teenage narrator of Espach's wry first novel, looks on, her affluent suburban family disintegrates. In a world where couples divorce, neighbors commit suicide and teachers have suspect relationships with students, Emily loses faith in the adults around her.

Nemesis, by Philip Roth (Vintage International)

It's the summer of 1944 in Roth's suspenseful novel, and a polio epidemic has taken hold of a Newark neighborhood. With fear and suspicion spreading as fast as the disease, a young playground director and military reject named Bucky Cantor turns the outbreak into his own patriotic battleground. Nemesis is "suffused with precise and painful tenderness", Leah Hager Cohen writes. "The narration is evocative of a Greek chorus, at once communal and all-knowing."

China Daily-New York Times

(China Daily 11/04/2011 page19)