My second paperback pick this week is Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande. This is Gawande’s second collection of essays (2002’s Complications was a finalist for the National Book Award). If you suffer from envy, the author may not be an easy person to like. He has degrees from Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard; he’s a surgeon in Boston; and for the past decade, he’s written brilliantly about his profession for The New Yorker (where some of these essays originally appeared). His style is smart but not showy. His interests are far-ranging -- from malpractice to epidemiology to the doctors who administer the death penalty. And he makes even a wimp like me, who feels faint at the sight of a needle, feel completely comfortable “in” the operating room. I think we’re lucky anytime someone who practices in a specialized world can make that world’s fascinations accessible and lively to outsiders. Gawande does that better than just about anyone.

Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris tells the story of the five movies -- "The Graduate," "In the Heat of the Night," "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," "Doctor Dolittle," and "Bonnie and Clyde" --nominated for Best Picture at the 1967 Academy Awards. Harris makes a strong case for each of these movies as a cultural and Hollywood landmark in its own way and for all five as a collective turning point in American cinema. The detail is exhaustive but never exhausting -- as in the fascinating story of how Simon and Garfunkel came to be on the soundtrack of "The Graduate," after snobbishly resisting at first, twenty-five-year-old artistes that they were.

At Titlepage, we’re thrilled to be featuring authors on each episode whose works have caused us to sit up and take notice. But there are always other writers out there who we feel deserve attention. So every couple of weeks, Dan and I are going to recommend additional books on the site. You can see their covers on the right-hand side of the home page, and we’ll tell you a bit more about them here on the blog. My first pick, recently published in paperback, is The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu.