Craig Seligman

“The Dictator” makes jokes about 9/11, torture, amputees, female body hair and several ethnic groups. Extended sequences involve masturbation and (more graphically than you can imagine) childbirth.

A black veteran returning from the Korean War gets word that his sister is in trouble: “Come fast. She be dead if you tarry.”

Thirty-four years ago, in “The World According to Garp,” John Irving created a transsexual for the ages in a former football player named Roberta Muldoon. (John Lithgow played her in the movie.)

Black woman, white man: Jabu and Steve, the mixed-race couple Nadine Gordimer has built “No Time Like the Present” around, are trying to lead a normal life in the new South Africa. Insofar as anybody can.

In the strange world of Ben Marcus’s novel “The Flame Alphabet,” language has turned poisonous. Only children are immune to its toxins, and so children, all of a sudden, are dangerous: Their singing and shouting and jabbering can kill.

The aerial shots of the Maldives in “The Island President” could make anybody long to snorkel.

You know the drawing: a male nude facing front, becurled and muscular, with two sets of arms and legs, one touching the circumference of a circle, the other the sides of a square. In “Da Vinci’s Ghost,” the journalist Toby Lester peers closely at Leonardo’s “Vitruvian Man” -- its origins, its meaning and the circumstances of the artist who drew it.

San Francisco, 1974. A professor banished from his post (for what disgrace we don’t quite know, only that it involved a “dear student”) takes refuge in a cubby of a downtown office.

The most amazing stories in “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” are about Israel or Israelis, and what’s amazing about them, in part, is how they avoid politics.

“God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World” isn’t exactly a history. As the subtitle suggests, the author, Cullen Murphy, is really interested in examining the dread institution’s relation to the world we live in now. His last book was titled “Are We Rome?” His new one is short, entertaining and formidably smart.

Pak Jun Do, the hero of Adam Johnson’s novel “The Orphan Master’s Son,” is a North Korean macho man who suffers deeply but silently.

Among the many improprieties Sally Bedell Smith cites in her biography “Elizabeth the Queen” is the time Jimmy Carter planted a kiss on the Queen Mother. She later said she hadn’t been kissed that way since the death of King George VI.