The Rug Merchant, Phillip Lopate (Viking). “A...

The Rug Merchant, Phillip Lopate (Viking). “A small and quietly wonderful novel.� Cyrus, “a fully achieved and perduring character . . . can understand and appreciate everything; he can talk gracefully and eloquently, but he can’t say: ‘I want’ � (Richard Eder).

Watching Television: A Pantheon Guide to Popular Culture, edited by Todd Gitlin; Reading the News: A Pantheon Guide to Popular Culture, edited by Robert Karl Manoff and Michael Schudson (Pantheon). The seven essays in “Watching Television� emphasize “how television is implicated in the growing sense of impotence and fragmentation that characterize the American mood.� “Reading the News� tries “to demystify journalism by revealing in specific terms how the news happens.� Both books are “rich and provocative� (Neil Postman).

Winston S. Churchill: Road to Victory, 1941-1945, Martin Gilbert (Houghton Mifflin). “An engrossing history of Churchill’s crucial role in the grand alliance of World War II from Pearl Harbor to V.E. Day� (David Eisenhower).

The Enigma of Arrival, V. S. Naipaul (Knopf). “An oblique, exasperating and finally moving . . . journal and series of reflections based on the years that Naipaul spent in the English countryside� (Richard Eder).