FOR YOUR DESK

Doing Business in China: How to Profit in the World’s Fastest Growing Market

By Ted Plafker

(Warner, $24.99)

As Earth’s most populous nation, housing fully one-fifth of all humans alive today, China represents a mammoth market for goods. But it’s also something of a mystery for many American business leaders. Plafker, a Beijing correspondent for The Economist, assumes an insider’s and interpreter’s role in this book, which is designed to give corporate strategists clues about where sales opportunities exist (biotech and retail are both ripe), how to navigate China’s shifting legal hurdles, and even how companies can work that superpower’s political system to their best advantage. Information here would be beneficial both to international corporate execs and to U.S. investors hoping to benefit from developing overseas markets.

FOR YOUR NIGHTSTAND

Stalin’s Ghost

By Martin Cruz Smith

(Simon & Schuster, $26.95)

Twenty-six years after his introduction in Gorky Park, Moscow cop Arkady Renko is still fighting the bureaucracy and cynicism that make his job difficult, even pointless. This time out, he’s dogging a once-heralded soldier and police officer, gathering evidence of the man’s corruption. However, he’s also having to deal with seemingly ludicrous reports about the late Soviet leader Joseph Stalin haunting a metro train platform; the sudden disappearance of his adopted son; and his girlfriend’s decision to pick up where she left off with her former boyfriend, who just happens to be the dirty cop Renko is investigating. Smith has proven himself to be an exceptional storyteller, with a particular proficiency in milking emotion and humor from what in another writer’s hands might be bleak plots and bland players.

The Snake Stone

By Jason Goodwin (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, $25)

Goodwin – whose first novel, The Janissary Tree (2006), won plaudits and award nominations – now offers up a second adventure for eunuch investigator Yashim Togalu. A French archaeologist visits Istanbul in 1838, looking for a lost Byzantine artifact, but instead winds up dead. Yashim takes on the case, only to reason that he is the only good suspect. Nonetheless, he launches an investigation that reveals the existence of extremists committed to reviving the Byzantine Empire, places Yashim in the company of the sultan’s West Indies-born mother, and puts into his hands a 16th-century book that may help him sort out the tangle of motives and manipulators behind the foreign archaeologist’s demise. An exotic gem.

Presidential Diversions: From George Washington to George W. Bush

By Paul F. Boller Jr.

(Harcourt, $25)

Former history professor Boller has made a literary career out of cataloguing the quirks and quips of U.S. chief executives. Here he recalls their favorite pastimes, from John Quincy Adams’ penchant for skinny-dipping and Grover Cleveland’s love of beer gardens, to Woodrow Wilson’s aborted attempt to write fiction, George Washington’s wont to cut a rug and Lyndon Johnson’s four-pack-a-day cigarette habit.

Dancing with Rose: Finding Life in the Land of Alzheimer’s

By Lauren Kessler (Viking, $24.95)

The author had long endured a very difficult relationship with her mother. But after watching Alzheimer’s disease first turn her parent into a stranger in her own life, and then steal away that life, Kessler, who heads the University of Oregon’s graduate program in literary nonfiction, decided the way to assuage her guilt was to sign on as a caregiver at an Alzheimer’s facility. She wasn’t surprised by the humbling labor or sense of powerlessness attendant to this job; what she hadn’t expected, however, were the humor and humanity that end-of-life care would expose. Unsentimental, yet warmed by the characters of the patients and the underpaid attendants struggling to keep them comfortable, Dancing with Rose shows just how much life can still be enjoyed by those with so little of it left.