Literary Nonfiction. Nature. Travel. In May of 2007, noted American poet and novelist and son of Holocaust refugees Michael Blumenthal went to South Africa to volunteer at C.A.R.E., a rehabilitation center for orphaned and injured baboons founded by Rita Miljo. Rita was a Lithuanian-born childhood member of the Hitler Youth who had gone on to have a life as adventure- filled as Beryl Markham's in West With the Night.

... baboons are neither devils nor saints but animals who like us have very individual personalities, experience a wide range of emotions and possess a capacity for reasoning.' These are the words of Kobie Kruger, best selling wildlife author, in her foreword to Life with Darwin. Of all the primates in Africa, the Chacma Baboon has arguably received the least attention in terms of comprehensive behavioural studies. Life with Darwin is an account of the work of Karin Saks who, through fostering orphaned baby baboons and attempting to rehabilitate them back into the wild, had the opportunity to observe and record the activities of a number of wild baboon troops. Through her daily interaction with them she brings fresh perspectives to our knowledge of an animal society that is both complex and well ordered. It is a fresh and accessible look at a species that has not always been sympathetically regarded, and its insights go a long way towards redressing this attitude.

Poetry. Now back in print after more than 20 years, Michael Blumenthal's DAYS WE WOULD RATHER KNOW, originally published by Viking-Penguin and sold out in both of its original printings, was one of the most admired, and most influential, books of American poetry of the 1980's, and marked the auspicious continuation of one of the decade's most promising debuts. While different in scope, subject, and style, these seventy poems all body forth a central theme: that - as reality is dissatisfying and satisfaction elusive - hope is in itself an antidote, and possibility is always invigorating. Love is rarely as exciting as the wish for love, writes Blumenthal; DAYS WE WOULD RATHER KNOW suggests that we are as fulfilled, as animated, by our longings as by the resolution of those wishes.

No Hurry is of mixed blessings; of tension, hunger, and challenges of having a body which both thrives and decays.

Shortly after his mother dies of breast cancer when he is ten years old, author Michael Blumenthal discovers a startling fact: His mother was not his biological mother, and his aunt and uncle, immigrant chicken farmers living in Vineland, New Jersey, are really his parents. As fate would have it, his father, a German-Jewish refugee raised by a loveless and embittered stepmother after his own mother died in childbirth, has inflicted on his adoptive son a fate uncannily -- and terrifyingly -- similar to his own: Having first adopted Michael, in part, to help his dying wife, he then imposes on him the same sort of penurious and loveless stepmother whom he had to survive. With these revelations, the "mysteries" that seem to have permeated Michael's childhood are laid bare, triggering a quest for belonging that will infiltrate the author's entire adult life. All My Mothers and Fathers is Michael Blumenthal's moving and powerful account of how he put his life together, and made both a break from and peace with his past.

Fiction. Jewish Studies. This Michael Blumenthal novel was chosen by Elie Wiesel, Thomas Kenneally, and Merrill Joan Gerber as winner of Hadassah Magazine's prestigious Ribelow Prize as Best Jewish Novel of the Year in 1994. In its all-too-short lifespan, it received rave reviews from Kirkus and Publisher's Weekly and glowing tributes from such writers as Lorrie Moore, Tim O'Brien, Jhumpa Lahiri, Robert Coles, and Leslie Epstein. Unfortunately, just three months after the novel's publication, its publisher, Zoland Books, was forced to close for economic reasons, and this brilliant novel by one of America's finest poets hardly even saw the light of day. It is now available for the first time in paperback allowing it a second--really a first--life. Once you read it, I am sure you will agree that it more than deserves the kind of critical and popular attention which--due to the unfortunate circumstances that befell its original publisher--it never received.

Poetry. A reprinted edition of the celebrated 1987 Penguin edition (a collection) by the 1985 winner of the Academy of American Poets Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award. "Blumenthal's new collection moves surely through the contradictions implied by its title. Belonging to the "central" modernist tradition of Wallace Stevens and informed by both wit and intelligence, the poems take us through a variety of topics and moods without losing sight of the book's pivotal experience, a divorce. Urbane, sophisticated, sometimes self-deprecatory, Blumenthal sustains an observant distance, which only emphasizes the romantic yearning underlying the book's theme. The best poems work well, arching toward an ethereal, metaphysical tone, as in these lines from the title poem: "and when life turns its dimmed lights up/ once again and the theater empties,/ they find the stranger love always delivers up." Other poems feel like exercises, but Blumenthal's voice is growing more authentic"--Library Journal.