books

Several years ago, Kate DiCamillo was waiting for a friend in the lobby of a New York City hotel. Suddenly, she had a moment of pure inspiration, as she saw a picture in her mind of a magician and felt his desire to perform some extraordinary magic.

Mother Nature is the scariest killer of them all. That's what I took away from "Whiteout," the 1998 miniseries from Oni Press that was collected as a graphic novel in 2001, and is now a movie, premiering Sept. 11.

It's not that Mama Nature kills any more savagely or brutally or frequently than human beings. We're actually pretty good at that.

How closely is greatness connected with mental instability? Is it possible to live a deeply impassioned life and maintain the kind of ballast needed to run a country?

These are the perhaps-inadvertent questions brought to the fore in Douglas Brinkley's new biography "The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America" (HarperCollins. $34.99.)

Now that school has started, add some extra fun with these great new school-themed books for kids:

Yes, it's true: Disney bought Marvel Comics for $4 billion.

Let's get the jokes out of our system right away: The House of Mouse buys the House of Ideas, Spider-Mouse and Duckdevil, Fantasia Four (Billion).

But what does it mean? Obviously, Disney isn't going to blab about its plans, but we do know some things and can guess some others. Here are the questions I hear the most:

I spent quite a lot of years not reading Jack Kerouac.

In 2007, when the 50th anniversary of "On the Road" arrived, I kept this up. As I saw it, men dominated American literature for many years after World War II. Women were welcome mainly as admirers, and only insofar as they were willing to sit back and shut up.

With the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina coming up this week, four new or upcoming books examine the tolls of that storm and other calamities.

A trio of Newbery Medal-winning authors has just published new books:

I love Vikings. And the existence of "Northlanders," a series from DC's mature-reader Vertigo line, tells me I'm not alone.

"Northlanders" doesn't have a continuing story line or characters. It's just a series of disparate stories set during the Viking era, all written by Brian Wood ("DMZ") and each drawn by a different artist.

Occasionally I recommend a book without pictures, and such is the case with Brian Cronin's "Was Superman a Spy? And Other Comic Book Legends Revealed!" (Plume, $14).