School shootings, date rape, kidnapping, modern-day witch hunts for alleged sexual predators: These are just a few of the thorny issues Jodi Picoult has dealt with in the numerous novels she’s written to date. And in each of them she offers readers a vantage point from which hasty moral judgments are impossible. In her new book, Change of Heart, she tackles capital punishment, using it as a vehicle to examine religious dogma and the crippling loss of a loved one, as well as the fallacy of sentencing a man to death without fully understanding his crime.

Herbert von Karajan was one of classical music’s towering figures in the 20th century. The Austrian conductor’s career began under the Nazis (even though Hitler considered him “un- German”) and continued after World War II, when he rapidly attained star status. The text to A Life in Pictures summarizes his life and career, but, as the title suggests, the photographs are the focus of this coffee-table book. The best are black-and-white, artful compositions in light and shadow. Their subjects cover Karajan at work and play—he loved zooming around in sports cars and speedboats when he wasn’t conducting meticulous and powerful interpretations of great symphonies.

In the summer of 2005, Nike SB, a division of the shoe giant in charge of producing footwear for skateboarders, created an advertisement for their upcoming skateboarding tour that attempted to connect the brand with the type of music that many skaters loved. Titled “Major Threat,” the ad reproduced the iconic album art of hardcore punk legends Minor Threat’s 1981 self-titled album. The response from many skaters—and from Dischord Records, the Washington, D.C., label run by former Minor Threat frontman Ian MacKaye—was swift and predictable.

Poetry or fiction that extols the virtues of art is certainly not a new phenomenon. Think of Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” In recent years authors like Tracy Chevalier and Jeanne Kalogridis have come to prominence for constructing fictional narratives around specific works of art, using them as a starting point from which to explore the social or historical context within which they were painted. Perhaps more importantly, they allow readers to peek beneath the shroud of mystery surrounding artists and their subjects. Susan Vreeland’s new novel, Luncheon of the Boating Party, belongs to this vein of fiction. Based on Renoir’s painting of the same name, it allows readers to enter the painting’s leisurely scene and capture a view of Parisian society in the late 19th century.

By the 1920s, high-end travel by ship, train and airplane had become a thriving business the world over, promoted by colorful posters of great artistry. Travel Italia surveys work by some of Italy’s best commercial artists in the field. The earlier pieces were mostly illustrative of particular destinations.

Since publishing his first novel, The Death of Vishnu, Manil Suri has joined the pantheon of Indian writers gaining widespread recognition for their English prose. The first of his books to use the Hindu trinity to explore the present-day realities of India, it was intended as part of a trilogy, albeit one that departs from the traditional format of continuous plot and characters. “It’s rather like three panels of a triptych in the sense that there are these three faces of the Hindu trinity, Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma, and I was trying to distill the essence of each,” Suri says.

There’s never a scarcity of problems for people like me,” proclaims private investigator Easy Rawlins in Walter Mosley’s latest novel, Blonde Faith (Little, Brown), the 10th in a series of Easy’s adventures. By “people like me,” Easy might mean black men in 20th-century America. But, given Easy’s dramatic personality change in this story, the proclamation bears rereading.

Anyone who has children is aware of the number of resources available to new and prospective parents. But how much of those are geared toward the progressive punk parent? When activist/musician/teacher Jessica Mills became pregnant, she was struck by the lack of mainstream parenting literature that spoke to her own subculture where, as she puts it, “politics intersects with parenting,” so she decided to write one of her own.

Otto Preminger’s stage and screen Nazis (think Stalag 17) may well have provided a perverse, self-styled role model for the famous director, one he developed with tyrannical relish off-screen as well. According to Foster Hirsch in his stunning, eminently readable biography, Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would be King (Alfred Knopf), the filmmaker’s Prussians registered with conviction, yielding none of the serpentine sophistication that made Conrad Veidt’s characterization in Casablanca an intellectual delight.

Milwaukee’s colorful past, more interesting than the history of many heartland cities, is being examined in a series of profusely illustrated books from Arcadia Publishing. Larry Widen, whose previous book examined Milwaukee cinemas, contributes a look at the city’s flourishing cultural milieu through the mid-20th century. During those years Houdini headlined in Milwaukee at the Majestic Theatre, museums sprouted along Wisconsin Avenue and Downtown was crowded with theaters, concert halls and exhibition buildings, many of them architecturally fabulous. Frank Alioto remembers Brady Street’s early ethnic history, its role as a thriving business district and, in the 1960s, mecca for the local counterculture. The pictures in both books are fascinating photo albums of Milwaukee’s past.