Nonfiction Reviews: Week of 4/30/2007

by Staff -- Publishers Weekly, 4/30/2007

Once Upon a Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the USA
Julia Alvarez. Viking, $23.95 (278p) ISBN 978-0-670-03873-2

Skillfully blending memoir and social science, Alvarez (How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents) explores the quinceañera, the coming-of-age ceremony for Latinas turning 15. She spent a year researching and attending "quince" celebrations, finding out what rituals are favored and what they mean to the girls. She researched what the gowns and photo sessions cost. She interviewed people working in the "quince" industry, from party planners to cake bakers. After all, with more than 400,000 American Latinas turning 15 every year, and with the average quinceañera costing $5,000, the financial, if not the cultural importance of the "quince" should not be underestimated. Alvarez structures her book around one particular girl's ceremony, from the dreamy planning stages through the late hours of the actual, dizzying affair. By intercutting the party narrative with stories from her own youth, Alvarez reminds herself-and readers-that at some point we were all confused, histrionic adolescents. Both sympathetic and critical, she doesn't dismiss the event as a waste of hard-earned savings or as a mere display of daughters for the marriage market; nor does she endorse it as the essential cultural tradition connecting Latinas to their roots. Instead, Alvarez wants readers to focus on creating positive, meaningful rites of passage for the younger generation. (Aug.)

Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Meth Addiction
David Sheff. Houghton Mifflin, $26 (336p) ISBN 978-0-618-68335-2

Expanding on his New York Times Magazine article, Sheff chronicles his son's downward spiral into addiction and the impact on him and his family. A bright, capable teenager, Nic began trying mind- and mood-altering substances when he was 17. In months, use became abuse, then abuse became addiction. By the time Sheff knew of his son's condition, Nic was strung out on meth, the highly potent stimulant. While his son struggles to get clean, his second wife and two younger children are pulled helplessly into the drama. Sheff, as the parent of an addict, cycles through denial and acceptance and resistance. The author was already a journalist of considerable standing when this painful story began to unfold, and his impulse for detail serves him personally as well as professionally: there are hard, solid facts about meth and the kinds of havoc it wreaks on individuals, families and communities both urban and rural. His journey is long and harrowing, but Sheff does not spare himself or anyone else from keen professional scrutiny any more than he was himself spared the pains-and joys-of watching a loved one struggling with addiction and recovery. Real recovery creates-and can itself be-its own reward; this is an honest, hopeful book, coming at a propitious moment in the meth epidemic. (Aug.)

A Natural History of Time
Pascal Richet, trans. from the French by John Venerella. Univ. of Chicago, $29 (400p) ISBN 978-0-226-71287-1

For millennia humans relied on mythical or biblical accounts to conjure up a birth date for our planet. Astronomer Edmund Halley used the amount of salt in the oceans as his calendar. The great Newton ventured at writing a chronology that took most of the stories of Greek kings and heroes at face value. But as French geophysicist Richet tells readers, people didn't get serious about ascertaining the age of the Earth until the Enlightenment, when researchers tried to figure the amount of heat lost by the Earth to reckon backward to its molten youth. But a firm date-4.5 billion years-couldn't be established until the discovery of radioactive elements to date everything from textiles to stones. Richet writes in a meandering European style as he draws in figures from other fields (who would have guessed that Voltaire was Newton's principal advocate on the Continent?) to fill out his story. His writing occasionally plods along, and attempts at humor sometimes fall flat, although these may be just hazards of translation. Geology and natural science buffs will discover a rich, baroquely embellished birthday cake to dig into and enjoy. 12 half-tones, 27 line drawings. (Aug.)

Off the Record: The Press, the Government, and the War over Anonymous Sources
Norman Pearlstine. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25 (320p)ISBN 978-0-374-22449-3

The author endured a firestorm of criticism from fellow journalists when, as editor-in-chief of Time Inc., he turned over Time reporter Matt Cooper's notes on confidential sources in the Valerie Plame scandal to special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. In this defensive apologia, he explains his reasons for defying what he allows is a hoary journalistic tradition of going to jail to protect sources. Pearlstine, who holds a law degree, cites a high-minded conviction that "journalists aren't above the law," but admits that the "tipping point" in his decision was his formulation of a hairsplitting legalistic distinction between "confidential" sources, who should be protected, and mere "deep-background" anonymous sources, who can be given up to the grand jury. Along the way, he discusses at length the critics who accused him of putting Time-Warner's profits above journalistic principle as well as New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who went to jail to protect her Plame sources (before finally testifying). He also raises some cogent points about journalists' abuses of anonymous sourcing conventions. Readers already persuaded of Pearlstine's pusillanimity may find his lawyerly self-justifications less than convincing. (Aug.)

Unto the Daughters: The Legacy of an Honor Killing in a Sicilian American Family
Karen Tintori. St. Martin's, $24.95 (224p) ISBN 978-0-312-33463-5

Tintori's poignant memoir of the recent discovery of her great-aunt's murder deeply underscores her Sicilian culture's troubling subjugation of its women. Tintori (Trapped: The 1909 Cherry Mine Disaster) recounts how in 1993 her aunt and mother reluctantly told her of an obliterated name from her great-grandfather's passport to America. Gradually Tintori discovers the fate of the missing youngest daughter, Francesca, by working backward in time to when the Costa family first made its way to Detroit from Corleone, Sicily, in 1914. The family settled into comfort in Little Sicily: the girls enjoyed scant education and were married off early, while the boys worked at the Ford factory and ran with rum-runner gangs. Although her sister Josie made a successful love match, Francesca pined for the barber's son, but was forcibly engaged at 16 to a scion of the Mafiosi in order to better her family's fortunes. Francesca eloped, to the family's dishonor, and was probably murdered (shackled, dismembered and thrown in the waters of Belle Isle) by her brothers when she dared to return. Because of her family's wall of silence, Tintori finds no sense of catharsis here, only a harrowing tale of sorrow and shame. (July)

Eating India: An Odyssey into the Food and Culture of the Land of Spices
Chitrita Banerji. Bloomsbury, $24.95 (304p) ISBN 978-1-59691-018-8

Skillfully moving backward and forward in time, Banerji, a culinary historian based in the U.S. whose previous books have explored the cookery of her native Bengal (Life and Food in Bengal), regards India with the intimacy of a native, the curiosity of an outsider and the broad vantage of an expatriate. In the course of her culinary tours across the subcontinent, she poses compelling questions about the nature of authenticity in a time of great flux, the mutability of tradition and the place of food in secular life and religious culture. For answers, she looks not only to the past but to the present as it unfolds in roadside shacks, sweet shops or a temple canteen, describing how outside influences such as colonialism and immigration have shaped India's regional cuisines. Early in this engaging work, Banerji recounts how whenever she invites Americans to her home for an elaborate meal, rather than sampling each dish in sequence-the better to appreciate its subtle flavors-her guests heap together meat, rice and vegetables on one plate. The decision to allow appetite and intellectual curiosity to determine her course could easily have resulted in a similar mishmash. It is to the author's credit that her journeys to Benares, Gujarat and points south retain their unique flavors. (July)

Let's Spend the Night Together: Backstage Secrets of Rock Muses and Supergroupies
Pamela Des Barres. Chicago Review/A Cappella, $24.95 (400p) ISBN 978-1-55652-668-8

A groupie is to a rock band as Mary Magdalene was to Jesus, asserts L.A. rock author Des Barres (I'm with the Band) in this eager, self-congratulatory attempt to rehabilitate the term groupie through two dozen fun and well-documented examples of rock muses since the 1960s. Des Barres steers her interviewees to underscore their important role in making their rock star boyfriends look good and play well, such as Tura Satana, given the dubious title Miss Japan Beautiful, who met awkward young Elvis Presley on the burlesque circuit in the mid-'50s and taught him his shimmying moves. Des Barres recalls her groupie rivals back in the day, including Patti D'Arbanville, Bebe Buell, Lori Lightning and Catherine James. Cynthia Plaster Caster, "the Rodin of Rock," shares her descriptions of her plaster replicas of rock stars' penises (including that of Jimmy Hendrix), while Dee Dee Keel spills tales of her oral exploits for British rockers with deplorable bathing habits, and male groupie Pleather relays Courtney Love's shaky self-esteem. In the end, it's all about the music, or as Pleasant Gehman sums it up blithely in this breathlessly gossipy scrapbook: "Being a groupie is like worshipping at the church of rock and roll-and you are the high priestess." (July)

Grace Kelly: A Life in Pictures
Edited by Pierre-Henri Verlhac and Yann-Brice Dherbier. Anova UK/Pavilion (IPG, dist.), $40 (208p) ISBN 978-1-86205-761-6

Released to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Grace Kelly's death, this stunning if poorly organized tribute to the legendary actress showcases not only her brief but magnificent Hollywood career but also her life as a princess, wife and mother. Once past the bland forward by Tommy Hilfiger and a stilted biographical essay tracing Kelly's life from her childhood in Philadelphia to her death on the treacherous roads of the French Riviera, the reader is treated to almost 200 pages of photographs, candid and posed, of the woman whose life epitomized the fairy tale dream. The images lack a compelling arrangement, but Kelly's radiance, both onscreen and off, transcends the pages. With elegant looks that foreshadowed her real-life role as a princess, Kelly seems unable to take an unflattering photograph. From the on-set shots of Kelly frolicking with her To Catch a Thief co-star Cary Grant on the Côte d'Azur to the first pictures of Kelly and her three children, she exudes an air of effortlessness and confidence that has all but disappeared in today's leading ladies. The woman who became Alfred Hitchcock's ultimate blonde and the beloved princess of Monaco is exquisitely captured in this photographic collection that will delight longtime fans and newcomers alike. (July)

No Speed Limit: The Highs and Lows of Meth
Frank Owen. St. Martin's, $24.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-312-35616-3

In this intensely researched, fascinating account of methamphetamine, Owen takes readers through the late-19th-century synthesis of ephedrine from ephedra (a medicinal plant) to meth's current status as public enemy #1. Along the way, we learn that the Nazis ate meth tablets like Now and Laters (millions of doses sustained the Wehrmacht in its rampages); meet fascinating characters like Uncle Fester, a Green Bay industrial chemist, whose books like Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture have made him a cult icon; and encounter dozens of people whose lives have been disfigured by the drug. Owen also relates how meth helped him meet deadlines as a freelance writer in the 1980s and includes the details of his own charming, four-day meth binge-for research purposes-in present-day New York City. He covers a lot of ground, literally, as he speeds through history and around the country doing interviews (longer exposure to some of the addicts and former addicts might have shed more light on exactly what makes the drug so attractive). Still, Owen's account is refreshingly clearheaded and free of hysteria. As he points out in telling detail, the current demonization of meth follows that of any number of other drug "epidemics" that have hit America over the years, with media and law enforcement learning little from one to the next. (July)

Inside the Red Mansion: On the Trail of China's Most Wanted Man
Oliver August. Houghton Mifflin, $26 (288p) ISBN 978-0-618-71498-8

August, former Beijing bureau chief for the London Times, crafts a harrowing, super-detailed story of a China exploding with runaway growth yet still trapped in the past and ruled by the ethos of tufei-the classical Mandarin word for bandit. By turns delightfully surprising and slap-across-the-face sobering, August's yarn centers on his quest to find Lai Changxing, a country boy turned self-made billionaire, thug and China's most wanted man. August takes him from a private club (where "[f]locks of sequined mermaids waltzed past in merry circles, followed by operatic massifs of rouged Red Guards goose-stepping to 'The Sound of Music' ") and Xiamen, an out-of-control coastal boomtown (with "[a] furious sea of cement and marble, wave upon wave of high-rises rippling out, strips of tarmac submerged at bottomless depths") to a drab government building in Vancouver, B.C., where Lai was being held on immigration charges. August finally sees Lai not as a freewheeling gangster but as a man diminished-"Nothing about his physical bearing suggested the lyrical countenance of a tragic hero or a human devil..." This must-read, can't-put-it down tale shows the China only hinted at on the evening news-a place of outsized egos, over-the-top commercial development and shadowy, tradition-bound authoritarian rule. (July 18)

The Boys from Dolores: Fidel Castro's Schoolmates From Revolution to Exile
Patrick Symmes. Pantheon, $26.95 (384p) ISBN 978-0-375-42283-6

Symmes, whose Chasing Che retraced Che Guevara's transformational 1952 motorcycle trip through Latin America, writes a history of the Cuban revolution that also explores the qualities that define what it is to be Cuban. He draws on his own visits and extended stays in Cuba, and the half-century-old memories of a group of formerly privileged boys, now mostly exiled, who along with Castro attended Dolores, a Jesuit school that until the revolution, educated Cuba's elites. The Dolores alumni speak poignantly of prerevolutionary Cuba and the "necessary" revolution in which many participated. Equally poignant are their descriptions of events as the revolution lurched toward socialism and repression, events that led them to self-imposed exile. The memories of several expats who were part of the Bay of Pigs fiasco make compelling reading. To the Dolores alumni the Holy Grail is a Cuba without Castro, but Symmes, whose picture of Castro is unsympathetic in the extreme, nonetheless worries that a Castro-less Cuba will, without remorse, leave its poor bereft and evolve into a society that is more free but less just. Symmes's writing is lyrical and evocative; his powerful and complex picture of Cuba and the exile community is well worth reading. (July 10)

A Stranger in the Land: Jewish Identity Beyond Nationalism
Daniel Cil Brecher, trans. from the German by Barbara Harshav. Other Press (Norton, dist.), $15.95 paper (392p) ISBN 978-1-59051-211-1

Brecher, an Amsterdam-based independent historian who lived in Israel and now describes himself as an "opponent of Zionism," has conjoined two books. One is an often rich personal memoir of his life, and alienation, in both postwar Germany, where he grew up, and then in Israel as a young man during the 1980s, when he served in the army's education corps. Brecher has many insightful things to say about such issues as the understandably anxious nature of German-Jewish identity. The other book is an analysis of Israeli society and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Brecher characterizes the 1993 Oslo Accords as "not a peace treaty, but a treaty of surrender" by the Palestinians. While Brecher acknowledges Palestinian terrorism, his basic stance is that the Zionists were and continue to be colonialists and expansionist aggressors-a cartoonish history of a conflict marked by tragedy and by injustices committed by both sides. Some of his critique, such as that most Israelis do not empathize with nor even think about Palestinian suffering, is worth considering. In general, however, though a thoughtful autobiography, this is less successful as history. (July)

The Age of Lincoln
Orville Vernon Burton. Hill & Wang, $25 (384p) ISBN 978-0-8090-9513-1

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s The Age of Jackson appeared in 1945 and has been an enduringly popular work with general readers. Burton, an associate professor of history and sociology (In My Father's House Are Many Mansions), has written an ambitious sequel, or perhaps homage, on the age of Lincoln. Burton's intriguing thesis is that Lincoln's most profound achievement was not the abolition of slavery but the enshrinement of the principle of personal liberty protected by a body of law. Thus he elevated the founding fathers' (and Jackson's) more restricted vision to a universal one. The outbreak and course of the Civil War should be seen in the light of competing notions of what "freedom" meant, rather than (as has usually been the case) as a bloody conflict over black emancipation or states' rights. Lincoln, as Burton convincingly argues, both created his age and was a product of it: he matured in an America struggling with a rising free market and millennial impulses that sought Christian perfection. The ultimate result was the triumph of democratic capitalism. For readers seeking to comprehend the sweeping social, religious and cultural backdrop to the Civil War, Burton's book is a worthy heir to Schlesinger's. 8 pages of b&w illus. (July)

The Fabric of America: How Our Borders and Boundaries Shaped the Country and Forged Our National Identity
Andro Linklater. Walker, $25.95 (304p) ISBN 978-0-8027-1533-3

The focus of this unruly book is one of the unsung founders of the United States, Andrew Ellicott. Linklater (Measuring America) performs a real service in rescuing from near oblivion this surveyor and boundary commissioner who, for 35 years after 1785, laid down many of the borders that now demarcate the United States from Canada and state from state. In a time of difficult and dangerous travel, Ellicott seems to have been everywhere and to have interacted easily with people under Spanish and French rule as well as with Native Americans. Much of the layout of the nation's capital is also his legacy. His tale is told by Linklater with skill and energy, but the author overreaches. Rather than sticking with plats, borders and their surveyors, Linklater in effect relates the nation's entire history through the 19th century. After many others with more authority have attacked Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, he also takes it on, arguing, not without ingenuity, that the American frontier experience "was not the freedom of the wilderness but the lines drawn in previously uncharted ground-around claims, properties, states, and the republic itself." Perhaps, but the case isn't adequately made here. (July)

The Pirate Queen: Queen Elizabeth I, Her Pirate Adventurers, and the Dawn of Empire
Susan Ronald. HarperCollins, $26.95 (496p) ISBN 978-0-06-082066-4

When Elizabeth Tudor became queen in 1558, her religiously fractured kingdom was in financial chaos and under constant threat from superpower Spain. How the iron-willed, financially astute monarch utilized piracy and plunder as a vital tool in guaranteeing English independence from foreign domination and in transforming a backwater nation into a nascent empire is the tantalizing focus of Ronald's (The Sancy Blood Diamond) latest effort. To wreak vengeance on the Spanish perpetrators of the Inquisition, Elizabeth granted swashbuckling John Hawkins permission for his first slaving voyage to Guinea in 1562. On a 1577 mission to raid Spanish shipping in the Pacific, Francis Drake became the first European commander to sail around the southernmost tip of South America from the Atlantic into the Pacific, and in 1588, he destroyed the invading Spanish Armada. Charismatic, massively ambitious Walter Raleigh founded Virginia, popularized smoking tobacco and spent the 1590s in a futile search for the fabled El Dorado. Authoritative, assiduously researched and with a knack for making the intricacies of sea skirmishes accessible and absorbing, this is a surprisingly fresh perspective on one of the most popular subjects of royal biography. 16 pages of b&w illus.; maps. (July)

The New Time Travelers: A Journey to the Frontiers of Physics
David Toomey. Norton, $25.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-393-06013-3

According to Toomey, professor of English who teaches technical and nonfiction writing at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, the concept of time travel successfully made the transition from science fiction to the research literature of physics about 20 years ago. This is not to say that physicists uncritically accept the idea but simply that it is now a topic for rigorous scientific discussion. Because Toomey (Stormchasers) spends as much time describing the personalities of those investigating this odd field as he does the subject's technical aspects, he is able to bring the topic fully to life. The contributions made by Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan and Kip Thorne, in addition to other lesser-known physicists, are described, but even the author's fine writing is not able to make all of the highly technical material easily understood. Given that time travel, if it can occur at all, is likely to involve wormholes and worldlines, multiverses and Minkowski diagrams, as well as negative energy and naked singularities, this is not surprising. Toomey is at his best treating the many paradoxes that time travel engenders and exploring the ways around them, from Hawking's "chronology protection conjecture" to David Deutsch's creation of multiple universes. While physicists have, to date, been unable to demonstrate that any laws of nature make time travel impossible, Toomey makes it clear that we shouldn't expect to make such a trip any time soon. 15 illus. (July)

Competition: The Birth of a New Science
James Case. Hill & Wang, $26 (304p) ISBN 978-0-8090-3577-9

When we interview for a job, play a pickup game of basketball or check our mutual funds, we're competing with other people. Writer and business consultant Case, who has a Ph.D. in mathematics, surveys the topography of competition to show how it ranges from the complexity of game theory to the simplicity of bidding at an auction. The author begins with an extensive explication of game theory as developed by John von Neumann, John (A Beautiful Mind) Nash and their colleagues. He builds on this foundation to present case studies of competition in practice, such as nations' angling for competitive position in their trade policies. Avid eBayers might pick up helpful hints on competitive strategies, and readers who dabble in the stock market will discover techniques to help in their decision making. Case devotes the latter half of his book to various kinds of economic competition. Futurists, game theorists and economists will likely find much familiar material skillfully packaged, while many general readers will find the book rough sledding. But Case has some new and challenging policy proposals, for instance how to protect workers' interests while avoiding the pitfalls of labor unions, that will spark debate. 40 line drawings. (July)

Treating the Aching Heart: A Guide to Depression, Stress, and Heart Disease
Lawson R. Wulsin, M.D.. Vanderbilt Univ., $59.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-8265-1562-9; paper $22.95 ISBN 978-0-8265-1561-2

Wulsin, a professor of psychiatry and family medicine at the University of Cincinnati, offers a welcome addition to the literature on the mutual impact of body and mind in this look at how depression contributes to heart disease and vice versa. Written in an informal tone and balancing scientific data with patient checklists and case studies, this book is meant for patients and doctors alike. He tells, for instance, of Bea Hook, a middle-aged woman he was treating only for depression until he realized she had serious risk factors for heart disease that could be exacerbated by her depression. But the author cushions such information with helpful "Clinical Tips" for the average reader: for example, "Learn how depression affects your risks for heart disease"; "Chart the course of your depression over your lifetime"; "Insist on comprehensive treatment of heart disease." Wulsin discusses possible single and combination treatments, which include medication, psychotherapy, light therapy and pets. Wulsin has effectively melded science with a popular approach to drive home the need for improved awareness and improved care for heart disease and depression and similarly connected diseases. (July)

What Women Want Next
Susan Maushart. Bloomsbury, $24.95 (256p) ISBN 978-1-59691-352-3

In an attempt to figure out how women can achieve happiness vis-à-vis sex, marriage, motherhood and work, Australia-based author Maushart (Wifework) surveys the writings of feminists, conservative gurus, psychiatrists and spiritual leaders, including bestsellers like Germaine Greer, Laura Schlessinger, the Dalai Lama, Freud and Arlie Hochschild. Women must stop blaming others-men, doctors, the patriarchy, their mothers, their own hormones-for the way their lives are turning out, self-described feminist Maushart concludes, because freedom has its price. And if what women want next are marriages that are mathematically equal, that won't be easily achieved if women seek taller, wealthier, older men of higher social status. Women want to reintegrate motherhood into the rest of their lives, and those who choose to be stay-at-home moms are "no less a feminist success story than their career-oriented sisters." Furthermore, women's ambivalence about gender roles is responsible for such failed feminist agendas as equal pay for equal work. This Australian import by a long-time American expat is an unfocused, pedestrian retread of very familiar territory that's saddled with Aussie expressions and examples that don't always apply in the U.S., and with blanket assumptions (e.g., referring to women who change their names after marriage: "I've got news for you, girls. If you let him stamp his name on you, he is boss"). (July)

The Pentagon: A History
Steve Vogel. Random, $32.95 (656p) ISBN 978-1-4000-6303-1

Washington Post journalist Vogel provides an incisive history of the Pentagon both as an architectural construct and as an American symbol, though not as an institution. Vogel traces the politics and design considerations involved in planning a new home for the previously scattered War Department (forerunner of today's Department of Defense) in the early 1940s. Wartime conservation subsequently forced builders to use the least amount of steel possible, and much concrete. The "Stripped Classical" building-erected in 16 months at a cost of $85 million-was made with five sides chiefly because it lay on remnant acres between five appropriately angled roads. At the time, it was a massive undertaking: five concentric rings of offices, 17.5 miles of corridors and a five-acre central courtyard. Vogel demonstrates how planners conceived the structure as fitting into L'Enfant's original plan for Washington, D.C., and goes on to depict it as a national icon. In this vein, Vogel describes the building as a target for protesters during the Vietnam War (with special attention to October 1967's March on the Pentagon, immortalized in Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night), and, of course, the 9/11 attack. Throughout, Vogel artfully weaves architectural and cultural history, thus creating a brilliant and illuminating study of this singular (and, in many ways, sacred) American space. Photos. (June 5)

City Adrift: New Orleans Before and After Katrina
Jennie Bergal et al., foreword by Dan Rather. Louisiana State Univ., $22.95 (184p) ISBN 978-0-8071-3284-5

This objective investigation conducted by seven outstanding journalists is an overwhelming indictment of the failure on the part of government and nongovernment agencies to respond to both the threat and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Sara Shipley Hiles, a journalist on environmental issues, explores the natural and man-made environmental factors that contributed to the catastrophe; she further explains the negative impact of the Bush administration's downsizing, in 2004, of a Louisiana coastal restoration plan. Jim Morris details how an eviscerated Federal Emergency Management Agency, despite adequate warning, tragically failed to evacuate the population. Another piece by Curtis Wilkie details the heritage of corrupt state and local politics that led to a civic breakdown and an immobilized judicial system. According to this very disheartening examination, New Orleans, despite federal promises, is now less able to withstand a hurricane than it was in 2005. Graphic black-and-white photos throughout are a haunting reminder of the television images of a helpless and dying American city that horrified the country in 2005. This excellent exposé of corruption and incompetence, conducted under the auspices of the Center for Public Integrity (a nonpartisan organization that sponsors investigative journalism) should lead to calls for future accountability. (June)

I've Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature
Lucia Perillo. Trinity Univ. (PGW, dist.), $24.95 (256p) ISBN 978-1-59534-031-3

In this thoughtful and eloquent memoir, comprising previously published essays, poet Perillo (Luck Is Luck) observes the world around her from her four-foot-high wheelchair. Once an intrepid park ranger in the Cascade Mountains, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in her 30s and must now navigate the world without the use of her legs. Like the memoir, her life moves at a slow pace, full of bird watching, pondering and even occasional sex; she uses her heightened senses and a poet's prose to give a vivid, tragicomic portrayal of her current life and reflections on her "bipedal" past. Whether she's taking notes on seagulls, trees, salmon, poetry or herself, she writes astutely and gracefully. However, in her close observations, she rarely steps back to see the forest, and her nonlinear organization provides little emotional resonance. Nevertheless, Perillo's physical debilitation has only strengthened her poetic voice, which remains healthy, alive and breathing that fresh mountain air. (June)

China Ghosts: My Daughter's Journey to America, My Passage to Fatherhood
Jeff Gammage. Morrow, $25.95 (272p) ISBN 978-0-06-124029-4

As more Americans adopt Chinese children, the bookshelves fill with firsthand accounts of their experiences. Perhaps because many adoptions are preceded by infertility issues, most of these memoirs are written by women. So this, a father's account of going to China with his wife to adopt their first and second daughters, is particularly useful. Gammage, a staff writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, had been happily married without children for many years, although he knew his wife really wanted children. By the time they discovered they couldn't have biological children, the best option was adopting from China. While there were tensions over their first daughter's medical problems (an infected scalp injury), both adoptions went reasonably smoothly. Back home, Gammage wrestled with his mixed feelings about the birth parents and his "burden of good fortune," that guilty knowledge that his own happiness came from someone else's misfortune. Realizing that his own relationship to China was being shaped by the process of raising two Chinese girls, he ends this upbeat memoir by wondering about the impact of this new wave of immigrants on the future of Sino-American relations. (June)

A Mirror Garden: A Memoir
Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian and Zara Houshmand. Knopf, $25.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-307-26613-2

In this meandering memoir, an Iranian artist from a prominent family shares memories of her posh, wide-ranging life, from the early years under the Qajar shahs to post-revolutionary Iran. Born to a family of wealthy merchant politicians in 1924 in the thriving city of Qazvin, the author attended the first school for girls in her hometown. The family moved to Tehran in 1932 when her father was elected to parliament, and there she enjoyed a privileged life ushered in by the modernization regime of Reza Shah, before various foreign powers invaded the country during World War II. A gifted artist with family connections, she moved to New York to study at Parsons, and her exotic sense of color and design secured her work at Bonwit Teller, an exclusive New York City department store. An early marriage crumbled, but Shahroudy married a second time in 1957 into a high-ranking Iranian family, the Farmanfarmaians. She was then in a position to become an art connoisseur and collector, especially of Iranian folk art such as coffeehouse paintings and mirror mosaics. While her memoir lacks focus, she (along with Iranian-American writer Houshmand) nicely captures a bygone epoch in a very likable voice. (June)

Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music
Glenn Kurtz. Knopf, $22 (256p) ISBN 978-0-307-26615-6

Waylaid from an early career as a classical guitarist, a teacher of the arts recounts his reimmersion in his music by undertaking an intensive regime of practicing. A serious artist is constantly plagued by the fear that he either has the gift or he doesn't, notes Kurtz, and that no amount of "busy work" can redeem him. Growing up in Great Neck, N.Y., in the 1970s, Kurtz tapped into the Guitar Workshop and mastered folk songs by the time he was 10; inspired by seeing Andrés Segovia perform, Kurtz envisioned a life devoted to music. He studied at Boston's New England Conservatory, where the key to success was constant practicing, and where he had to overcome a sense of the guitar's inferiority to other instruments. Trekking through Europe with other players, he was confronted with the economic exigencies of a musical career and eventually ceased practicing, to his great sorrow. In his mid-30s he took up the guitar again and gleans the painful lesson that although musical artistry may seem divine, mastery of the instrument is humbling and mundane. Kurtz's work contains a rich history of the classical guitar, including the work of Bach, Fernando Sor and Scott Joplin. (June)

Taste: Acquiring What Money Can't Buy
Letitia Baldrige. St. Martin's/Truman Talley, $24.95 (240p) ISBN 978-0-312-35173-1

Baldrige, who served from 1961 to 1963 as Jackie Kennedy's social secretary and chief of staff, was labeled "America's leading arbiter of manners" by Time in 1978. Her 20-plus books include Legendary Brides and the 736-page New Manners for New Times. The premise of this volume was suggested by her editor-publisher, Truman "Mac" Talley, who "listened with aplomb to my shocking tales of what is happening today in social mores." Probing the history and nature of taste, Baldrige examines the role taste plays in the average person's life and explains how to "educate your eye." She surveys celebrated tastemakers, from British art dealer Lord Duveen to Coco Chanel, with chapters on interior design and entertaining: "The best dinner parties are those without any ulterior motive. They're rare but wonderful." The core of the book covers taste in fashion (where "even the fabric is snob-important" for some), encompassing such topics as wigs, jewelry, jeans, the application of lipstick in public, influential designers and shoe fetishism in Louis XIV's court. Throughout, she interweaves her own experiences with Diana Vreeland, Babe Paley and others. This patina of personal memories and anecdotes adds to the sheen of her polished prose. The vulgarians may be at the gates, but Baldrige is doing all she can to keep them away. (June)

The Perfect Stranger: The Truth About Mothers and Nannies
Lucy Kaylin. Bloomsbury, $23.95 (208p) ISBN 978-1-58234-407-2

The rift between stay-at-home mothers and working mothers continues to be played out in the media, and Kaylin (the executive editor for Marie Claire and author of For the Love of God) deftly focuses on the women who make it possible for working mothers to continue their careers and leave the raising of the children (and the running of the household) to a stay-at-home substitute: the nanny. Part "how-to" and part "plea for absolution from the guilt... that comes with enlisting the help of a nanny," Kaylin's primer is for women faced with finding a modern-day Mary Poppins. Kaylin speaks from her own experience and includes interviews with nannies and mothers alike (primarily in New York City), so the book abounds with anecdotes to soothe some mothers' worries while stoking the fears of others. Wage, class and race issues are all duly addressed, but the book's primary focus is the ambivalent relationship between mother and nanny, fraught with vacillating emotions of fear, mistrust, love, dependence and subtle struggles for power that rival those in any workplace. Kaylin keeps a brisk pace throughout the book, which is laced with true confessions (including what some mothers discovered through the use of a "nanny-cam," a hidden video camera) and provides a valuable resource to any mother facing the challenge of hiring, well, herself. (June)

Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only: The Life of America's First Great Black Filmmaker
Patrick McGilligan. HarperCollins, $29.95 (416p) ISBN 978-0-06-073139-7

At a time when Hollywood was so white that "conditions would have had to be improved one hundredfold before it could even qualify as Jim Crow," Micheaux (1884-1951) was forced to pursue his creative ambitions as an independent filmmaker in the "race picture" market. McGilligan, the author of several acclaimed biographies of film directors (George Cukor: A Double Life), returns again and again to the image of Micheaux as a "lone wolf," churning out two or three pictures a year at his peak while barely managing to stay ahead of creditors. And it wasn't just the all-black casts that put his films outside the mainstream; the stories often ran afoul of censors and critics for their uncompromising portrayals of contemporary African-American society. McGilligan sketches a crucial portrait of his subject's life before motion pictures, including an attempt to work a South Dakota homestead and a failed marriage that would provide the impulse for much of his creative output. The story isn't always as detailed as readers might like, but that's due to the limited available historical record. McGilligan does a fine job of reaffirming Micheaux's significance beyond the appreciation of cineastes. (June)

Harold Newton: The Original Highwayman
Gary Monroe. Univ. Press of Florida, $34.95 (144p) ISBN 978-0-8130-3042-5

In 1954 artist Harold Newton (1934-1994) began traveling throughout his native Florida to sell the vibrant, dramatic landscape paintings that characterize his oeuvre; a decade later, he had an inspired group of about two dozen followers, largely self-taught African-American artists, known collectively as the "Highwaymen" because they often sold their paintings at roadsides to passing motorists. Photographer and writer Monroe (The Highwaymen: Florida's African-American Landscape Painters) prefaces this collection of 165 paintings with an informative and enjoyable essay on Newton that includes a vividly detailed biography of the artist, largely based on reminiscences from Newton's fellow artists, friends and family. Monroe also examines Newton's technique and the significance of his legacy, which Monroe argues was defined by the artist's ability to portray Florida as a vigorous and fertile "Promised Land." Also of interest are Monroe's comments on the capriciousness of the art market; while Newton's work was little known throughout his career, it has become highly collectible in the past decade. This is an excellent, beautifully illustrated introduction to a dynamic painter that sparks the viewer's interest in Newton and his fellow highwaymen, all of whom created against the backdrop of Jim Crow. (May 27)

Georgia O'Keeffe Museum: Celebrating Ten Years 1997-2007
Barbara Buhler Lynes. Abrams with Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, $65 (352p) ISBN 978-0-8109-0957-1

Georgia O'Keeffe's effortless genius is easy to take for granted unless a curator or museum finds a way to make it new again. A dedicated museum in Santa Fe successfully refreshes the artist in this unexpectedly observant catalogue, edited by the museum's curator. Organized by subject-abstractions, still lifes, landscapes-the 336 color reproductions capture well the ecstasy of O'Keeffe's eye. Here is her favorite wooden door, the road to Santa Fe, a canyon. Two lavish gatefolds keep thematic work side by side. The book lets the artist's work and words speak for themselves, as the light text mainly consists of extended captions that incorporate sparky quotes from O'Keeffe's letters and interviews: "The red hill is a piece of the bad lands where even the grass is gone.... I think [it] our most beautiful country-you may not have seen it, so you want me always to paint flowers." While the book contains its fair share of O'Keeffe flowers, it gives full credit to her red hill and her unique ability to see movement and light in a rock, a flagpole or even a favorite doorway. Essential for fans, the book also makes for a handsome introduction to the artist's brilliance. (May)

Fatal Forecast: An Incredible True Tale of Disaster and Survival at Sea
Michael J. Tougias. Scribner, $24 (240p) ISBN 978-0-7432-9703-5

Tougias (Ten Hours Until Dawn) narrates this dramatic, pared-down account of what happened to a pair of small fishing boats caught in the path of the devastating November 1980 storm off the coast of Cape Cod. When the storm blew up, the Fair Wind and the Sea Fever-captained by Peter Brown, son of legendarily hard-nosed Bob Brown, owner of The Perfect Storm's Andrea Gail-were fishing for lobster on Georges Bank, a plateau on the Atlantic floor that provides some of the richest fishing in the area, but is also the kind of place where "boats have a way of disappearing." Due to a malfunctioning weather buoy, the National Weather Service drastically underestimated the magnitude of the storm that engulfed the two small boats. Seventy-foot waves overturned the Fair Wind, trapping inside the whole crew save for Ernie Banks, who made it into a life raft, while the Sea Fever was barely staying afloat under the watery onslaught. Tougias smartly leavens his spare narrative with similar worst-case scenarios that resulted when other seamen miscalculated the sea's wrathful power. Most astonishing of all is Banks's three-day odyssey of being tossed about like a cork in heaving, freezing seas; as related by Tougias, Banks's calm, reasoned actions in the face of astonishing adversity are practically a how-to lesson in high seas survival skills. (July)

Seduced by Madness: The True Story of the Susan Polk Murder Case
Carol Pogash. Morrow, $24.95 (TKp) ISBN 978-0-06-114770-8

Journalist Pogash recounts and analyzes the story of Susan Polk in a riveting summation of both her life and her sensational trial for the 2002 murder of her husband, Felix Polk. In 1972, when Susan was a bright, troubled 15-year-old, skipping school, spending long hours alone reading serious fiction, she began an intense form of therapy with Polk, a respected and brilliant Berkeley therapist who specialized in adolescence. At some disputed point during the therapy, they began an affair and Felix, 25 years her senior, left his wife and children to marry her in 1981. Pogash, in fairness, points out the liberal therapy theories of the post '60s (Felix was an est follower), but the early inappropriate relationship between Susan and Felix would weigh heavily on their marriage and figure prominently in the murder trial. They had three boys (two of whom testified against their mother) and claimed their eldest, Adam, was subjected to abuse and satanic rituals in the California preschool scandal of the '80s. While the background is fascinating, the coverage of the trial is mesmerizing. Pogash takes the characters-the two DAs, the headline-grabbing defense attorney, Susan (after the attorney's departure from the case) acting as her own counsel, the jury, the courtroom groupies-and creates an edge-of-your-seat excitement. For fans of true crime, psychology, courtroom drama and truth-is- stranger-than fiction, this is a triumph. (June)