Nonfiction Reviews: Week of 6/25/2007

The nine innings of 1960's World Series' seventh game provide baseball historian Reisler with all the framework he needs to paint an exciting and detailed picture of a sport and its milieu. Reisler (Babe Ruth: Launching a Legend, among others) calls a good game, deftly intertwining the dramatic backstories and subplots of the World Series showdown between each pitch. With cinematic flourish, Reisler breaks from the game's action to zoom in on all the bit players and supporting cast of the competition, including the announcers, children playing hooky, the photographers, random spectators, and the individuals who pillaged the field for souvenirs. Reisler puts together a visually nuanced account without the aid of a video record (the tapes have been lost). As the drama mounts, each pitch and swing takes on greater meaning as Reisler illuminates the events leading up to the game and follows its reverberations into the future. He delivers an account that succeeds in creating suspense when the outcome is already known, and by the time Mazeroski's home run sails over the wall at Forbes Field, each Pirate and Yankee player feels like an old friend. As evidenced by the faithful who still congregate at what used to be Forbes Field's left field wall every October to listen to the rebroadcast, this is a story worth hearing. (Oct.)

When the author, an American journalist and software executive working in London, is sacked from her high-powered job, she enrolls as a student at the Cordon Bleu school in Paris. With limited cooking skills and grasp of the French language, she gamely attempts to master the school's challenging curriculum of traditional French cuisine. As if she didn't have enough on her plate eviscerating fish and knocking out pâté à choux, she determines to write a book about her experience and gets married along the way. The result is a readable if sentimental chronicle of that year in Paris in which her love life is explored in great detail, dirty weekends and all, and cooking features as a metaphor for self-discovery. Some readers may feel disappointed that the narrator's encounters with French cookery remain largely confined to her lessons at the Cordon Bleu. On those rare occasions when she ventures into the food-obsessed city, the descriptions of meals are glancing at best. Although her struggles with the language and lack of knowledge about the culture lend comic elements to the story (once, trying to order a pizza over the phone, she said, “Je suis une pizza”—I am a pizza), they, too, constrain the author's culinary explorations. (Oct.)

We're living in an age of great nonfiction writing,” says Glass, the host of the radio program This American Life, who picks out 14 of his favorite journalistic features from writers who are “entertainers in the best sense of the word,” unafraid to insert their personal perspective into the stories they're telling. The collection really is front-loaded with “kings”—with Susan Orlean and Coco Henson Scales the only female journalists included, despite any number of valid candidates. There's a greater problem with the anthology than its unintentional chauvinism, though. Far from “new,” many of its components are more than a decade old—Lawrence Weschler's “Shapinsky's Karma” dates to the mid-1980s—and several have already been published in other books, like the Malcolm Gladwell article that became a chapter in The Tipping Point or an extract from Bill Buford's Among the Thugs. That's not to say that the articles (and their authors) don't deserve the admiration Glass heaps upon them. The way that Michael Lewis teases out the family drama in the story of a teenage day trader who ran afoul of the SEC, for example, is breathtaking reportage and should be read and reread. For all its excellence, though, this anthology is less revelatory than it makes itself out to be. (Oct. 2)

In this intriguing account, Ross offers closeups on the lives and dreams of black porn actors. Combining interviews with personal observations and some theoretical gloss, Ross travels to the San Fernando Valley (center of the porn industry), an Adult Entertainment Expo in Vegas and a swinger's party in Oakland. The African-American niche commands about 10% of the multibillion-dollar porn market, and performers with names like Lexington Steele, Sinnamon Love and Sledge Hammer discuss their schemes to carve out a piece of it (as with the mainstream movie business, many actors hope to produce and direct). Ross gets good interviews and his straightforward prose suits the material: “Just like hog butchers who use every part of the pig 'from the rooter to the tooter,' porn exploits every part of the body to make a profit.” The most graphic and disturbing episode is that of a female performer who prides herself on not doing anal (“I think I'm too cute for that”) but then allows herself to be beaten and humiliated in a scene by white men. There are many subgenres, writes Ross, but “white men overtly degrading black women are some of the most popular.” (Oct.)

In these perceptive essays, Conaway (The Far Side of Eden) shows how development and tourism are laying waste to America's natural and cultural landscapes. Entertaining as well as astute, the pieces revolve around his impressions of exceptional places he considers “physical and spiritual barometers” of the country's health, including the Boise River in Idaho (overused and polluted), Napa Valley in California (disfigured by gigantic wineries and McMansions) and national parks (considered “saleable products” by elected officials and adversely affected by too many tourists, toilets, buses, concessionaires and paved highways). On Western communal lands that should be preserved by the Bureau of Land Management, such as New Mexico's Bisti Badlands and Wyoming's Big Piney, energy exploration and extraction, grazing and all-terrain vehicles are taking their toll. On the grounds of Washington, D.C.'s National Cathedral, “development needs” have resulted in new buildings, accommodations for tour buses and a huge gymnasium, so that an institution supposedly dedicated to saving souls has been turned into an “engine of tourism, development, and controversy.” Conaway argues persuasively that these irreplaceable landscapes stand for the real America, but because we are sacrificing them to material concerns, we're losing our culture along with the very ground upon which America was built. (Oct.)

Do we take our liberties for granted at the risk of losing them in the war on terror? Grayling (Descartes: The Life and Times of a Genius), a professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a leading British public intellectual, believes so. This book is, in some respects, an old-fashioned, triumphalist history of the rise of Western liberty since the 16th century (with Martin Luther, John Locke and Elizabeth Cady Stanton playing leading role), but nevertheless serves as a stirring call to arms to defend freedom from its enemies within and without. Grayling argues that the struggle for liberty has been one of sacrifice and hardship on the part of many heroic individuals. Despite the blood and the violence, it has been worth it: “Today's ordinary Western citizen is, in sixteenth-century terms, a lord: a possessor of rights, entitlements, opportunities and resources that only an aristocrat of that earlier period could hope for.” But, Grayling somberly writes, the process “of losing our inheritance of liberty might have already begun.” Grayling provides a refreshing tonic to any inclination toward apathy or cynicism, and his book will only gain in relevance as the 2008 presidential election looms. Color photos. (Oct.)

After actor Alda (Never Have Your Dog Stuffed) recovered from a nearly fatal intestinal obstruction, he decided to live as if he'd been given a second life. To make his new life as meaningful as possible, he wanted to remember those rare moments when a special “stillness” had come over him, “the kind that hits you when you hear something that goes to the core of who you think you are.” These were moments when he'd had some understanding about the meaning of his life, his reason for living—the central questions that Alda grapples with, as he looks back over his life. While poking good-natured fun at some of his earlier rhetoric (“the ravings of a naïve Hollywood liberal”) he shares highlights of the various commencement speeches and keynote addresses he's given to future doctors and physicists, or even to the odd group of Jefferson scholars. He phrases it differently for each audience, but the message is consistent: It's not what you do in life, but how you do it. Notice everything. Always be open to new ideas, new experiences. Alda is chatty, easygoing and humble, rather like a Mr. Rogers for grownups. His words of inspiration would be a perfect gift for a college grad or for anyone facing major life changes. (Sept.)

Deeply concerned about the failure of America's educational system, Crew (former chancellor of the New York City schools and currently superintendent of the Miami-Dade County schools) has a vision of what must be done. In spite of the billions we spend on education, six years after No Child Left Behind (NCLB), one-third of our eighth-graders can't do basic math, and only 60% of our 10-year-olds can read, he argues. Furthermore, NCLB's focus on testing has pre-empted attention from other important dimensions of education—building character, citizenship and workplace literacy. Crew proposes a new strategy. First, school systems need to be run like businesses, with explicit goals, implementation plans and budgets. The school must become the nucleus of the community, the center of a web connecting business, the arts, health services and any other social institutions that can be drawn into the school's orbit. “Connected Schools,” as Crew calls them, bring outside resources in and give students workplace literacy, i.e., a better sense of what is going on in the larger world. But it's the personal anecdotes that stand out: when Crew describes how his hardworking father put him through school, readers can almost believe that Crew has the grit and determination to make his reform plan work. (Sept.)

On November 1, 1913, Notre Dame's 29-year-old football coach, Jesse Harper, defeated Navy by having his team rely heavily—and successfully—on the forward pass, which had been legalized only seven years earlier. Notre Dame's surprising victory was the start of its football program becoming a sports powerhouse, Maggio believes, and it forever changed how the game was played. The book's first half is excellent, as Notre Dame alum Maggio (he graduated from the law school in 1963) offers a well-researched, insightful look at football's beginnings and the school's early struggles, highlighting just how important that victory was for the survival of two future American institutions. Bafflingly, after the historical game, Maggio devotes countless pages to summarizing every game associated with Harper, who was also Notre Dame's athletic director from 1931 to 1933. Without interviews from players and coaches to offer new insights into these games, the rest of the book reads like eight years' worth of box scores punctuated by letters between Harper and Rockne: his friend, former player and coaching protégé. Even die-hard Fighting Irish fans will have trouble enduring Maggio's lack of narrative flair and focus. Photos not seen by PW. (Sept.)

In this first collected volume, Jones (editor-at-large of Film Comment) displays not only vast knowledge of film, but also an undeniable love for the medium. From his review of Samuel Fuller's director's cut of the war classic The Big Red One to ruminations on such recent releases as David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, Jones expertly walks the line between academia and pop culture without sacrificing insight into either approach. In one of his most incisive pieces in the collection, Jones posits a narrative progression beginning with the works of film pioneers King Vidor and F.W. Murnau, through Robert Bresson and Nicholas Roeg, and ending with Terrence Malick's latest, The New World. Tackling every aspect of the filmmaking process—from the rise of digital effects to the influence of earlier critics such as Andrew Sarris and Manny Farber—Jones presents an engagingly personal journey through the medium that will attract novices and cinephiles alike. (Sept.)

Jamieson, city editor for the New York Times, whose seven-year-old son, Dean, has been in “full-bore question mode” for the past few years, decided that the best strategy for giving Dean the answers was also to give himself a challenge. He would get each answer “from a real person who knows it by heart, whose very livelihood depends on the knowledge” that Jamieson would present without sugarcoating or simplification. The result is a compendium of hilariously insightful questions from kids (age seven and under) with often insightfully hilarious answers from adults ranging from a doctor discussing the difference between somatic and neuropathic pain (“What would hurt more: getting run over by a car or getting stung by a jellyfish?”) to a dominatrix explaining Mach 1 air speed (“If you don't hit anything with it, how does a whip make that noise?”). Jamieson helpfully organizes the questions by theme into chapters, although his introductory anecdotes to each, while amusing, should have been drastically reduced to make room for more questions. Too bad this funny and fascinating book is coming out in September: it makes a perfect Father's Day gift for any dad whose child has ever asked, “Why is the sky blue?” or “Why do we have eyebrows?” or “What does 'sexy' mean?” (Sept.)

If you recognize the phrase “I don't roll on Shabbos” or “The Dude abides,” then you've seen The Big Lebowski, filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen's tribute to the detective genre starring Jeff Bridges as a bowling-loving stoner named “The Dude” who accidentally gets mixed up with kidnappers, nihilists and other strange Coen brother–style comic types. A financial and critical bomb released in 1998, it has since gained a devoted cult following, due in no small part to the efforts of this delightfully obsessive book's authors, the organizers of “Lebowski Fest,” a traveling celebration that combines the good vibes of a Grateful Dead concert with the fervor of a Star Trek convention. Like a typical Dead concert, however, the book is a lot of fun, but will seem uneven to all but the hardest-core fan. Highlights include insightful interviews with principal actors, including Bridges and John Goodman (“I think that's the favorite thing I've ever done in my life”). Unfortunately, the authors also feature various unsuccessful attempts at capturing the film's quirky humor (“How to Dude-ify Your Car”) along with too many long and repetitious interviews with various Lebowski fanatics. (Sept.)

Award-winning South African historian Van Onselen has crafted a riveting narrative portraying the life and crimes of Joseph Silver (1868–1918), a violent man whose story is almost too improbable to be true. Silver terrorized women on four continents in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, rising from humble Jewish roots in a small Polish town to become a leading trafficker in female slaves. With masterful survival instincts, Silver locked horns with the forces of law and order in England, the U.S., South Africa and Argentina, often corrupting those who pursued him and even, in a jaw-dropping display of chutzpah, serving on occasion as a police officer himself. Despite the overall fascination with Silver, Van Onselen's excellent book will receive more notice for its final chapter, in which he makes a compelling circumstantial case for Silver being Jack the Ripper. While the evidence is somewhat more speculative than the author concedes, he deserves credit for identifying a man with a history of violence against prostitutes who apparently lived in the heart of Whitechapel during the 1888 Autumn of Terror, and who matched some eyewitness descriptions of suspicious figures seen with the victims shortly before their deaths. B&w photos, maps. (Sept.)

Freedman, who “translates” legal jargon into English for an investment bank and writes the “Legal Lingo” column for the New York Law Journal, offers a cornucopia of hilarious, offbeat and downright bizarre examples of simple concepts contorted into words that defy understanding, often retaining centuries-old lingo like “Further affiant sayeth naught” (which means: this is the end of the affidavit). Freedman is as much reformer as humorist, and he ably demonstrates that legal documents can be written in understandable prose. He also skewers the contingent of lawyers and academics who resist such changes in the name of precision and lampoons flaws in the legal system, such as judges' refusal to explain instructions to jurors who are mystified by phrases such as “Circumstantial evidence is evidence that, if found to be true, proves a fact from which an inference of the existence of another fact may be drawn.” Occasionally the three-jokes-a-page approach is more cute than clever, but this lighthearted farrago of the follies of the law is sure to amuse and to convince readers that legal language can be made plain. (Sept. 4)

How did the Supreme Court handle Indian rights in the early 19th century? What factors influenced the Court's decision in Roe v. Wade? This timely survey looks at the intellectual, social, cultural, economic and political events that have influenced the legal history of the Court. The authors (two professors of history and one professor of law) consider whether the court is a political institution and whether in the course of two centuries “the justices have... remade the Constitution.” The 15 concise chapters, each devoted to one chief justice's tenure, look at major cases and offer thumbnail sketches of each justice as individuals with unique personalities, special interests and independent judicial perspectives who “never backed away” from their role “as final arbiters of the meaning of the Constitution.” The authors make evident the framers' original intent to create a Constitution founded on immutable ideals yet responsive to evolving standards through the amendment process. This illuminating re-examination is essential for those who want a historical context for current debates about America's politics and fundamental principles. 25 photos. (Sept.)

Even those inclined to suspect a conspiracy was behind JFK's murder will likely remain unpersuaded by Pacepa's circumstantial, speculative case that the Soviet Union ordered Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate Kennedy. The author, who was head of Romania's secret security agency before defecting to the U.S. in 1978, maintains that Khrushchev plotted the assassination, only to have a change of heart, but Soviet agents were unable to “deprogram” Oswald. Pacepa's version of history gives the KGB months to prevent the assassination (and its potentially devastating blowback) by simply eliminating Oswald once his determination to kill Kennedy became clear. Pacepa relies heavily on the work of the Warren Commission, the House Committee on Assassinations and author Edward J. Epstein; his own experience of Romanian intelligence provides only anecdotes and what he calls an ability to recognize the Soviet fingerprint in the case. While there is reason to doubt that the former Soviet Union was fully forthcoming about Oswald's time there, this book offers no convincing Soviet motive for the assassination. (Sept. 14)

Edited by New York Times science writer Kolata, this volume celebrates writing that captures the excitement of scientific discovery and also its human consequences. Tyler Cabot's “The Theory of Everything” spotlights theoretical physicists awaiting “the greatest, most anticipated, most expensive experiment in the history of mankind.” By contrast, “Manifold Destiny” by Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber tells of Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman, who quietly announced a solution to one of the field's most elusive problems: Fermat's Last Theorem. Atul Gawande's “The Score” looks at the all-too-often painful history of obstetrics, and “Truth or Consequences” by Jennifer Couzin examines the bitter fallout for innocent graduate students and postdocs when their adviser is accused of falsifying data. Oliver Sacks's “Stereo Sue” explores the marvel of binocular vision, and Barry Yeoman's “Schweitzer's Dangerous Discovery” profiles unconventional paleontologist Mary Higby Schweitzer, discoverer of tissue remnants in dinosaur bones. These articles, culled mainly from general interest publications like the New Yorker but also from science magazines like Discover, showcase articles that show, in Kolata's words, how “[a]dvances in science have changed who we are as human beings and... are changing what we will become,” and readers will indeed find them as exciting as they are compelling. (Sept. 18)

Harold Robbins (1916–1997), whose potboilers sold 750 million copies worldwide during his lifetime, was born into a middle-class Brooklyn Jewish family. But as Wilson relates in this shallow biography, Robbins often fabricated a past as Czar Nicholas's illegitimate son or a lonely orphan who became a sailor indulging in gay sex on a submarine. Early works like the autobiographical, Depression-era A Stone for Danny Fisher showed talent, and his fictionalized portrait of Howard Hughes, The Carpetbaggers, was made into a film and catapulted him to fame. But, Wilson says, Robbins's novels grew schlockier and repetitive as he wrote to sustain his cocaine-fueled lifestyle of fancy cars and mansions, prostitutes and gambling. Particularly damning is the testimony of Robbins's Simon & Schuster editor, Michael Korda, who recalls a bitter, sneering writer tossing off pages in exchange for a check. Hustler founder Larry Flynt's inflated claim that Robbins was as much a celebrity as Tom Cruise is repeated by Wilson with scant skepticism or analysis, and it's doubtful that this lackluster effort will gain Robbins new fans. This misfire by the Edgar-winning biographer of Patricia Highsmith (Beautiful Shadow) is more an extended magazine article intended to titillate than a serious biography or a fruitful dissection of the American bestseller. 8 pages of photos. (Sept.)

Best known for his absurdist, sci-fi–tinged short stories, Saunders (In Persuasion Nation) offers up an assortment of styles in his first nonfiction collection. Humor pieces from the New Yorker like “Ask the Optimist,” in which a newspaper advice column spins out of control, reflect the gleeful insanity of his fiction, while others display more earnestness, falling short of his best work. In the title essay, for example, his lament over the degraded quality of American media between the trial of O.J. Simpson and the 9/11 terrorist attacks is indistinguishable from the complaints of any number of cultural commentators. Fortunately, longer travel pieces written for GQ, where Saunders wanders through the gleaming luxury hotels of Dubai or keeps an overnight vigil over a teenage boy meditating in the Nepalese jungle, are enriched by his eye for odd detail and compassion for the people he encounters. He also discusses some of his most important literary influences, including Slaughterhouse Five and Johnny Tremain (he holds up the latter as “my first model of beautiful compression”—the novel that made him want to be a writer). Despite a few rough spots, these essays contain much to delight. (Sept. 8)

Tackling the thorny subject of America's black men and their place in the national experience with balanced analysis and superb writing, Washington Post staff writers don't miss a beat. Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Edward P. Jones sets the tone with an astute introduction about growing up without a father in D.C. and the emotional complications of lacking mentoring. Excellent journalistic features include Michael A. Fletcher's title piece, “At the Corner of Progress and Peril,” examining the many missed opportunities of these besieged men; Stephen A. Holmes and Richard Morin's insightful exploration of how black men perceive themselves, “A Portrait Shaded with Promise and Doubt”; and Robert E. Pierre's “The Young Apprentice,” which reveals a college-educated couple's preparation of their son to enter the world. Kissah Williams offers a candid meditation on eligible black men in “Singled Out,” while David Finkel writes powerfully on “The Meaning of Work.” Covering sociological, psychological and spiritual topics, the book provides a comprehensive view of the African-American man in contemporary America. (Sept.)

The typical Western view of WWII's European Theater—as a struggle between freedom and fascism that climaxed with the Normandy landings—is harshly critiqued in this scathing reappraisal. Historian Davies (Rising '44: The Battle of Warsaw) argues that British and American campaigns were a “sideshow” to the titanic conflict between the Wehr-macht and the Red Army on the Eastern Front, where most of the fighting and decisive battles occurred. The war was therefore not a “simple victory” of good over evil, he contends, but the defeat of one totalitarian state, Nazi Germany, by another, the Soviet Union, whose crimes were just as vast, if less diabolical. Davies's topical approach judiciously surveys the military, economic and political aspects of the war, often from an Eastern European perspective. He observes, for example, that the region that suffered the most civilian deaths was Ukraine, and that the Soviet Union was initially as much an aggressor—against Poland, Finland and the Baltic states—as Germany. (Poland's travails, Davies's professional specialty, are somewhat overemphasized.) Davies cuts against the grain of popular war histories like Stephen Ambrose's accounts of D-Day and the Bulge, but his interpretations rest on solid scholarly work. Photos. (Sept. 10)

Journalist and foreign correspondent Nagorski combines published sources and interviews in this history of what he calls the largest, deadliest and most decisive battle of WWII. The often cited Russian winter did not account for the battle's outcome, he asserts, nor did German military overstretch. The tide wasn't turned by Hitler's increasingly erratic command decisions either. Moscow, Nagorski argues, was won by the Soviet government, the Red Army and the Russian people. Stalin's decision to stay in the city provided a rallying point—otherwise his mistakes as a commander and his brutality as head of state might have handed the Germans a victory they couldn't win in combat. A Red Army still learning its craft lost more than two million soldiers before Moscow, many of whom were victims of teenaged officers and obsolete weapons, failed tactical doctrines and logistical systems. Even the vaunted Siberian divisions were short of everything, including winter clothes, as they fought in sub-zero temperatures. Nor were Moscow's residents the united folk of Communist myth. Nagorski's sources luridly describe panic, looting and wildcat strikes as the Germans approached. Still, he concludes that whatever the shortcomings of Moscow's defenders, their deeds don't require heroic myth: the truth is honorable enough. (Sept.)

The Plenitude” is the word of Silicon Valley polymath Gold for the limitless stuff produced to feed our consumer-focused economy, but this small, posthumous (Gold died in 2003) book reads more like his private notebook than a business guide. That's not a bad thing: Gold, a scientist, inventor and artist who worked at times for the toy company Mattel and the legendary Xerox PARC research labs, is good company. Based on a few of his lectures, this breezy book shares thoughts on creative “hats” Gold has worn, such as artist and engineer, and the worldviews they impose on practitioners (e.g., engineers like to solve problems while designers are contemptuous of artists for their detachment from the commercial). The later part of the book weighs consumerism's pros and cons, coming out in favor—where else could an inventor fall?—while offering valid critiques (e.g., so much of what we make and buy is ugly). Throughout, Gold displays casual insights—such as illustrating the sheer abundance of the plenitude by pointing out the variety of shirts in an audience and the work that went into each—and pads this very skinny book with his own goofy cartoons. The result is a fun splash in some of the important ideas behind modern consumption. (Sept.)

This cynical but appealing memoir by a lieutenant in the elite 101st Airborne recounts his unpleasant times fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. After a quick review of his youth (shy, smart, dreaming of glory), Friedman describes his unit's deployment to Afghanistan after 9/11 to fight the Taliban. Its mission turns out to be guarding an air base, four months of demoralizing boredom followed by urgent orders into battle. The result is an exhausting 11-hour march high into freezing mountains, where the soldiers arrive as the fighting ends. A year later, as American forces invade Iraq in March 2003, Friedman's unit advances almost to Baghdad without encountering resistance but yearning to fight. There follows three months of dull occupation duty until, to everyone's horror, a grenade kills two soldiers on patrol, and the insurgency begins. The author accepts that America needed to fight in Afghanistan, but can't fathom why we invaded Iraq. He does not re-enlist. Given the public's waning support for the war in Iraq, Friedman's voice is likely to be heard by sympathetic ears. (Aug. 15)

Singlehandedly repulsing a Japanese attack in 1945, Pvt. John McKinney won the Medal of Honor for one of America's most heroic wartime feats, and here Johnson (Hour of Redemption) presents the event as a docudrama. Private McKinney was the nearly illiterate son of a Georgia sharecropper who served quietly throughout the New Guinea and Philippine campaigns. With victory assured in the Philippines, his unit was sent to defend a remote spit of land far from the fighting, where no one expected the attack when it came. Recovering from his surprise, McKinney recaptured a machine gun from the Japanese, firing until it jammed, then fought on alone with his rifle (he was a crack shot) and bayonet. Afterward, witnesses counted over 100 enemy dead—so many that superiors wanted a lower number before submitting their report. McKinney died in 1997, leaving no personal papers, so the author relies on interviews and official documents, and also on his imagination. The lurid invented dialogue accompanied by his hero's thoughts (“His mouth went dry, his muscles tightened, his heart beat slow and steady...”) will leave history buffs gnashing their teeth. (Aug. 7)

One of the American Civil War's most horrific events took place on July 30, 1864: the slaughter of thousands of Union troops, including many African-Americans, in a giant pit outside Petersburg, Va. The pit was created as a result of a poorly planned and executed Union mission to tunnel under Confederate lines and blow a hole in them, thereby opening the gates to a full frontal assault on Petersburg that, if successful, could have helped decide the war. Instead, after several hundred Confederates perished in the initial mine explosion, the Union troops entered the crater—later known as “The Pit”—and were gunned down. (The scene is re-created in the novel and film Cold Mountain.) Civil War specialist Axelrod (The War Between the Spies, et al.) offers a concise, readable and creditable recounting of the Battle of the Crater, which U.S. Grant famously termed a “stupendous failure.” When the dust settled, the Union forces, under the inept leadership of generals Ambrose E. Burnside and George Gordon Meade, suffered more than 4,000 killed, wounded or captured. The well-led Confederates had about 1,500 casualties. The massive slaughter does not make for easy reading, but is a reminder of the horror of war at its basest level. (Aug. 7)

This survey of Jewish history highlights the political aspect of Jewish experience, beginning with the observation that in the Hebrew Bible, Jewish power came through military heroics. By the time of the Roman conquest in A.D. 70, the Talmudic rabbis changed the narrative, blaming defeat on internal dissension, thus elevating the need for political discipline above military power. A Harvard professor of Yiddish and comparative literature, Wisse is keen to study how the politics of Jews occasions the politics of what she terms “anti-Jews.” For instance, she asserts that Allied leaders entered WWII not to save Europe's Jews but in order to defeat the Nazis, who were also anti-Jews. Similarly, the author says, President Bush was provoked to fight anti-Jewish terrorists by 9/11. Yet in both cases, isolationists accused the administration of caving in to Jewish demands that damaged American interests. Even the founding of Israel, she implies, has not normalized Jews' political position in the world. Palestinians, she says, have forged a national identity in “obsessive opposition” to Israel, and other nations have exploited Israel for their own political ends. Although her prose is sometimes opaque, Wisse is in fine form with well-reasoned, self-assured arguments bound to provoke heated debate among interested intellectuals. (Aug. 28)

In the 1950s the marshy, mosquito-infested lowlands of Florida, christened Cape Canaveral (“place of the cane”), began to be covered with concrete for ICBM launching pads. As authors Lipartito (Constructing Corporate America: History, Politics, Culture) and Butler (Manufacturing the Future: A History of Western Electric) relate, although Americans remember the cape and its control center, the Kennedy Space Center, as the site of media circuses surrounding early manned space missions, between 1958 and 1967 several hundred unmanned rockets blasted off into the Florida skies, sometimes two a day. NASA divided its early years on the cape between fighting turf battles with the military and moving tons of earth to fill in the marshes. As the authors describe, many of the space center's early administrators—notably Kurt Debus, who had worked on the V-2 rocket with Werner von Braun at Peenemünde—were hands-on engineering types who eventually gave way to professional administrators. Writing fine, vivid prose, Lipartito and Butler wisely avoid concentrating on the hot-shot astronauts, focusing instead on the center itself and on the dedicated men and women behind the scenes who worked on the engineering required to lift a rocket out of Earth's gravity and made the American space program a success. 97 b&w illus. (Aug. 12)

Beyond cop-show arrests, the “right to remain silent” has profound and wide-ranging implications, argues this scattershot legal/philosophical treatise. Georgetown law professor Seidman (Our Unsettled Constitution) examines the concept of a right to silence in several contexts, including police interrogations, Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination, public apologies, the Pledge of Allegiance and, less convincingly, the right to die. He approaches these issues from many directions, including Supreme Court jurisprudence and the writings of Aquinas and Camus. Seidman contrasts silence, which for liberals is the bulwark of a mental private sphere free from government intrusion, with a “republican” duty to speak. But the question of whether one can really choose to remain silent, he says, is complicated by “pervasive determinism,” which considers that choices are compelled by social forces and power relationships, and “radical libertarianism,” which insists that choice is necessary in a meaningless universe. Seidman is a gadfly—he favors scrapping Miranda rules in favor of public interrogation in the presence of counsel, backed by contempt charges against suspects who won't talk—and delights in tripping up conventional wisdom in logical paradoxes; the book sometimes feels like a debate between the dormitory existentialist and the sophomore who proves free will doesn't exist. It's often stimulating, but too abstruse for the average reader. (Aug. 27)

What would it require for a person to live all the commandments of the Bible for an entire year? That is the question that animates this hilarious, quixotic, thought-provoking memoir from Jacobs (The Know-It-All). He didn't just keep the Bible's better-known moral laws (being honest, tithing to charity and trying to curb his lust), but also the obscure and unfathomable ones: not mixing wool with linen in his clothing; calling the days of the week by their ordinal numbers to avoid voicing the names of pagan gods; trying his hand at a 10-string harp; growing a ZZ Top beard; eating crickets; and paying the babysitter in cash at the end of each work day. (He considered some rules, such as killing magicians, too legally questionable to uphold.) In his attempts at living the Bible to the letter, Jacobs hits the road in highly entertaining fashion to meet other literalists, including Samaritans in Israel, snake handlers in Appalachia, Amish in Lancaster County, Pa., and biblical creationists in Kentucky. Throughout his journey, Jacobs comes across as a generous and thoughtful (and, yes, slightly neurotic) participant observer, lacing his story with absurdly funny cultural commentary as well as nuanced insights into the impossible task of biblical literalism. (Oct.)

In January 2005, Ricky Rodriguez stabbed a woman to death and then fled the scene of the crime, finally shooting himself in the California desert. Rodriguez was a high-profile ex-member of the Children of God, also called the Family, a controversial hippie cult of the 1970s that had spiraled into aberrant sexual behaviors and other disconcerting practices. Rodriguez was seeking revenge for the sexual abuse that his murder victim and others had committed against him when he was a child (the cult had gone so far as to record its crimes in a bizarre book that glibly described—and provided photographic evidence of—sexual relations between adults and children). Lattin, who covered the religion beat for the San Francisco Chronicle, offers an arresting if uneven account of the Family. He begins by arguing that the cult is best understood in the context of American evangelicalism, and does some strong investigation into the founder's ancestry to prove this point. But he does not sustain these threads throughout the book, which becomes a typical true crime tale. Some aspects of the Family, like “flirty fishing” (sacred prostitution), are carefully researched, while others (like a journalistic account of how the cult funded itself so well on a global scale) are underreported. (Oct.)

Coutinho, a Jesuit priest who has lived much of his life in India, once was told by a theology teacher at an American university that he was a heretic. He had merely posed a “what if,” asking what the man would do if scripture scholars should determine that Jesus never existed as a historical figure. The teacher said he would have to abandon his work as a priest because he could never base his life on a myth, but Coutinho countered that he would still die for the myth. Conversant with India's Hindu and Buddhist traditions, Coutinho effectively uses this story to illustrate the differences between the Western and Eastern understandings of truth (one, he writes, sees truth as a set of beliefs while the other views it as an experience). Throughout this volume of short essays, Coutinho draws on Eastern religious traditions, blending them with his own Catholic practice to challenge and deepen readers' understandings of God. Besides asking questions like “Can you be religious without knowing God?” and “Are you running for fun or for your life?” he offers practical advice as well, including a PQR (Pause Question Respond) formula for handling difficult situations and BAD (Basement Attic Disposal) days for helping Westerners get rid of consuming possessions. Readers who favor “spirituality” over religion will most enjoy this book. (Oct.)

When a gunman killed five Amish children and injured five others last fall in a Nickel Mines, Pa., schoolhouse, media attention rapidly turned from the tragic events to the extraordinary forgiveness demonstrated by the Amish community. The authors, who teach at small colleges with Anabaptist roots and have published books on the Amish, were contacted repeatedly by the media after the shootings to interpret this subculture. In response to the questions “why—and how—did they forgive?” Kraybill and his colleagues present a compelling study of “Amish grace.” After describing the heartbreaking attack and its aftermath, the authors establish that forgiveness is embedded in Amish society through five centuries of Anabaptist tradition, and grounded in the firm belief that forgiveness is required by the New Testament. The community's acts of forgiveness were not isolated decisions by saintly individuals but hard-won “countercultural” practices supported by all aspects of Amish life. Common objections to Amish forgiveness are addressed in a chapter entitled, “What About Shunning?” The authors carefully distinguish between forgiveness, pardon and reconciliation, as well as analyzethe complexities of mainstream America's response and the extent to which the Amish example can be applied elsewhere. This intelligent, compassionate and hopeful book is a welcome addition to the growing literature on forgiveness. (Sept. 21)

Steinberg, a rabbi and educator, calls the Jewish holidays “fundamental expressions of our spirituality.” In Judaism's holistic approach, he says, spirituality encompasses the interaction of a person's intellectual, emotional and physical aspects, so the holidays “tie us to history, the earth, the Jewish people and God.” This first of three volumes explores Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot. Each section discusses a holiday's biblical origins, ideology and customs, followed by writings from Jewish thinkers throughout history, contemporary perspectives and alternative meditations. What makes this volume stand out from other holiday guides is an additional section with sacred texts presented in and inspired by Talmudic format. Steinberg examines each text at three different levels—literal, interpretive and personal. He doesn't shy away from questioning practices that may seem outmoded, but challenges readers not to abandon them abruptly. His careful, thorough and reasoned explanations will deepen understanding of each holiday's history and tradition, allowing celebrations to become, in fact, more celebratory. (Sept.)

Pakistani-born and British-educated Sardar, author of 40 other books on Islam, pens this elucidating and very original introduction to the religion. He describes the basics of Islam, including the Qur'an and hadith, the life of Muhammad and the history of Islam and Muslims, in an easy-to-read and cogent manner. Sprinkled throughout are surprising facts, including that Muslims do not believe in original sin and that there are as many Muslims in China as in Egypt. Sardar clarifies some troubling aspects of the Prophet Muhammad's life, explaining polygamy as mainly alliance building and Muhammad's participation in battle as more limited than generally described. He criticizes Muslims for their rigidity and for losing touch with reason—which, in his opinion, is a cornerstone of Islam. He decries the literalism behind the creation of sharia law, the rejection of free interpretation of the Qur'an (called ijtihad) and unfair treatment of women, but sees these behaviors as anomalies. In contrast, Sardar acknowledges Muslims' tolerance, such as their acceptance of other prophets, their flourishing book trade and societal advancements. With its manageable length and optimistic outlook, this introduction to Islam is a cut above the rest. (Sept.)

A pastor of the same Saddleback Church that's famous for bestselling author Rick Warren (who provides the foreword), Baker designs an eight-step Christian recovery program geared toward enjoying spiritual freedom from hurts, hangups and bad habits. Baker's book is based on Warren's sermon series Road to Recovery, which has been tested in the lives of more than 400,000 people in 10,000 churches. Baker's eight steps to spiritual freedom (admitting need, getting help, letting go, coming clean, making changes, repairing relationships, maintaining momentum and recycling pain) promise to help Christians overcome many kinds of addictive behaviors. Baker likens them to AA's 12-step program, but clarifies that Christ is the source of lasting change. He writes that as believers refuse to admit their powerlessness to overcome tendencies to do wrong, their lives are fraught with fear, frustration, fatigue and failure. The cure? Admitting weakness with a humble heart; then praying, writing and sharing with others about the problem. Each chapter includes moving narratives of participants in Baker's program who express how its principles changed their lives. These practical, pithy how-tos will galvanize Christians into action with the simplicity of Baker's easy-to-actualize plan. (Sept.)

Covering a wide array of emotions and states of being—disorientation, panic, loneliness, yearning, anger, determination, surrender and emergence—Goldstein (Gonzo Judaism), founding rabbi of the New Shul in New York City, above all simply reminds readers that we are human. In his easygoing style, he uses an engaging mix of Bible tales, congregants' stories and personal anecdotes, as well as cultural references, to illustrate a sort of eight-step program for opening oneself spiritually. Some are extreme examples of life's pain—homelessness, suicide, terrorist bombings—and others all too common encounters with job loss, cancer and death. Each story is tempered with a corresponding example of hope, a reason to carry on. Goldstein comes across as neither smug nor cavalier, nor does he consider this a self-help book. Rather, he seeks to address not personal loss so much as “the phenomenon of being lost, of becoming a wanderer, a soul unable to find its way.” As a seasoned extreme traveler himself, he knows what it is to wander, and readers of all spiritual persuasions will appreciate his gentle prodding as a fellow traveler on the journey. (Sept.)

Can we trust the Jesus narratives in the Gospels? Boyd and Eddy, who hold doctoral degrees from Princeton Theological Seminary and Marquette University, respectively, affirm that we can. Both have written widely on biblical and theological subjects. Their experience shows in this marvelous study of the historicity of the gospels and the reliability of the biblical narrative. At times this book reads like a good detective story: it lays out the clues and the methods of evaluating those clues, and then draws conclusions based on the best evidence. From the most ancient witnesses, like Josephus and Irenaeus, to contemporary critics like Burton Mack, the authors ably rebut the critics' claims to inconsistency and historical error. They further explore the value of the fantasy works of popular writers like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Although the authors are certainly capable of turning out an academic text, this book is intended for the general reader, the average churchgoer who may be struggling with difficult questions about the Jesus story. It's a fascinating and valuable work that merits a wide readership. (Sept.)

Just as A Mormon Mother is the standout memoir of a 19th-century polygamous woman's life, this autobiography offers the compelling voice of a contemporary plural wife's experiences. Daughter of a second wife, Spencer was raised strictly in “the Principle” as it was lived secretly and illegally by fringe communities of Mormon “fundamentalists”—groups that split off from the LDS Church when it abandoned polygamy more than a century ago. In spite of her mother's warnings and the devotion of a boyfriend with monogamist intentions, Spencer followed her religious convictions—that living in polygamy was essential for eternal salvation—and became a second wife herself at the age of 16 in 1953. It's hard to tell which is more devastating in this memoir: the strains of husband-sharing with—ultimately—nine other wives, or the unremitting poverty that came with maintaining so many households and 56 children. Spencer's writing is lively and full of engaging dialogue, and her life is nothing short of astonishing. After 28 years of polygamous marriage, Spencer has lived the last 19 years in monogamy. Her story will be emotional and shocking, but many readers will resonate with the universal question the memoir raises: how to reconcile inherited religious beliefs when they grate against social norms and the deepest desires of the heart. (Aug. 22)

Contrary to Mel Brooks's humorous presentation of Moses and the 10 Commandments on film, Klinghoffer (The Lord Will Gather Me In) does not think these biblical laws are a laughing matter. A writer and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Klinghoffer warns that America is ignoring the commandments and sinking deeper into a quagmire of immorality. Using the Northwest's urban environs in which he lives as a case study, he warns that Seattle suffers from an “advanced case of moral retardation” that could easily spread to the rest of the country. The main culprit is secularism, says Klinghoffer, a “modern and resurgent paganism.” Although this seems somewhat overstated, in light of religion's ascendancy in much of America, the author's argument that the U.S. has slighted a communitarian ethic in favor of increased individualism is compelling. Klinghoffer writes with passion and is genuinely concerned with the moral state of the union. However, he often slips into acerbic commentary that distracts from his more salient points. For every example given regarding the moral ineptitude of some residents of Seattle, there could be 10 provided about those who are fighting the good fight and living by God's word. (Aug. 21)

Kugel's tour de force of biblical scholarship juxtaposes two different ways of reading the Bible: the ancient biblical interpretations, ranging from the Book of Jubilees to Augustine, that he explored in The Bible as It Was, and the modern historical approach that challenges the historical veracity of scripture and seeks instead to find its writers' original sources and purposes. It can be a jarring journey for those schooled in traditional views, but what emerges is a fresh, even strange, and very rich view of everything from the Garden of Eden to Isaiah's dream vision of God. Refreshingly undogmatic and often witty, Kugel brings an intimate knowledge of the Hebrew Bible to illuminate small points as well as large. He discusses who the ancient Israelites were; the resemblances between YHWH and Canaanite gods; the unique role of the prophet in Ancient Near Eastern religions; the nature of ancient wisdom literature; and what the Bible means when it calls Solomon the wisest of men. The result is a stunning narrative of the evolution of ancient Israel, of its God and of the entire Hebrew Bible, contrasted with ancient interpretations that aimed to uncover hidden meanings and moral lessons. So, for example, for the ancients, the story of Cain and Abel is a tale of good versus evil. For the moderns, it was originally a story of origin, about the relation between ancient Israelites and the fierce Kenites to their south. While Kugel is a traditional Jew, he sees the modern approach as compelling, so the dilemma is whether a person of faith can read scripture in both the old way and the new. Drawing on Judaism's nonfundamentalist approach, Kugel's proposed answer is that the original purpose of the texts and their lack of historical accuracy matters less than their underlying message: to serve God. (Sept.)