Nonfiction Reviews

Angwin, an award-winning journalist for the Wall Street Journal, recounts the history of MySpace.com in this well-written, entertaining and drama-filled chronicle. From its founding by Chris DeWolfe to its surprising purchase for nearly $600 million by Rupert Murdoch and NewsCorp., Angwin takes the reader through the company’s tumultuous journey to the top. Readers will learn how Eliot Spitzer’s spyware lawsuit nearly devastated the company and how Richard Blumenthal’s investigation into the site’s lack of protection of minors resulted in a blindsiding public assault. An array of personalities populate the book, including Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone, Bill O’Reilly and Tila Tequila, who was one of the earliest to use her popularity on the site to generate a successful business. Angwin also describes the massive defection of MySpace users to Facebook and leaves the reader to wrestle with the issue of digital identity. Attesting to the depth of her research, Angwin also includes a lengthy notes section. This engrossing look at how MySpace became a media powerhouse will find a solid audience of business history, technology and entrepreneurship readers. (Mar.)

Tales from the residential real estate trenches are complete with attempted tear-jerking from former model Fitzgerald. The author took a running start at selling real estate after leaving behind a violent ex-husband in New York and arriving in L.A. with her infant daughter in tow, with few belongings, no education and no job prospects. After a rocky start, she’s grown to be one of the most successful agents for Coldwell Banker. Fitzgerald runs through frustratingly general advice on ambition, leadership, building rapport among would-be clients, navigating a bewildering industry and looking the part of a successful businesswoman. Though Fitzgerald strives for practical advice with cheerful chapter wrapup lessons, interviews with inspirational professionals and practice sales scripts, the advice is disorganized and vague, and the personal-story prose off-putting and melodramatic (“My fairy-tale husband and life had shattered on the marble floor like a fallen mirror—razor-sharp shards of glass lacerating my hopes, my dreams, and my heart”). Would-be realtors seeking advice would be best off looking elsewhere, as this book tries too hard to be both a memoir and a how-to guide, and thus falls short at both. (Mar.)

Duke historian Robisheaux turns the obscure story of a smalltown German woman convicted of witchcraft into a marvelous window onto a society in crisis. On Shrove Tuesday, 1672, Eva Küstner delivered Shrovetide cakes baked by her mother to her neighbor, Anna Fessler, who was still recuperating from the birth of her child a few weeks earlier. A few days after eating some of the cakes, Anna died a painful death. Almost immediately, the community accused Eva and her mother, Anna Schmeig, of witchcraft. In this fast-paced account, Robisheaux chronicles the roles that various ministers, lawyers and physicians play in the indictment of Anna Schmeig and her immediate family. Robisheaux shows that Schmeig’s trial and execution as a witch grew out of a small village’s superstitions and its belief in the power of God to transform an evil event into an exemplary one. Drawing on rich records of the trials of Schmeig and her family, Robisheaux finely crafts a vivid glimpse of a time, place and state of mind that, though remote, is all too familiar. 22 illus., 3 maps. (Feb.)

In this dramatic challenge to cherished American concepts like individualism, free will and laissez-faire economics, Trout (Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment) presents “an alternative story grounded not in the abstractions of political theory or economics, but in the moisture and grit of human psychology.” Studies by cognitive scientists and psychologists reveal an “empathy gap,” where individuals repeatedly make biased and selfish choices despite their best attempts to the contrary. The author posits that government can bridge the gap and cites vaccination, estate tax, helmet laws and food safety as issues that government has successfully handled for the greater good. For fighting poverty: “the best hope... is amending the Constitution to guarantee an above-poverty income to all citizens.” Trout recognizes that government may not always make the right choices, but suggests that if it depended more on automated processes and the advice of social scientists, it might recover the trust that it has lost. For some, Trout’s book will seem a panacea for a selfish world, but others may question whether it is really possible to prevent the same biases that affect individual decisions from affecting larger, governmental entities. (Feb.)

Douglas Sirk’s film Imitation of Life sparks another beguiling celebration of Old Hollywood for Staggs, author of All About “All About Eve.” Staggs sections the 1959 melodrama’s subplots into a campy “blonde side” (Lana Turner and Sandra Dee as a Broadway star and her daughter, battling over a man), and a tragic “dark side” (Juanita Miller and Susan Kohner as a black maid and the light-skinned daughter who repudiates her). Refracting themes of racial anxiety, confused identity and the mutual wounds parents and children inflict through Sirk’s subtly ironic direction, the movie, Staggs writes, is “a florid valentine with a death’s-head where Cupid ought to be.” Staggs’s luxuriously digressive account ranges far beyond the featured attraction. Drawing on chatty interviews with those who worked on or in the film, he profiles studio executives, stars and makeup men alike, assesses their oeuvre and gossips about their scandals, and takes extraneous potshots at everything from modern-day starlets (“nasal-voiced and rather dim overall”) to the Catholic Church (“a monolithic theocracy verging on fascism”). Staggs is an often incisive critic, but one who leaves himself raptly open to the emotional impact of movies; he shows readers how compelling Hollywood’s imitation of life can be. (Feb.)

Fans of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies and Decline and Fall will recognize the glittering world of the “Bright Young People”, the London socialites of the 1920s who had their costume parties and other exploits celebrated (and excoriated) in the tabloid media. Taylor, a literary critic and biographer, acknowledges that this crowd—which included Cecil Beaton and Nancy Mitford—were the Britney Spears and Paris Hilton of their day, but doesn’t belabor the point excessively. Taylor’s account is not so much a straightforward history as a bundle of thematic essays arranged chronologically; one chapter, for example, discusses the ways some gay “Brights” were able to avoid much of the repression prevalent throughout British society at the time, while another covers the themes of the fiction that came out of the scene. There are still plenty of juicy anecdotes to go around, although Taylor says that reports of drug-fueled orgies are “exaggerated,” and points out that Britain in the 1920s was a tightly regulated society. The text is enlivened by several Punch cartoons from the period, vividly depicting the hold these rich young partygoers once held on the public’s imagination. (Jan.)

Journalist and WWII-veteran Downs has spent the last 50 years investigating the mysterious circumstances of the disappearance of big band leader Glenn Miller as his plane flew over the English Channel in 1944. Downs’s intriguing if far-fetched look at Miller’s final days presents a radical argument: Miller, an army major, was a U.S. spy who died while attempting to deliver a secret message from Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, who was requesting a group of German generals to join a top-secret operation to disrupt Hitler’s war plans. Using his access to secret documents before and after the war ended, Downs makes a strong argument that Miller was captured in France by Nazi spies and tortured and killed during an unsuccessful interrogation in Paris to get him to reveal information about the operation. Downs interviews a number of U.S. troops who saw Miller’s dead body dumped outside a Parisian brothel, and he argues that the U.S. Army High Command created the fake story of Miller’s disappearance to keep the Nazis from claiming that they had broken Miller’s spirit. While Downs’s research has some merit, his breathlessly written suppositions sometimes read like the worst JFK assassination books. (Jan.)

In 2001, Zachary traveled to Africa to write a novel, but instead he became besotted with a woman and a continent. In his book, Zachary (The Diversity Advantage), a former foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, chronicles his six-year affair with Chizo, a Nigerian woman he met in Accra, Ghana, whom he eventually married. Each of the seven sections is set in the various locations where their romance blossomed—including Northern California, Grand Basdaam in the Ivory Coast, Accra and New York. His love story is sincere, though his descriptions often verge on the saccharine: “Turning her head, her eyes meet mine and our lips come together”; “She moved according to the rhythms of her place. She felt comfortable in her skin. She was beautiful, daring, powerful and upsetting. She robbed me of my routine.” There are intriguing passages, however, as when Zachary depicts life in West Africa, relates the stresses of navigating immigration or calms his anxious Jewish parents. (Jan.)

Nielsen, who lives in Melbourne, Australia, takes the reader on her search for a dream apartment in Paris armed with only a limited ability to speak French but an enormous amount of hope. When Nielsen’s husband agrees to buy their own pied-à-terre in Paris (“Even our accountant thinks it’s a good idea”), she starts her crash course in the Parisian real estate market, a world away from her native Australia, in custom as well as distance. Entering her first real estate office, Nielsen encounters the particulars of buying a piece of Paris: apartments are sold by the meter, not by the number of rooms; a buyer generally makes an offer immediately after the first showing; and the current owner could be lingering in the dining room as the apartment is shown. From dark and crumbling to bright and strangely shaped, the apartments the Nielsens see are a side of Paris living they never knew existed; in the end, their dream comes true. Nielsen’s breezy writing makes this a sweet memoir that would appeal most to those dreaming of having their own piece of Paris. (Jan.)

Sherwood (The Man Who Ate the 747), a writer for the L.A. Times, travels worldwide to gain insight from people who have survived a slew of near fatal phenomena ranging from a mountain lion attack to a Holocaust concentration camp, and interviewing an array of experts to understand the psychology, genetics and jumble of other little things that determines whether we live or die. Readers curious about their own “survivor profile” can take an Internet test, which is explained in the book’s later pages. Sherwood’s assertion that survival is “a way of perceiving the world around you” is enlightening, as are some of the facts he uncovers: you have 90 seconds to leave a plane crash before the cabin temperature becomes unbearable; luck has more to do with personal perspective than chance. But Sherwood’s balance of self-help, scientific theories and first-rate reporting is diminished by occasionally overwrought prose as well as the countless survivors’ stories, which can run together in a touchy-feely stream of faith and optimism. (Jan.)

In 2004, autistic savant Tammet reeled off 22,514 digits of pi from memory, setting a European record. How did he achieve such a feat? Is an autistic mind different from others? Yes and no, Tammet answers in this follow-up to his bestselling memoir, Born on a Blue Day. His own brain may be wired a little differently, but we are all capable of remarkable mental feats, he asserts. Tammet seamlessly blends science and personal experience in a powerful paean to the mysteries and beauty of the brain. Intelligence is a complex phenomenon that synthesizes various skills and abilities. Tammet illustrates this with his own abilities in memory, language and number sense. For example, he points out that his extraordinary memory for numbers is augmented by “the unusual way in which my mind perceives numbers as complex, multi-dimensional, coloured and textured” that allowed him “to compose something like a visual song.” Tammet concludes that all humans have something unique to contribute to the world, and he himself has a gift for rendering science accessible and even delightful. (Jan.)

Author of the excellent A Few Bloody Noses: The Realities and Mythologies of the American Revolution, British historian Harvey turns his attention to military leadership with modestly successful results. After listing a great commander’s qualities, Harvey delivers laudatory biographies of 12 who fought from the mid-18th to mid-20th centuries. Americans will enjoy reading of less familiar 18th-century British commanders such as Robert Clive, who triumphed against immense opposing forces to conquer huge areas of India. Thomas Cochrane won dazzling naval victories during the Napoleonic Wars and became a national hero, but offended Admiralty officials, who refused him promotions. Later chapters make for lively reading, but the author stretches too hard to portray his subjects as mavericks. Washington, Nelson, Wellington, Grant and Rommel were establishment figures in good standing, and Patton’s superiors appreciated him despite his quirks. Montgomery and MacArthur made plenty of enemies, but most military experts conclude that their inflated egos had little to do with their talents, which in professional eyes (although not those of worshipful civilians) were overrated. Maps. (Jan.)

Covering a neglected period in James Baldwin’s career, his time in Turkey from 1961 (a year after publication of Another Country and two years before The Fire Next Time) to 1971, Zaborowska follows in the writer’s footsteps to analyze and put into context the significance of this seminal decade. Working by way of Edward Said, she examines a combustible mix of race, exile and gender through Baldwin’s forays in a society that straddles East and West. Zaborowska, an associate professor in American and Afro-American studies at the University of Michigan, combines archival material and interviews with detailed critical interpretations of Another Country; Baldwin’s little-known theater direction of John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes, which was a smash in Turkey; the post-Stonewall No Name in the Street; and the Chekhov-inspired The Welcome Table. Of central importance is how Baldwin’s so-called Turkish exile helped distance him from, while also focusing, his massive contradictions within a society of contradictions. Somewhat weighing down her text by close readings, Zaborowska otherwise displays the fascinating, delicious thrill she received from the people she interviewed. This is an at times probing but uneven look into Baldwin’s tormented soul and work. 53 illus. (Jan.)

Gebauer and Lowman, of the professional services firm Towers Perrin, explore the benefits companies reap when they engage their employees. The authors argue that the most important thing an organization can do is successfully unleash employees’ full potential, yet most employers fail to do so; four out of five workers worldwide are not delivering all of their abilities. Based on exhaustive research of global data, Gebauer and Lowman show that engaged employees connect with a company at three levels—the rational, emotional and motivational—and these connections result in a willingness to surpass expectations. They also explore what drives employee engagement and how to convert the enrolled and enlist the disenchanted. With fresh examples from Campbell Soup, Honeywell International and MGM Grand Hotel and Casino, the authors provide tools organizations can utilize. This timely and convincing argument breaks new ground and is a must-read for the HR department, managers and executives at every level. (Jan.)

In this highly readable companion to his nightly CNBC television series, The Big Idea, former ad man Deutsch profiles the entrepreneurs who have visited his show and the lessons he’s learned from them. The author relishes stories of “little people”—mothers, students, retirees and “former screw ups”—who had only a good idea and built multimillion-dollar businesses without MBAs or sometimes the support of their friends and families—individuals like Lisa Lloyd, a single mother with a poverty-line wage who borrowed money and sold her car to create her first batch of plastic hair clips that created elaborate braids with little fuss. After receiving positive encouragement from local salons, Lloyd licensed the product to a national barrette manufacturer, where it has enjoyed $30 million in sales to date—and made Lloyd a rich woman. Entrepreneurial success stories are complemented by practical advice and resources for building a business. The author’s enthusiasm and interest in his readers is apparent on every page, distinguishing this book from the dry, disinterested business guides that fill the small business startup bookshelves. (Jan.)

Missteps and missed opportunities proliferate in this gripping insider history of Middle Eastern diplomacy during the Clinton administration. Indyk, former ambassador to Israel, examines the contradictions inherent in Clinton’s Iraq policy with a remarkable level of self-criticism and brings a nuanced perspective to his analysis of Iraq’s alleged WMD programs and the reasons for and against war. The book emphasizes Clinton’s initial strategic focus on Syrian-Israeli relations, and the author’s discussion of Syria runs parallel to his central narrative about the Israel-Palestine conflict, which traces the tumultuous eight years from the hopeful handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat in 1993 through the beginning of the second intifada. The author achieves an impressive balance of scale, packing a tremendous amount of anecdotal information throughout, creating a portrait of diplomacy that reveals the influence of countless small details, from ceremonial gifts to friendly kisses, on world affairs. At the same time, the book surveys the enduring challenges that plagued the Clinton team’s efforts to bring peace to the region, making insightful connections between the history in which the author participated and the present state of the region. (Jan.)

Popkin, a renowned obesity and nutrition expert, investigates what the World Health Organization has defined as a global obesity epidemic, identifying familiar culprits (nutrient-poor, sugar-rich foods; larger serving sizes and less exercise)—but introduces fresh research to demonstrate how our drinking habits have contributed to the problem. The author follows the expanding waistlines of four families in the United States, Mexico and India to argue that obesity is less a result of “gluttony and sloth” than a confluence of factors rooted in a fundamental conflict between human biology and modern society, where more calories are consumed than expended, and governments and multinational corporations shape everyday lives (a detailed section traces the growth of modern food and beverage conglomerates). Unfortunately, the book remains a disjointed portrayal of this thesis: Popkin never fully explores the impact of energy drinks and sodas and interrupts his observations of the four families to wax nostalgic (and unscientific) on his youthful dietary and exercise habits in rural Wisconsin. The salience and urgency of the obesity epidemic is incontrovertible, however, and Popkin’s is a readable and ambitious introduction. (Jan.)

A fitting tribute to Cooke and his accounts of postwar America, this collection of his dispatches ranging from the soldiers of WWII coming home in 1946 to the threat of Saddam in 2004 coincides with what would have been Cooke’s 100th birthday (he died in 2004). Cooke, an Englishman who adopted America as his home, captured the country’s historic moments (Korea, the civil rights movement, the moon landing, Watergate), but also traveled extensively and gave voice to the man in the street and outside of the hotbeds of power. Best known as the host of television’s Masterpiece Theater and the voice of radio’s Letter from America, Cooke was both a force and a media darling. Photos accompany his “letters” (he wrote nearly 3,000 of them), and his daughter writes a touching introduction and commentaries. A personal take on a tumultuous time, this book will especially appeal to those who were there. (Dec.)

This history of the Atlantic world is packed with paintings, maps both ancient and modern, and photographs. Prolific historian and Emmy-winning TV writer Sandler points out that scholars have only recently focused on the Americas, Europe and Africa together as a thriving regional system connected by the great ocean. The book begins in the ancient world, when sailors ventured surprisingly far out into the Atlantic with no navigational instruments. The narrative pace picks up after Columbus’s voyages, with beautiful maps and images of the early explorations. As history, there is little new in the chapters on the American, French and Industrial revolutions and the world wars, but the book shines in depicting the ships that traveled the ocean, their technical progress and voyages, the massive movement of immigrants and slaves, and today’s continuing exploration of the Atlantic. While the writing is a cut above that of the usual coffee-table book, it’s the illustrations that really stand out, so readers will have a thoroughly satisfying time just poring over the 480 color illustrations and their extensive captions. (Dec.)

In 2003, Staff Sgt. Maddox was an army interrogation specialist on his first field assignment in Iraq gathering information on “bad guys.” The unexpectedly rapid collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime made that category a broad one. Sent to Tikrit, Saddam’s home town, Maddox found no system for screening detainees to identify priority targets. That began to change with one of Saddam’s bodyguards, Maddox’s first serious interrogation and the first step to Saddam’s capture. With freelance writer Seay (coauthor, Hello Charlie) providing the polish, Maddox takes readers through an intense multilevel series of question-and-answer games that led slowly, with many false starts and sidetracks, to Saddam’s hideout. Maddox makes no secret of his mistakes: losing his temper, failing to control interrogations, seeking information rather than cultivating insight. “We weren’t in the United States and my job wasn’t to hand down justice,” he writes. His account is a welcome corrective to lurid accounts of interrogation techniques, frequently secondhand. The capture of Saddam Hussein, like all good intelligence work, was 5% insight and 95% patience. Brutality, Maddox makes clear, was not merely counterproductive but unnecessary. 8 pages of color photos. (Dec. 13)

With a light dose of narrative background and a heavy emphasis on an interview format, Endlich (Goldman Sachs: The Culture of Success) allows philanthropists to voice their passion for large-scale charitable organizing and giving. The author’s subjects are an illustrious bunch, including Melinda Gates and hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones, and they champion such diverse causes as autism, poverty in Ethiopia, job training for the inner-city poor and need-based educational scholarships for college. Endlich keeps her treatment balanced by focusing on initial project failures and challenges as well as successes and brilliantly pulls together the common threads and motivations of these profiled philanthropists. The financiers, entrepreneurs and even one Olympian all agree that their extraordinary luck in life and ability to empathize factored heavily into their desire to give back in a big way to those in need; it is giving that adds a “narrative” to their lives. Given the excesses in corporate America and on Wall Street lately, this heartening book proves that even the most successful individuals in business can also devote themselves to something that “touched them so profoundly that they could not turn away.” (Dec.)

As an anthropologist who has herself conducted research in Papua New Guinea, Lutkehaus (Zaria’s Fire) is well positioned to evaluate renowned forerunner Margaret Mead’s cultural influence in 20th-century American society. Her intriguing thesis examines Mead as a “representative figure” of public concerns and desires—and as a prism through which to view anthropology’s influence on the rapidly changing contours of American life. The argument remains too familiar and superficial, however, to be of much force. Lutkehaus stresses Mead’s early media-savvy participation in the construction of a public persona—from quintessential 1920s flapper to model modern woman, “Grandmother to the World” to emblem of gay rights. Mead had an instinct for resonant social commentary and notoriety. The author emphasizes (as do many Mead biographers) the connection between her subject’s personal life and her academic and popular writing (beginning with her highly influential crossover studies of Samoan adolescence and sexuality), but is too protective of her subject to allow a nuanced reading of Mead’s precise methodology or political liberalism, or their notable entanglement in the relationship between Mead’s version of cultural relativism, the new field of applied anthropology and American hegemony. (Dec.)

Philosophy professor Harris and English professor Molesworth fuse disciplines in this groundbreaking study of Locke (1885–1954), the preeminent African-American aesthetician and philosopher in the years between WWI and WWII, most familiar as the editor of the New Negro, “the chief group presentation of the values and interests of the Harlem Renaissance.” The authors are painstakingly detailed along the usual biographical path—childhood, education (Harvard; Oxford, where Locke was the first African-American Rhodes scholar), work (Howard University professor, editor, writer). The authors’ separate perspectives bring uncommon depth and detail to the analysis of their subject’s multiple interests: “philosophy, cultural criticism, race theory, adult education, and esthetics, among others.” Locke the thinker holds the center in this biography, but all around are glimpses of Locke the social being—a who’s who of turn-of-the-century Harvard and of decades of African-American writers, scholars and political figures. Harris and Molesworth are as exhausting as they are exhaustive, and in delineating Locke’s life with dense archival richness, the authors have given historians of the Harlem Renaissance, in particular, welcome material to mine for years to come. (Dec.)

Journalist Derrow has selected essays that explore the wealth and variety of female sexual experience, making for a gender-transcending tale of sex lives that manages to be philosophical, poignant—and a great bit of naughty fun. From Hope Edelman’s essay on her first love, who helped her cope with her mother’s struggle with breast cancer, in “The Sweetest Sex I Never Had,” to Lauren Slater’s joyful paean to married celibacy, Julie Powell’s frank recollection of cheating on her husband with a man who fulfills her masochistic fantasies, these stories are private and fraught, frank and self-aware. The women represented are old and young; lesbian, bisexual and straight. They draw attention to the special way sex evolves for women (as in Pari Chang’s essay on sex during pregnancy); their experience is so varied that it is likely readers will recognize their own untold stories and sexual selves in this collection. (Dec.)

This moving account of writer/photographer Stockton’s first year with her pet coyote, Charlie, expands on her popular blog, the Daily Coyote, but newcomers and the author’s many fans will find that this memoir offers a complete—if not yet completed—story about love and life in a small Wyoming town. On a cross-country move from San Francisco to New York City in 2005, Stockton fell in love with the beauty of Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains and decided to settle there. She found new roots and a new boyfriend, a government trapper whose job was to protect livestock by killing coyotes. When he finds an orphaned coyote pup, barely 10 days old, he gives it to Stockton, beginning an adventure that moves human and animal from a blissful open affection (the author’s photos of baby Charlie are as adorable as they are beautifully composed) through a period of reconsideration after Charlie bites her to a breakthrough realization that Charlie needed a much more structured “alpha” attitude from his owner. Stockton’s journey of sharing her life with a wild animal and providing training while respecting Charlie’s unique nature makes for a fascinating and rewarding read. (Dec.)

The first of three planned volumes of Sontag’s private journals, this book is extraordinary for all the reasons we would expect from Sontag’s writing—extreme seriousness, stunning authority, intolerance toward mediocrity; Sontag’s vulnerability throughout will also utterly surprise the late critic and novelist’s fans and detractors. At 15, when these journals began, Sontag (1933–2004) already displayed her ferocious intellect and hunger for experience and culture, though what is most remarkable here is watching Sontag grow into one of the century’s leading minds. In these carefully selected excerpts (many passages are only a few lines), Sontag details her developing thoughts, her voluminous reading and daily movie-going, her life as a teenage college student at Berkeley discovering her sexuality (“bisexuality as the expression of fullness of an individual”), and meeting and marrying her professor Philip Rieff, with whom, at the age of 18, she had David, her only child. Most powerful are the entries corresponding to her years in England and Europe, when, apart from Philip and their son, the marriage broke down and Sontag entered intense lesbian relationships that would compel her to rethink her notions of sex, love (“physical beauty is enormously, almost morbidly, important to me”) and daughter- and motherhood, and all before the age of 30. Watching Sontag become herself is nothing short of cathartic. (Dec.)

Two writers share their experiences—as a teacher and a journalist—in two New York City schools.

Keeping the challenges of urban education in mind, McCloskey, who writes for the New York Times, monitors a year of studies at a Catholic high school in Harlem in his debut book, revealing the soaring cost of academically training young poor and non-Catholic black males for graduation and college. The subject of the yearlong investigation is Rice High School, with principal Orlando Gober, who keeps the street culture at bay while pursuing educational excellence and a high moral foundation. With the highest black student population in the regional diocese, Gober makes no excuses for how schools have failed: “parents and teachers made excuses, which crippled their willpower.... People have to be held responsible for what they do.” It is illuminating to see the struggles and triumphs of a school day where students feud, teachers jockey for power, and administrative control must be maintained at all costs. Powerful, eloquent, candid, McCloskey’s account should be required reading for those who seek to remedy the academic woes of our troubled urban schools. (Jan.)

Educator Diamond has worked with the younger set for 25 years. Most recently, she taught kindergarten at New York City’s P.S. 87, the setting for this memoir and sourcebook for current or aspiring teachers and parents. In the foreword, artist and writer Feiffer reminisces about his own school days, reveals that Diamond taught one of his daughters and offers words of praise for the book, citing its rich “sense of inquiry, observation, mission and self-examination.” Indeed, Diamond’s passion for her work, affection for the kids and her dedication to their improvement is evident throughout the book. Even as she describes her experiences with her pupils, she details the times she questioned her own judgment. She is also frank about how to engage a child and when to involve his or her parents: for example, she describes a student named Henry (whose “Welcome to the Aquarium” sign inspired the book’s title), who is initially reluctant to participate in artistic projects, and decides to call in his parents to talk about her concerns. Diamond’s honesty makes for a highly informative if overlong narrative. (Dec.)