Nonfiction Book Reviews: Week of 3/30/09

Stewart (The Courtier and the Heretic) reflects on his unconventional path to becoming a successful management consultant—despite a complete lack of business knowledge or experience, let alone an MBA. He offers an insider's perspective on the industry, revealing the astonishingly high routine consultant fees and the absurdity of leading firms depending on consultants fresh out of school to tell them how to run their business. Following in the footsteps of “shamans,” consultants “envelop their work with an aura of sacred mystery” and “outrageously unjustified” levels of self-confidence to add to their perceived expertise. Gleefully revealing the magician's tricks, Stewart takes readers on a whirlwind tour of how this industry came to be a powerhouse. Filled with fascinating insider anecdotes and featuring a who's who in the consulting world, including Peter Drucker, Michael Porter and Bruce Henderson, this wry, absorbing book will enlighten executives about the value consultants actually bring to their clients. (Aug.)

In this sensuous nature journal, MacArthur “genius” award winner Carroll (The Year of the Turtle) follows the inhabitants of his local New Hampshire wetlands through a season of turtle life from March thaw, when the turtles wake from hibernation, to November, when ice puts them back to sleep, along the way celebrating such personal “holy days” as “the Return of the Red-winged Blackbird.” Wearing camouflage and waders, he meets wildlife on its own terms. At the sudden appearance of a red doe, he wonders, “to have those senses—would I trade my thinking, dreaming, imagining mind for them for one full day... would I ever want to come back?” He watches a thirsty turtle hatchling encountering water for the first time: he “extends his neck full length, immerses his head, closes his eyes” and drinks for 21 minutes. Accompanied by Carroll's own exquisite drawings, this poetic recording of his season of loving observation is subdued by Carroll's dread of habitat destruction and nostalgia for a boyhood when “I entered waters that, if not alive themselves, were so filled with light and life that my binding with them was as much metaphysical as physical.” (Aug.)

Williams, senior v-p and cofounder of the Orlando Magic and former general manager of the Philadelphia 76ers and Chicago Bulls, offers a lackluster pep talk on the benefits of teamwork, reiterating that it can produce better results than individual efforts. He argues that the same principles that apply to team sports also apply to the corporate environment, government, the military, the religious world and families. Through dozens of anecdotes from his own life, he sings the praises of group effort, synergy and the African concept of ubuntu—“I am, because we are”—and describes how those principles can bolster entrepreneurial, creative and even global security–related ambitions. Too broad accolades to the virtues of passion, empowerment and character break up the anecdotal monotony, but as the author admits gleefully in the introduction, his enthusiasm leads to rampant overwriting—in this instance, a magazine article stretched to book-length by endless stories about professional basketball. (July)

Forget Blackbeard—piracy is more widespread and dire today than ever before, according to this rudderless exposé. Sekulich (Ocean Titans) draws that conclusion in part through a liberal definition of piracy. The exploits of the well-organized and murderous Somali pirates that Sekulich chronicles qualify spectacularly: they have attacked a cruise ship, hijacked a supertanker, held freighter crews hostage for ransom and put a tragic crimp in food-aid shipments to Somalia. But the author also devotes much space to what amounts to mundane acts of maritime theft, hanging out, for example, with Malaysian fishermen who complain of having their boats and outboard motors stolen at night. His search for a genuine pirate to interview turns up a rueful Indonesian man who belonged to a gang that sneaked aboard ships anchored in port and stole cargo items, sometimes roughing up the watchmen. Readers looking for outlaw romance will not find it in these dispirited heists. While pirate attacks are certainly terrifying to their victims, Sekulich's alarm isn't justified by his depiction of the problem, which makes it seem like more than a nuisance but less than a scourge. Photos. (June)

Veterans in economics and microfinance scrutinize the finances of the poor in India, Bangladesh and South Africa. Following their 250 subjects for a year, the researchers compile family “financial diaries” and report on how the poor spend money and the myriad resources that function like portfolios. A confluence of circumstances the authors term a “triple whammy” (low and unreliable income, irregular cash flows and financial instruments ill-suited to the needs of this population) makes saving essential, and the poor depend on savings clubs, insurance clubs, money guarders or microfinance institutions. It is often a piecemeal approach, and any emergency can have disastrous consequences. With the advent of Muhammad Yunus's Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1976 and Grameen II in 2001, the growing global profile of microfinance might give the population more access to funds through reliable, flexible means—but the majority must turn to family, friends, neighbors or moneylenders. While the book's methodology and conclusions are fascinating, it is a complex and technical analysis best suited for those fluent in economics and public policy. (June)

The dramatic growth of “boomburbs”—enormous suburbs mushrooming in the American Southwest—frames this outsider's look at the changing political, social and civic culture of 21st-century America. Little, a former correspondent for the Irish RTE network, builds the book around personal vignettes drawn from research he conducted in the region in 2007 and 2008. The author takes snapshots of a number of current hot topics—the rise of the media-savvy “Millennial generation,” immigration and the subprime mortgage crisis—without delving into any single subject in excessive detail. Little's observations of a congregation led by a former Microsoft employee–turned–pastor illuminate evangelical religious life, while the different Democratic primary positions taken by a father and son, both Texas politicians, reflect generational attitudes toward Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Little's unifying thesis is that boomburb culture represents the competing American impulses of individualism, represented by the frontier, and community. Writing originally for an Irish audience, Little sometimes strains in his attempt to make sweeping generalizations about America's generational shift. The book closes before the 2008 presidential election and the recession, and as a result, its cautiously optimistic story feels incomplete. (June)

Journalist Pierce delivers a rapier-sharp rant on how the America of “Franklin and Edison, Fulton and Ford” has devolved into America “the Uninformed,” where citizens hostile to science are exchanging “fact for fiction, and faith for reason,” and glutting themselves on “reality” TV and conspiracy theories. Pierce makes no apologies for his liberal bias, and some conservatives—notably evolution opponents and Rush Limbaugh—endure a good deal of bashing. Pierce writes that in the U.S., “Fact is merely what enough people believe, and truth lies only in how fervently they believe it.” He supports his thesis with references to James Madison and other founding fathers, who may have foreseen and rued the emergence of “cranks” who would threaten the Enlightenment-based nation they were shaping. Although the book is not likely to win any converts from the right wing Pierce so energetically decries, it is an engaging catalogue of those unscientifically verified “truths” that enthrall and impassion millions of Americans. (June)

A native British wit expresses an adopted American ebullience in this sparkling collection of political journalism and commentary. Fairlie (1924–1990) migrated from London to the U.S. in the 1960s, where his writings in the Washington Post, the New Republic and elsewhere both celebrated and pilloried the American scene. The unstuffy Brit applauds America's informality, its gadgetry, its abundance and vastness, and its personification in a cowboy-poet named Hooter he meets in a Mankato, Minn., bar, but he's appalled by its politics. An avowed Tory in Britain, he discovers conservatism's Reaganite version to be “narrow-minded and selfish and mean-spirited”; he duly eulogizes FDR, attacks George F. Will and denounces government bashing as “the sneer of patronizing and vaulting privilege at the needs of ordinary people that can be served only by government.” Whether stomping on the “dangerous insects” in the Washington media corps or defending his beloved Scotch whiskey against the Perrier water fad that prompted “the abandonment of... a wholesome and convivial liquor for a suspect Gallic product,” Fairlie's elegantly pugilistic prose still feels fresh—and surprisingly relevant to today's politics. (June)

Having escaped the idiocy of rural life in his growing-up-gay-in-the-Ozarks memoir America's Boy, the author returns to it in this flamboyant fish-out-of-water saga. Inspired by Thoreau, Rouse and his partner moved to a cottage near the Michigan resort town of Saugatuck in order to simplify; wean himself from his addictions to shopping, tanning and cable; and resolve childhood traumas by being brashly gay in a nonurban setting. Saugatuck is actually quite gay-friendly, but trials abound: the eerie quiet of the countryside, the apocalyptic snows, a marauding raccoon fended off with lip balm and breath spray, the scarcity of gourmet yuppie-chow, the humiliation of wearing waders instead of Kenneth Cole boots, the slow, unfashionable locals who ask, rather perceptively, “'Don't you ever take anything seriously... things that don't affect only you?'” Rouse's battle with his own narcissism is a losing one; indeed, it feels like the real point of offering his pink-outfitted self to the suspicious gazes of hunters and other yokels is simply to accentuate what a fascinating spectacle he is. Alas, Rouse's comically campy, but rarely truly funny, writing is so trite that few readers will share his self-involvement. (June)

Recording gadgets evolve with dizzying speed, but debates over their effects on music never change, according to this fascinating study of technology and aesthetics. Journalist Milner (coauthor, Metallica: This Monster Lives) surveys developments in recording, from Thomas Edison's complaints about those new-fangled Victrolas to the contemporary controversy between CD and vinyl. With every advance of hardware, he notes, comes accompanying shifts in the sound of music: the sense of physical space implied by stereo sound; the advent of rock 'n' roll reverb; the “big obnoxious ambient drum sound that defined the '80s” under the Phil Collins dictatorship; the “unsettling robotic tone” imparted to vocals by today's Auto-Tune pitch-correction software; the arms race toward ear-grabbing, distortion-heavy loudness that leaves us “surrounded by music that does nothing but shout.” Perennial arguments about the fidelity of new technologies, he contends, miss the point: now that every record is digitally spliced together out of multiple tracks and far-flung samples, there is no authentic musical performance for the sound engineer—contemporary music's true auteur—to “record.” Milner combines a lucid exposition of acoustics and technology with a critic's keen discernment of the pop-music soundscape. The result is a real ear-opener that will captivate fans and techies alike. (June 16)

In this brilliantly researched and written study, British medical historian Jay (The Air Loom Gang) tells the story of Thomas Beddoes (1760–1808), who established a “Pneumatic Institution” near Bristol to test his theories about using various gases to treat illness. Beddoes's science fell somewhere between alchemy and a truly modern medicine, and he attracted a circle that was dazzling even for its time, when salons brought together the most gifted conversationalists from across the spectrum of society. Beddoes employed the young Humphrey Davy, who quickly made important discoveries about batteries and electricity, and whose investigations of nitrous oxide lent Beddoes's work on gases some degree of respectability. Poets Samuel Coleridge and Robert Southey also came into Beddoes's orbit, as did James Watt and Josiah Wedgwood as both sponsors of Beddoes and fathers of two of his consumptive patients. Fans of scientific biography and history of science, as well as history buffs in general, will be engrossed by Jay's marvelous study of an unusual man and the political and intellectual ferment of his time. Illus. (May)

Socrates and Alcibiades were an unlikely couple: an ugly old philosopher and a charming, intelligent, ambitious and arrogant aristocrat. The fallout from this relationship and an unpopular war toppled the world's most significant philosophical figure. By placing the execution of Socrates against the context of the Peloponnesian War, classicist Waterfield (Xenophon's Retreat) argues that a guilty verdict against the philosopher, charged with impiety and corrupting Athens's youth, was a rational outcome. “Athens of the last third of the fifth century B.C. was affected by a striking list of stress factors. Old certainties were being undermined by prolonged warfare, morally subversive ideas, population displacement” and other forms of social upheaval. Sitting atop a solid foundation of scholarship, this valuable survey of an important period of ancient history is especially useful as a prelude to texts by Plato, Xenophon and Thucydides. Of the many introductory studies on the Athenian judicial system, the trial of Socrates, the conflict between Athens and Sparta and the reasons that democracy gave way to oligarchy in Athens, this is among the clearest, most well-organized and most concise. 4 pages of illus., maps. (May)

At only 40 years of age, British historian Goldsworthy's (Caesar) ninth Roman history offers the same high level of scholarship, analysis and lucid prose as the previous eight. After a superb survey of Roman politics and civilization, Goldsworthy begins with the death in A.D. 180 of emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose reign is traditionally viewed as the apex of Roman power. During the disastrous century that followed, emperors rarely ruled more than a few years; most were murdered, and civil wars raged, though there was some stability during the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine. Invasions slowly chipped away at the empire until it vanished in A.D. 476 with the abdication of the last Western emperor. Goldsworthy makes sense of 300 years of poorly documented wars, murders and political scheming. Highly opinionated, he presents surviving documents and archeological evidence to back his views such as that Constantine became Christian because Roman leaders traditionally believed that divine help won battles, and the Christian god seemed to Constantine like the front-runner. This richly rewarding work will serve as an introduction to Roman history, but will also provide plenty of depth to satisfy the educated reader. Illus., maps. (May)

The self-confident and power-seeking Eleanor of Aquitaine (1124–1204) was heir to France's largest duchy. Eleanor became queen of France through her marriage at 13 to the future Louis VII. But Louis's indecisiveness during the Second Crusade and Eleanor's forthright support of her uncle the prince of Antioch's strategy over Louis's provoked the dissolution of her 15-year marriage. She quickly remarried a younger man, the future Henry II, 12th-century Europe's most powerful monarch. She bore him nine children while acting as regent during Henry's long absences in his reign's crucial early years. But Henry's interventions in her own realm of Aquitaine drove Eleanor to urge her three eldest sons to rebel against their father. After Henry's death, she emerged from 15 years of house arrest to play a significant political role in the reigns of her sons Richard I and John. Despite repetitious prose and a somewhat off-putting academic format, Turner's (King John) work is highly readable and informative, fleshing out the adventurous life and times of a spirited, beautiful and ambitious political animal who paid a heavy price for defying medieval expectations of women. Illus., maps. (May)

In this vibrant piece of intellectual history, Reston completes the saga of the relationship between East and West he began with Warriors of God. Combining a historian's attention to detail and a novelist's narrative flair, Reston focuses on the period when the Ottoman Empire came within a hair's breadth of conquering Europe. The Sultan Suleyman swore to accomplish what his father and grandfather had not—conquer the Holy Roman Empire. Standing in his way was an equally ambitious leader, the young Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. As Reston observes, each faced rebellion and fractiousness within his own empire. Although Charles defeated Suleyman at Güns, now in Hungary, the Turks had spread terror through Europe by moving farther into Christian lands than ever before. By examining this short but crucial span of years, Reston not only brings to life two “Olympian” figures who believed they were carrying out the will of God; he also offers a lucid window onto Renaissance Europe and the foundations of contemporary debates between the West and Islam. (May 18)

Prize-winning journalist Storozynski pulls military strategist and engineer Thaddeus Kosciuszko (1746–1817) back from the brink of obscurity by including almost every documented detail to create the first comprehensive look at a man who once famously symbolized rebellion. His were the plans sold to the British by Benedict Arnold. And Kosciuszko's years of devotion to the American cause framed his efforts to transform Poland into a self-governing republic freed from the oversight of Russia's interests. He antagonized Catherine the Great and, later, Napoleon. Kosciuszko rallied the first Jewish military force since biblical times to fight for Polish independence, and consistently supported equality and education for peasants, Jews, Muslim Tatars and American slaves—which earned him the devotion of the masses and lectures by the upper classes. Readers of military and American history should take note: the minute details will enthrall devotees. Casual readers will benefit from Storozynski's expert crafting of a readable and fact-filled story that pulls readers into the immediacy of the revolutionary era's partisan and financial troubles. (May)

In this brisk narrative survey, Raphael offers a history of the events between the outbreak of colonial protest in the 1760s and the ratification of the Constitution in 1788. He does so through the lives of seven people, some, like George Washington, justly celebrated, others obscure. All seven and many others come alive in their acts and words, their stories serving as the spine of the book. No one will come away without a better idea of how social class, ideas, careers, ambitions and plain luck interwove themselves into the revolution carried on by an entire people. Raphael also weaves his tale around such staple themes of American history as the growth of popular sovereignty and westward expansion. From the author of A People's History of the American Revolution, none of this is surprising, nor is the skill of his pen. The book adds nothing to what's already known, but it will delight readers and no doubt add to their knowledge through a tale rarely told so well. 27 b&w illus. (May)

According to Gill (Nightingales), the age that has been labeled Victorian was, in its origins, Albertian. Prince Albert was the chaste scion of a family of ambitious, debt-ridden, sexually corrupt misogynists, and his holy war of moral strictness made him appear straitlaced, judgmental and sanctimonious. In marrying Victoria, says Gill, Albert planned to take the reins of British power, though parliamentary rules didn't allow him to be king. Gill paints a portrait of this marriage as a “work in progress,” in which the balance of power shifted continually between queen and consort, but Victoria's repeated pregnancies caused a dramatic shift in Albert's favor: he joined her meetings with ministers, and met or corresponded with the most powerful men in England and abroad. His great accomplishment was keeping Great Britain out of the American Civil War; he also served a stint as chancellor of Cambridge, bringing the university into the modern world. Despite their constant battle for dominance, Victoria was always madly in love while Albert was pleased to be adored. A lively, perceptive, impressively researched biography of what Gill terms “a forerunner of today's power couple.” 16 pages of color illus.; b&w illus. throughout. (May 19)

Nelson (Left for Dead) tells the story of the 369th Infantry, a segregated regiment that overcame discrimination to make an enviable combat record in the trenches of WWI. Nelson describes the regiment's organization in 1916 and its success in attracting volunteers despite a racist environment. American Expeditionary Force commander John J. Pershing considered blacks suitable only as labor troops. But the French forces, decimated by war, welcomed the 369th, which earned respect the hard way: the nickname “Harlem Hellfighters” came from the Germans, who faced them. The 369th stood in the front lines alongside France's best chasseurs alpins and Moroccans. Pershing responded by replacing all the regiment's black officers with whites. That would have broken morale in many units, but the 369th continued to distinguish itself until the armistice. Almost 200 were awarded the French Croix de Guerre, and the regiment, which never lost a foot of ground nor a prisoner, received a unit citation. The blacks' war at home endured, but the Hellfighters' legacy helped win that one as well, and Nelson's tribute is informative and long overdue. (May 18)

McLean's debut is a perceptive memoir of the Vietnam war that is unique for the author's background: McLean joined the Marine Corps after graduating from Phillips Academy, where George W. Bush was a classmate. Making excellent use of more than a hundred letters he wrote home from the war zone from November 1967 to July 1968, McLean reconstructs his time in the Marines with a sharp eye for detail and very readable—at times almost poetic—prose. McLean underwent a hellish tour of duty and in the fall of 1968 became the first Vietnam veteran to enter Harvard. He uses a good deal of reconstructed dialogue to tell his war story, a technique that in lesser hands only cheapens a memoir. But virtually all of McLean's dialogue rings true, as does nearly everything else in the book. That includes this passage in which McLean remembers his baptism under fire a few days after he arrived in Vietnam: “It had been eerie, frightening, invigorating, chaotic, and surreal. Welcome to combat. It was not like the movies.” (May 19)

Veteran ghostwriter and coauthor Whitney (Where Have All the Leaders Gone?) now writes in her own voice about her brother Jim Schuler, a vet who served three tours in Vietnam and died penniless and alone in 2001 at age 53. Whitney also offers her take on many issues—such as PTSD, veterans' benefits and homelessness— affecting American veterans of wars from WWI to Iraq and Afghanistan. Whitney presents little that is new on these subjects. The parts of the book dealing with her brother and family are more fully realized, although much of that narrative, including Jim Schuler's service in Vietnam and his postwar army career, is based mostly on speculation since he had little contact with his estranged family. Whitney herself was adamantly against the Vietnam War, something her troubled brother never forgot or forgave. Whitney thus only partially succeeds in her “mission” to “find” her brother, and her account fails to meet the standard of the one invoked in the title, Gen. Hal Moore and Joe Galloway's classic We Were Soldiers Once... and Young. 8 pages of b&w photos. (May)

Haass (The Opportunity), president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former adviser to Secretary of State Colin Powell, offers a combination of memoir and analysis on two wars that, he says, began in 1990: Desert Storm, the response to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Haass describes Saddam's attack on Kuwait as undertaken in the face of U.S. efforts to persuade him to stand down. The 2003 war emerges as a consequence of 9/11, a “radical” initiative to oust Saddam and restructure the Middle East. In a pattern common to senior advisers without ultimate responsibility for decisions, Haass repeatedly describes perceptive memoranda ignored and perceptive insights rejected by those at the levers of power. He claims neither prescience nor precognition. Instead he presents himself as a realist and a moderate, preferring diplomacy to force while recognizing the necessary synergy of soft and hard power. Haass concludes that the first war succeeded because its limited aims were accomplished: Iraq was defeated and Kuwait's sovereignty restored. Whether or not Iraq eventually stabilizes, the second war ultimately failed because it was neither necessary, desirable nor just. Bungled execution only highlighted the waste of finite moral and material resources. Wars of choice are not inevitably mistaken, Haass concludes, but they are best avoided. (May)

Loew (Tough Call) offers a disappointingly stale satiric look at the Bush presidency. What passes for political commentary is familiar and fairly superficial—e.g., fake and actual charts, screeds and lists of Bush's malapropisms. It is surprising that the author, a contributor to the Onion, has such difficulty combining humor and analysis; skipping from fact to farce, the reader might have difficulty discerning where the actual accusation lies. Furthermore, Loew does not marshal new material in making his furious condemnations; instead he trots out criticisms of a variety of the Bush administration's perceived sins—everything from Bush's prodigious vacation time to the bungling of the occupation of Iraq—with familiar evidence and arguments. While the book serves as a decent catalogue of the Bush administration's (mis)handling of Hurricane Katrina and controversial positions on torture and global warming, even the most virulent Bush critics will find that this J'accuse lacks the promised teeth and laughs. (May)

For more than a century, the coupling of art with commerce has made New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art the world's most glamorous whore, according to this sprawling history. Gross, a veteran chronicler of the rich and beautiful (Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women), highlights the relationship between the directors and curators who amassed the Met's collection—fakes and questionably acquired antiquities included, he notes—and its patrons. In his telling, the exchange of money for prestige (contributor John D. Rockefeller wanted good publicity after striking workers were massacred at the family's Ludlow mine) is a tawdry business, with the museum's high-toned seduction of well-heeled egotists, who in turn felt betrayed when newer collections impinged on their own galleries. Not the best-curated of exhibitions, Gross's thematically unfocused chronicle is overstuffed with the details of fund drives, building plans and bequests; some figures feel like they were profiled mainly because there were juicy anecdotes about them—a rarity in tight-lipped Met circles—not because their doings are especially illuminating. Still, browse long enough and you'll find behind-the-scenes dirt and an intriguing look at the symbiosis of culture and cash. (May 12)

In this new memoir, award-winning novelist Price (Kate Vaiden) takes up where his 1989 Clear Pictures left off—with a young Price heading for England on a Rhodes scholarship, a young man lighting into new and unfamiliar territories and the lessons he learns about literature, life and love. Covering the years 1955 to 1961, Price chronicles the challenges of living in a strange place, his emotional insecurities and his anxieties about his ability to complete the thesis on Milton, his adventures in Europe with a close friend and his eventual return to his alma mater, Duke University, to teach writing and literature. Along the way, Price recalls his friendships with Stephen Spender, Cyril Connolly, W.H. Auden and his brief encounters with Jean-Paul Sartre and J.R.R. Tolkien. Price's memoir also displays the tenacious desire with which, after warm encouragement from Eudora Welty and William Styron, he embarks on a round of writing that produces his first novel, A Long and Happy Life, published to acclaim in 1962. Although the detail can be tiresomely meticulous, Price, as usual, powerfully articulates the strength of memory in shaping our lives and gracefully draws us into a literary life lived fully. Photos. (May)

Journalist Himelstein recaptures Russia's golden age through the eyes of the former serf-turned vodka entrepreneur, Pyotr Arsenievich Smirnov (1831–1898). From his early days as a “small-time liquor peddler” to one of Russia's richest men, Smirnov was the nemesis of teetotaling Tolstoy—who blamed the country's late 19th-century woes on his countrymen's thirst for alcohol. As the first Russian brand architect and seller of high-quality, low-cost liquor, Smirnov makes for a fascinating subject in his trajectory and outsize ambition. He applied for the title of Purveyor to the Imperial Court, but “the tsar's refusal, rather than deflating Smirnov's outsized ambition, emboldened it. It aroused something deep inside the man, a creative spark that transformed Smirnov from a competent businessman into one of the most ingenious marketers of his time.” While the dozens of obstacles, including the closure of the Imperial Archives and a dearth of information about Smirnov's years of serfdom, might have deterred lesser researchers, Himelstein has triumphed with a timeless book that entertains, informs and inspires any would-be entrepreneur to chase his dreams. (May)

In very short, very tender essays, a variety of gay male writers, from poets to playwrights to a standup comic, pay homage to an even wider variety of women who have inspired them. Peter Dubé writes how the photography of Claude Cahun suggested “a delirious world of possibilities”; Jeff Oaks recalls a childhood of wearing wristbands fashioned from paper cups to emulate his “model of power,” Wonder Woman; Christopher Lee Nutter looks back on his closeted teenage years and how Sade taught him “that there was a world somewhere that suited them better than the world they'd been born into.” While a few essays are disappointingly shallow (“More than smart and fabulous, Parker Posey is fall-on-the-floor ridiculous”), such standout pieces as Mark Doty on Grace Paley are elegant and affectionate tributes to how these muses have been “fairy godmothers” and “older sisters,” as Montlack's introduction explains, and illustrate how complex, sustaining and lifelong are the bonds between gay men and their divas. (May)

Film critic and biographer Levy (Rat Pack Confidential) embarks on a respectful, thoroughgoing survey of Newman's long life (1925–2008) and massive film career without lingering on emotional and psychological factors. A kind of accidental hero, Newman recognized that his blue-eyed good looks would open doors for him, but by sheer determination and work ethic he muscled his way to the Olympian heights of America's finest actors. Born to middle-class Jewish parents in Shaker Heights, Ohio, he eventually enlisted in the navy then attended Kenyon College on the GI Bill; his early first marriage and dabbling in theater seemed to be a way to avoid having to return home and take over his father's sporting-goods store. He enrolled in Yale's drama department, then in 1952 gave himself a year in New York to prove himself: he hustled small, paying parts and gradually became a part of the Actors Studio, where he claimed to have learned everything he knew about acting. From then on, using his connections shrewdly, he moved from success on Broadway (Picnic, where he met Joanne Woodward, whom he married in 1958) to TV (Our Town) and Hollywood (Somebody Up There Likes Me). From there, the professional accolades began piling up, while Levy also chronicles Newman's stunning success as a race-car driver, entrepreneur and philanthropist. Levy doesn't shy from discussing Newman's shortcomings as a father and husband, yet he leaves a glowing assessment of this legend's career. (May)

Few golf fans know the name Homer Kelley, writes Gummer, an acclaimed golf writer himself who admits even he didn't know Kelley's story until relatively recently. But Gummer aims to bring awareness to a man and the book he wrote that revolutionized the game of golf. Never a golfer himself, Kelley devoted his life to finding what made the perfect golf swing. Spending 30 years of his life in writing The Golfing Machine, Kelley analyzed the different components to a swing via geometry and physics, and insisted that there was no perfect solution—“it was a system, not a method,” and it was up to the golfer to find the proper components geared toward his own game. Even after his first book was finally published in 1969, Kelley continued to fine-tune his work, publishing several updated editions. And perhaps fittingly, he died while giving a seminar on the book. Alas, The Golfing Machine itself might have appealed to only the most physics-minded players: as one critic of Kelley's lamented, it all seems “convoluted.” Yet when one reads over the laundry list of professional golfers who benefited from Kelley's ideas, one wonders why Kelley's legacy lived in anonymity for so long. Gummer takes complicated ideas from Kelley's book and makes them easy to follow, and while the subject matter isn't universally fascinating, golf fans will find it to be a quick, enjoyable read. (May)

The list of collegiate baseball players who have roamed the fields of Omaha's Rosenblatt Stadium is impressive—from Dave Winfield to Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens to Barry Larkin. For those stars, and the thousands of other less-famous players who have traveled each summer to that friendly Midwestern city, the College World Series is more than what happens on the field, as McGee vividly illustrates. When college baseball's best players come to Omaha, it's a two-week party. So while McGee intricately relates the action on the field and the myriad personalities of the coaches and players—from the super stud and future millionaire to the son-of-a-dairy-farmer-turned-championship-hero—he doesn't stop there. In this entertaining read, McGee talks to the fans from Louisiana who travel across the country to tailgate and serve gumbo to all their new friends; the storekeeper who provides free beer for the hot Omaha summer; and the scorekeeper, the organist, the grounds crew and dozens of other people who put together the event that continues to make the CWS a popular destination. As one coach said after his team was heartbreakingly eliminated, “even when you lose, this is still the greatest place on Earth.” (May)

Novelist Dunn (Geek Love) collects 22 essays and articles written over the last quarter-century. In 1980, Dunn's then-husband had her watch a fight on TV and from that day forward she was hooked. Soon afterward, Dunn began freelancing boxing pieces to an alternative paper in Oregon, the Willamette Weekly. Over the years, Dunn has written on such subjects as hand wraps and cuts, on fighters famous (Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler) and obscure (Andy Minsker) and on the phenomenon of women's boxing. Her articles have appeared in publications that include Playboy, Sports Illustrated and Mother Jones. Although Dunn's fiction is celebrated for its style, her essay prose rarely rises above the journeyman. Dunn seems to have a hard time deciding on her authorial position from essay to essay—advocate, journalist or eyewitness—and the lack of focus leaves the reader equally confused. Overall, the collection lacks unity: since Dunn is producing occasional pieces for various markets, she recycles the same details in different places, especially with the pieces on women and boxing. In a few articles, however, like “Defending Tyson” and the Minsker pieces, Dunn unveils insight that exceeds the merely perfunctory. While Dunn may be an old pro when it comes to fiction, with boxing she remains an amateur, albeit an enthusiastic one. (May)

Freelance writer Coleman (Eddie Would Go) examines the history of surfing in Hawaii through the lens of Makaha, an isolated town on the west coast of Oahu. Makaha is the heart and soul of the title, but those words also apply to the men and women whose stories give life to the town. Chief among them is Richard “Buffalo” Keaulana, an accomplished waterman of full-blood Hawaiian descent. Born in 1934, Keaulana grew up during the evolution of surfing from an obscure ritual in a far-flung corner of the American empire to an international phenomenon. For Coleman, Keaulana embodies the culture that produced the first longboard and the elusive concept of aloha. Coleman also tells the story of the women's surfing pioneer, Rell Sunn; the Rabelaisian Hawaiian singer and songwriter Israel Kamakawiwo'ole; and the first voyage of the Hokule'a, a replica of traditional Polynesian voyaging canoes. Coleman tends to romanticize his subjects (“Looking into the deep brown eyes of Brian Keaulana is like seeing the soul of Makaha”) and the narrative doesn't always come together, yet his unquestioning embrace of all things Hawaiian is infectious, and his subtle charm will please all true believers in the soul of surfing. (May)

In this robust roundup, researcher and librarian Collins scours the archives to show how cooking programs throughout the decades reflect America's changing cultural mores. From James Beard to Rachael Ray, TV cooking hosts have brought this intimate brand of entertainment into the home, moving from educating the general public on the finer points of home economics to coaching us on developing our inner creativity. Collins skillfully marshals her research, starting with radio programs sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the mid-1920s, featuring a fictitious Aunt Sammy to administer recipes in order to “lift the level of American cookery.” James Beard hosted the first postwar TV cooking show, I Love to Eat, short-lived and criticized for its blatant endorsement of commercial sponsors, while spawning numerous imitators. Then, Cordon Bleu–trained Dione Lucas's sophisticated prime-time 1950s cooking show enraptured audiences until it was eclipsed by Julia Child's PBS show, The French Chef, in 1963. Unfussy and fallible in the kitchen, Child demystified haute cuisine, and her long-running TV presence spurred good-natured rivals like Graham Kerr's The Galloping Gourmet. Readers might be surprised at the role public television played in nurturing the genre, presently evolved into the Food Network's elevation of chefs as celebrities and food akin to porn. Collins's engaging, somewhat scholarly study finds cooking shows the great leveler in gender, class and lifestyles and with a strong future. (May)

Piquant and ribald, Bachrach's debut memoir about her dotty mother from Providence, R.I., revolves around the accidental gassing accident aboard her parents' boat in 1983 that left her father dead of exhaust asphyxiation and her mother with severe brain damage. The author was then a 33-year-old advertising executive working in Paris on a new (ultimately doomed) campaign to introduce antiperspirant to the French, when she rushed back to the U.S. at the behest of her two professional siblings, expecting a double funeral but finding her tenacious, irrepressible 56-year-old mother, Lola, emerging from a coma. Widowed, confused and mis-medicated, Lola was not expected to recover from her carbon-monoxide poisoning, but her long-suffering children knew better, having endured a long history of Lola's erratic, flamboyant, bipolar yo-yoing requiring years of psychiatry, shock treatment and hospitalization. Over time her aphasia, echolalia, catatonia and incontinence amazingly do turn around, but Lola is ever a force to be reckoned with, the granddaughter of a prominent Rhode Island rabbi, molested in her youth, lustily married to so-called Mr. Fix It (also the name of the boat, which he incorrectly rewired, causing the release of gas vapors that killed him) and gamely re-marriageable (“Men are like buses,” she maintained, lining up another husband: “Miss one, hop on another”). Bachrach's prose is wry, risky, and feels like she has found her moment at last. (May)

When Hemley, a writing professor at the University of Iowa, decides that he wants to do over some of the experiences he flubbed as a child, he isn't just dreaming. The 48-year-old father of three makes a list of times and places he'd like to revisit, including kindergarten, the prom and summer camp, doggedly pursuing all the contacts and background checks necessary to “storm the walls of childhood” as an adult. Surprisingly, the kids and teachers he meets along the way accept him in his overgrown state; some even express envy. The complex logistics of Hemley's quest—including endless e-mails and phone calls to convince others that he's legit—can be tedious, but Hemley is endearing, funny and more than a bit courageous (the night before his first day of kindergarten, he's too nervous to sleep.) As he tackles his part in the school play or sits with the popular kids at lunch, Hemley philosophically ponders the lessons of the past. While some experiences don't pan out quite the way he hopes (after crashing his car into the ACT center, he ditches the idea of a standardized test repeat), others fall serendipitously into place (a crush from high school now works as the school's alumni director and agrees to be his prom date). A big kid at heart, the author draws readers in with just the right mix of humor and tenderness. 22 b&w photos. (May)

In this humorous, anecdotal account, King at 75-plus marvels good-naturedly at his staying power for a half-century as a talk-show host for radio and TV. Born in Brooklyn in 1933 to Jewish immigrant parents, young Larry Zeiger was profoundly influenced at age nine by the untimely heart-attack death of his father and by the medium of radio. Rejected by the army for bad eyesight and uninterested in going to college, he got his break filling in for a deejay at a radio station in Miami, where he took the name King in a pinch. His early scrapes are hilarious, especially with women (he married eight times), and he had an uncanny ability to snag famous personalities like Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra and Richard Nixon to be interviewed on air. By simply being curious and unassuming, King could make anyone seem fascinating, from a plumber to the famously laconic Robert Mitchum. Despite being fired in 1971 for financial shenanigans, King swept back on the air in Washington, D.C., before being hired to host a show for Ted Turner's fledgling CNN in 1985, where he has been following current affairs for the past 25 years. King, writing with Fussman (After Jackie), has produced a cultural history as much as a personal testimony, touching on world-shaping events over the last 50 years and sharing, with inimitable humor and grace, some quirky POVs from King's family and friends. (May)

Fans of Nora Ephron's I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman will find humor along with serious insights about women and aging in Barreca's latest challenge to women to “stop obsessing over hymens, husbands, and hangnails and once again direct our attention outward to the larger issues of... the creation of genuinely significant opportunities for women in all workplaces.” But Barreca (Perfect Husbands & Other Fairy Tales) is more about laughs than lecturing, as she addresses the mysteries of finding the perfect bra, the indignities of bathing suit shopping at TJ Maxx, her relationship with her hair and the “Fifty-two Things I Learned by Fifty-one.” Along the way, she points out what she considers to be the insipid concerns of holiday preparations or what exactly women may consider to be a waste of time (“Why, oh why, didn't I organize my closet according to color and texture of garment?”). Between the snappy observations, Barreca takes an opportunity to liken the progression of contemporary feminist thought to a car accident—“it's not so much that we're in a backlash as we're in a whiplash.” (May)

Ithis marvelously entertaining and erudite follow-up to Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens, Davidson has written the definitive study of the varieties of same-sex love in ancient Greece. Abjuring recent theory-laden views of ancient Greek sexuality, and in particular homosexuality, Davidson examines the great variety of loves practiced across all ages and classes in such locales as Sparta, Crete and Macedonia. He draws deeply on etymology, philology, archeology, poetry and philosophy, observing, for instance, that the various Greek words for love—from agape (fondness) to pothos (longing) and eros (driving love)—define an amatory universe in which a variety of feelings and sexual practices characterize relationships between individuals. Thus, love manifests itself differently depending on whether “the lovers are Spartan women, gods and heroes, comrades-in-arms or master and slave.” There is the sweet and playful eros of the lyric poets, the patriotic eros of Pericles' funeral speech, and the letters of Alexander that reject offers to send him the most beautiful boys in the world. Davidson's study is brilliant social history and a first-rate history of classical Greece. B&w illus. (May 26)