Nonfiction Reviews

Tye, a Boston Globe reporter and author of The Father of Spin, offers the first biography on Satchel Paige, the premier pitcher of the Negro Leagues. Having interviewed more than 200 veteran fellow players of the Negro and Major Leagues, he is able to flesh out the Satchel Paige persona. Through Paige’s hardscrabble years in Jim Crow Alabama to his time with the all-black Monarchs, one of the powerhouses in segregated “colored” ball, Tye dissects Satchel’s mastery of pitching, his accuracy, power and velocity, and signature pitch, the sizzler. Satchel was among the peerless Negro Leaguers, who beat the white big leaguers more than 60% of the time; he struck out some of the biggest sluggers, like Ralph Kiner, Rogers Hornsby and even Joe DiMaggio, who got one hit off of Satchel and was signed by the Yankees immediately. He became one of four black athletes signed up in the late 1940s, with the Cleveland Indians, three years after Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers (the two men were bitter rivals). This is the definitive biography of a black showman-athlete, and as Tye makes the case, one of the finest pitchers ever, who finally was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1971. (July)

Combining passion with current scientific information, Callahan, an immunologist/pathologist at Colorado State University, explains why our conception of two sexes is more a social than a biological construct. He argues that there are no simple, foolproof ways to determine sex. For example chromosomal structure, XX for females and XY for males, is not fully predictive because of various genetic disorders that can play a larger role. Similarly, genitalia can be quite varied and represent a continuum of difference rather than two discrete points. Callahan does a good job of exploring intersex individuals, who are neither male nor female, and argues that they need to be accepted for what they are and not viewed as defective. Further, he provides provocative evidence that surgical gender reconstruction is often unsuccessful. Although Callahan attempts to make the case that some non-Western societies have a less bipolar view of gender, his abbreviated presentation is not very convincing. He is, however, persuasive that better understanding of and respect for sex and gender variability would be far healthier for the 65,000-plus intersex people born each year and society in general. (July)

Hotel magnate Robert Bigelow is developing an inflatable space station called the TransHab, where, for a mere $12 million, vacationers will be able to spend four weeks. All he needs is a space buggy to get his vacationers there. In this snappy survey of present-day rocket technology and schemes, science writer Bizony (The Rivers of Mars) tells readers where the action is. Internet entrepreneurs like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Paypal founder Elon Musk are enviously regarding outer space with cool intellect and drawing up plans for spaceships. Musk’s Falcon rocket reached space successfully, and his company plans to take satellites and other payloads into space for commercial and government customers. But not only billionaires can participate in the space race: both Bigelow and NASA are dangling prizes worth tens of millions of dollars in front of aspiring space moguls to spur creation of new technologies. Bizony’s book is not a how-to manual with instructions for launching a rocket from the backyard. Rather, his descriptions of fuel systems and spaceship design in accessible language could inspire science buffs to take up the challenge. Illus. (July 28)

The dynamic Asian tiger economies, with their export-focused, state industrial policies, defy laissez-faire economic orthodoxies; this insightful history sheds light on their controversial achievements. Time magazine’s business correspondent Schuman surveys behemoths China, Japan and India, middleweight powerhouses like Taiwan and Korea and oft-neglected developing countries like Malaysia and Indonesia, examining their economies through profiles of the government and business leaders. His evenhanded treatment of the “Asian model” notes both its successes—spectacular growth and technological progress—and failings—crony capitalism and sometimes stifling government regulation—while exploring the complexities and effectiveness of its various national versions. The clearest policy message is the author’s not entirely convincing endorsement of globalization and free trade, which, he insists, benefit South Carolina as much as South Korea. To reassure readers that free market verities still hold, Schuman includes stories about scrappy Asian entrepreneurs who built startups into world-class corporate juggernauts, sometimes helped and sometimes hindered by government economic planners. Schuman writes in the same vein of anecdotal pop-economic analysis as Thomas Friedman, with less grandiosity and more nuance; the result is a thoughtful, reader-friendly look at the crucial economic developments of our age. (July)

The vexed issue of illegal immigration is goosed in this raucous, hammy odyssey. Rico, a self-proclaimed gonzo journalist and “soft, white... middle-class American” with no Spanish, set out to portray the Mexican migrant experience by crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally, and spends the book searching the border’s 2,000-mile length for a safe, convenient place to do so. Such does not exist along a frontier controlled on one side by the U.S. Border Patrol and on the other by drug cartels and gang-affiliated coyotes, and Rico’s quest eventually reduces him to an almost authentic state of semicriminal desperation. Along the way, he debates and mocks ideologues on all sides, from nutty Minutemen border vigilantes to naïve open-border activists. The book is more about writing a book about the border than it is about the border. Rico himself, with his exaggerated angst, is always the showy central character, and many of his encounters—parading his Minutemen T-shirt before offended Mexican-Americans, soliciting coyotes in a Mexican strip-joint—are transparently staged. Still, when he takes the spotlight off himself, he conveys an arresting panorama of an out-of-control borderland full of seething rancor and foolish dreams. (July)

The founder of Female Factor Strategic Consulting is a convincing cheerleader for marketing more effectively to women. She points out that women purchase or are the key influencers in about 80% of all consumer product sales in the U.S. alone—but 90% of marketing execs trying to reach them are men. In her crusade to teach marketers to become female-literate, Brennan offers very practical advice, urging readers to think twice before using overtly “masculine” competitive messages, to avoid violent images and language, and to realize that women, focused on practicality rather than cool bells and whistles, require fairly sophisticated marketing: “pink is not a strategy,” she reminds us tartly. The five important global demographic changes affecting female consumerism—more women in the work force; delayed marriages and therefore more spending on self; lower birthrates resulting in fewer kids (but more stuff); a divorce economy, which translates into needing two of everything; and the growing rate of active older women—mean that the female market must be well catered to. Brennan’s style is smart and straightforward, and her pragmatic advice is spot-on; marketers should take note. (July)

On July 14, 1789, a mob stormed the Bastille, Paris’s redoubtable prison. It held only seven inmates, but the Estates-General had achieved political parity with King Louis XVI, and Parisians, fearing a royalist coup, were searching for weapons stored in the Bastille. In a well-written account, Prendergast recounts in detail the events of the day and, as important, those leading up to it, including failed attempts to impose new taxes and the very poor harvest leading to popular unrest. In the book’s second and more interesting half, “Memory,” the author examines how the French have continually refashioned the meaning of the day and of the French Revolution in general. By the bicentennial in 1989, a commemoration of the founding of modern France, the general public had become, by and large, indifferent to political and intellectual debates over the Revolution. Prendergast notes how French political leaders have used history for political and ideological purposes, and how, in our age of short memory, history and celebration increasingly diverge. (June)

When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, typhus ravaged his army, killing hundreds of thousands and ensuring his defeat, according to this breathless combination of military and medical history. After summarizing the havoc this disease wreaked on earlier armies and sketching Napoleon’s career, the book describes his invasion of Russia with more than 600,000 men. Almost immediately typhus struck. Infected lice excrete the microbe in their feces, and victims acquire the disease by scratching the itchy bite. Talty (Mulatto America) describes the effects in graphic detail: severe headache, high fever, delirium, generalized pain and a spotty rash. Death may take weeks, and fatalities approached 100% among Napoleon’s increasingly debilitated, filthy, half-starved soldiers. Talty makes a good case that it was typhus, not “General Winter,” that crushed Napoleon. Readers should look elsewhere for authoritative histories of Napoleon’s wars and of infectious diseases, but Talty delivers a breezy, popular account of a gruesome campaign, emphasizing the equally gruesome epidemic that accompanied it. 12 maps. (June)

This grimly absorbing history revisits the worst ordeal Americans experienced during WWII. Michael Norman, a former New York Times reporter, and Elizabeth Norman (Women at War) pen a gripping narrative of the 1942 battle for the Bataan peninsula in the Philippines, the surrender of 76,000 Americans and Filipinos to the Japanese and the infamous death march that introduced the captives to the starvation, dehydration and murderous Japanese brutality that would become routine for the next three years. Focusing intermittently on American POW Ben Steele, whose sketches adorn the book, the narrative follows the prisoners through the hell of Japanese prison and labor camps. (The lowest circle is the suffocating prison ship where men went mad with thirst and battened on their comrades’ blood.) The authors are unsparing but sympathetic in telling the Japanese side of the story; indeed, they are much harder on the complacent, arrogant American commander Douglas MacArthur than on his Japanese counterpart. There’s sorrow but not much pity in this story; as all human aspiration shrivels to a primal obsession with food and water, flashes of compassion and artistic remembrance only occasionally light the gloom. 8 pages of b&w illus., illus. throughout; maps. (June 16)

Oxford University historian Horne (Harold Macmillan) presents a busy snapshot of America’s controversial superdiplomat in this admiring biographical study. The year 1973 ran Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon’s chief foreign policy adviser, ragged with such watersheds as the Paris Peace Treaty with North Vietnam, the Chileans’ overthrow of president Salvador Allende and the Yom Kippur War; he also won the Nobel Peace Prize, was appointed secretary of state and launched détente with the Soviets. Horne’s chummyportrait, heavily informed by its ever-accessible subject, dubs Kissinger “the single most powerful man in the world” as his epic negotiations, intricately recounted here, resolved crisis after crisis while a paralyzed Nixon White House dithered over Watergate. Horne defends Kissinger from leftists who accuse him of war crimes and right-wingers who claim he was soft on Russia; he absolves Kissinger of responsibility for the Chilean coup, and blames congressional doves and a “fifth column” of antiwar activists for handing Indochina over to communism. The author’s own Cold War conservatism heightens the book’s dated tone; he doesn’t question the continuing relevance of Kissinger’s static, Metternichian balance-of-superpowers vision. His is a simplistic, unreflective account of Kissinger’s place in history. (June)

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon. In this extensively researched account of that epic achievement, former publishing executive and prize-winning author Nelson (The First Heroes) moves seamlessly between Apollo 11 astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, their nervous families and the equally nervous NASA ground crew. Nelson follows Armstrong in nail-biting detail as he tries to find a place to land with less than a minute’s worth of fuel remaining. A large central section of the book digresses to provide some backstory on the feverish American-Soviet game of one-upmanship in the year leading up to the Apollo 11 launch. For instance, Nelson describes Apollo 8 as an almost reckless gamble by NASA to beat the Russians in sending men to orbit the moon The book also describes the sad personal toll the mission took. Collins was best able to deal with the cost of fame yet expressed the anticlimax of life after Apollo 11: “I seem gripped by earthly ennui.” Space fans and readers who remember that momentous time will find this an exciting read. (June 29)

Boston University law professor Wexler is also a published humorist. This felicitous combination of talents is put to good use as he visits the towns and cities where the always controversial cases concerning separation of church and state arise. Wexler’s lucid explications of difficult constitutional concepts and the vagaries of Supreme Court rulings are superb, providing readers a deeper understanding of the First Amendment and Supreme Court jurisprudence. But that’s only half the story. Wexler is laugh-out-loud funny as he narrates his odyssey through battleground sites from rural Wisconsin through Texas to the chambers of the U.S. Senate. Along the way he happily and with a usually generous spirit skewers Supreme Court justices, legislators, educators, law school professors and pretty much anyone else, including himself, who has ever taken a position on the enduring American controversies surrounding prayer in schools, religious displays on public property, or the teaching of evolution. This is a rare treat, a combination of thoughtful analysis and quirky humor that illuminates an issue that rarely elicits a laugh—and that is central to the American body politic. (June)

Like “geese force-fed grain until their livers explode, to make foie gras, we are a generation born to consume,” says this witty commentary on rampant consumerism enabled by design innovation. Indeed, Sudjic (director of London’s Design Museum and author of The Edifice Complex) says, consumer snobbery and design obsession can border on “high-functioning autism.” Writing almost conversationally, he explores how “consumer engineering” expanded the design process, inspiring the world to “consume [its] way out of the Great Depression”and becoming the present marketing ideal. Luxury, fashion and art, says Sudjic,are the highlights of modern design, with fashion as the “most developed form of built-in obsolescence”—and consumers are willing to pay dearly for the impermanence. Brimming throughout with primarily British examples, pricing and language, Sudjic’s appreciation of first-rate design shows through his vivid descriptions of universally classic functional or aesthetically pleasing archetypes. Especially appealing to marketers and design connoisseurs, this is easily digestible for the average consumers interested in knowingly purchasing quality design for the senses—if they can still afford it in today’s economy. 71 b&w illus, 5 color illus. (June)

Gorn (Mother Jones) presents a solid, unromanticized account of the last year in the short life of famed bank robber John Dillinger. Gorn rejects psychologizing about why Dillinger, the unexceptional if restless grocer’s son, born in Indianapolis in 1903, turned to a life of crime, arrested first in 1924 for assaulting an elderly store clerk in a botched robbery. After spending nine years—almost a third of his short life—in jail, Dillinger found a Depression-era America far different from the one he’d left. Less than two months into his parole, Dillinger and the first in a revolving parade of Dillinger gang members robbed the Commercial Bank in Daleville, Ind., making off with $3,500. Between July 1933 and his death just one year later, Dillinger robbed more than 10 banks, killed at least five people (all lawmen) and stole over $300,000, all the while evading capture by local law enforcement and later the FBI. Gorn, who teaches at Brown University, relies on newspaper accounts and government documents (and, thankfully, no reconstructed dialogue) to plot the movements of a criminal who, 75 years after his death, still reverberates in the American consciousness. 30 b&w photos. (June)

A young smalltime crook with a meticulous eye for artistic detail and an addiction to the thrill of crime crafts millions in high-quality phony bills in Kersten’s account of counterfeiter Art Williams Jr. Born in 1972 and abandoned by his father to poverty, the gritty gangs of Chicago and a mentally ill mother, Williams slid into an underworld of theft and violence before a bohemian money crafter introduced him to counterfeiting. With swagger, ingenuity and a devoted wife, Williams produced millions of dollars’ worth of uncannily accurate bills for 14 years, till the Secret Service caught up with him. As Kersten narrates this story, he ably weaves the minuscule details of currency security with colorful portraits of underworld characters like a Chinese mob leader known as the Horse and tales of giddy shopping sprees fueled by sex, fake bills, even mischievous masquerades as priests. Illustrating Williams not only as a delinquent genius but a sensitive young man seeking paternal love and aesthetic validation, Kersten (who first told Williams’s story in Rolling Stone) configures a rollicking and captivating look into a compelling criminal mind. (June 11)

In this utterly enchanting book, food writer Carpenter chronicles with grace and generosity her experiences as an “urban farmer.” With her boyfriend Bill’s help, her squatter’s vegetable garden in one of the worst parts of the Bay Area evolved into further adventures in bee and poultry keeping in the desire for such staples as home-harvested honey, eggs and home-raised meat. The built-in difficulties also required dealing with the expected noise and mess as well as interference both human and animal. When one turkey survived to see, so to speak, its way to the Thanksgiving table, the success spurred Carpenter to rabbitry and a monthlong plan to eat from her own garden. Consistently drawing on her Idaho ranch roots and determined even in the face of bodily danger, her ambitions led to ownership and care of a brace of pigs straight out of E.B. White. She chronicles the animals’ slaughter with grace and sensitivity, their cooking and consumption with a gastronome’s passion, and elegantly folds in riches like urban farming history. Her way with narrative and details, like the oddly poetic names of chicken and watermelon breeds, gives her memoir an Annie Dillard lyricism, but it’s the juxtaposition of the farming life with inner-city grit that elevates it to the realm of the magical. (June)

When he signed up to do a stint with Médecins Sans Frontières in 2006, Maskalyk, currently assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Toronto, volunteered to go anywhere the organization wanted to send him, writing, “No wife, no kids, no house, no debt, no one waiting for me to get back.” He was posted in Abyei, an oil-rich region set squarely on the demarcation between north and south Sudan, where one of the bloodiest civil wars in Africa had recently ended. In a makeshift hospital, he saw dozens of sick people, most suffering—even dying—from treatable illnesses. In his six months of service, Maskalyk oversaw a measles outbreak and treated tuberculosis patients, mothers fatally injured during childbirth and countless malnourished children. Even if Maskalyk frustrates in his apolitical stance, refusing to ask why so many are suffering and merely lamenting the fact, he provides a raw and deeply felt account of his time in Sudan. (June)

The clouds rarely lift in this grim, perceptive biography of Hollywood’s first African-American screen siren. Gavin (Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker) makes clear that much of Horne’s perpetual frustration stemmed from the racism black entertainers faced in the pre–civil rights era. MGM glamorized her as a darker version of its white starlets, but gave her small roles and singing cameos that Southern theaters could conveniently excise. As a cabaret chanteuse and Vegas headliner, she battled segregated nightclubs that let her sing to, but not drink with, white customers, and racial attitudes tainted her relationships with black audiences and with her white husband and lovers. Still, Horne’s failures and heartaches seem largely determined by her talent and character. Her movie career, Gavin contends, fizzled more because of limited acting ability than studio perfidy, while a chaotic childhood left her a “nasty woman” ready to “freeze people into oblivion.” Indeed, her unhappiness shaped a successful stage persona—a cross between “a cobra” and “a panther devouring her prey”—that infused romantic lyrics with scornful irony. As Horne grows from “joyless toddler” to chilly, bitter diva, Gavin’s clear-eyed account makes her the author of her life, and her pain. Photos. (June)

The golden days of rock ’n’ roll flit by in this sprightly memoir by the celebrated songwriting duo. A couple of Jewish kids with a passion for black music, Leiber and Stoller started out as teenagers writing blues ballads, penned such early, genre-defining rock classics as “Hound Dog” and “Stand by Me,” then conceived a midlife obsession with aging chanteuse Peggy Lee, for whom they wrote and produced an album of ruminative torch songs. Along the way, they went through iconic music-biz rites of passage: hanging with Elvis; working at the Brill Building; getting into financial disputes with Phil Spector, Atlantic Records and the Mafia. As arranged by collaborator Ritz, the authors harmonize well in their alternating reminiscences; Stoller is the more reflective one, while the best anecdotes belong to the brash Leiber, who was challenged to a drag race by James Dean, choked by Norman Mailer and forced to trade his car for a pair of shoes. There’s not a lot of deep insight into the creative process—the authors seem to have written most of their songs on 15 minutes’ notice—just vignettes from pop music’s giddy youth, short and sweet and catchy. Photos. (June)

Prompted by the legend of a man, Mr. Disposable Income, who paid over $70,000 for a rare bottle of single malt Scotch whisky, Hopkins and her friend Krysta hit the road on a quest to parse the spirit’s immense appeal—and to look for the perfect shot of whiskey. Part road-trip memoir, part history and part handy tasting guide, Hopkins’s search takes them to Ireland, Scotland, Pittsburgh (the author’s hometown), Kentucky and Canada. Hopkins, a popular blogger who goes by the moniker “The Accidental Hedonist,” has an easy, friendly tone, and her book often reads like a series of blog posts, albeit longer and well-researched. This works well when Hopkins gives historical context—how blended whiskeys overtook traditional whiskey in popularity, the story of the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania and how Prohibition decimated the U.S. whiskey industry. But the casual tone can make the first-person narrative sound a bit like two American coeds on a whiskey-bingeing spring break (Hopkins and her companion are in their early 40s and 30s, respectively). Still, this is a pleasant and informative read. (June)

Sorensen has made a career out of studying the way consumers behave in supermarkets. His research into their behavioral patterns includes inventing PathTracker, a system that tracks the motions of shopping carts and fitting test shoppers with specially designed glasses that record their field of vision every 3/25ths of a second, telling him exactly what they are looking at and for how long. It turns out there are three different groups of shopping excursions—quick trips, fill-ins and stockups—and Sorenson studies shoppers by behavior, rather than demographic. He exhorts retailers to forget the old system of making the shopper walk through a store, hoping they’ll make impulse buys; instead, get them buying as quickly as possible and build momentum by putting products—particularly high frequency purchase items—directly in their paths. He cites such stores as Stew Leonard and Tesco as taking full advantage of new shopper research and provides interesting studies to back up his claims. While vastly informative—even from a sociological standpoint—the book comes across as too theoretical and academic for the general reader. (June)

Berland and Schoen, founding partners of a strategic research firm, take on a familiar subject—examining the common traits of highly successful people—with a fresh twist, arguing that success is achieved not by remaking your personality but by enhancing the skills you already have. They offer ways to use your own skills, attributes and personality as a path to charting an individualized course to achievement. Studies of 50 leaders in a variety of fields (e.g., Mark Burnett, Steve Forbes, Mario Andretti, Bob Woodward) make up the meat of the book and offer models as a learning tool as well as shedding insight into how the successful think. The authors identify four major categories of successful individuals—“Natural-Born Leaders,” “Independence Seekers,” “Visionaries” and “Do-Gooders”—and determine the inner personality, motivational and external traits that comprise each group. By identifying and embracing the unique potential of these archetypes, readers will be well positioned to put their best self forward. (June)

Philosopher and motorcycle repair-shop owner Crawford extols the value of making and fixing things in this masterful paean to what he calls “manual competence,” the ability to work with one’s hands. According to the author, our alienation from how our possessions are made and how they work takes many forms: the decline of shop class, the design of goods whose workings cannot be accessed by users (such as recent Mercedes models built without oil dipsticks) and the general disdain with which we regard the trades in our emerging “information economy.” Unlike today’s “knowledge worker,” whose work is often so abstract that standards of excellence cannot exist in many fields (consider corporate executives awarded bonuses as their companies sink into bankruptcy), the person who works with his or her hands submits to standards inherent in the work itself: the lights either turn on or they don’t, the toilet flushes or it doesn’t, the motorcycle roars or sputters. With wit and humor, the author deftly mixes the details of his own experience as a tradesman and then proprietor of a motorcycle repair shop with more philosophical considerations. (June)

Kuipers (Burning Rainbow Farm) reports on “eco-tage” or eco-sabotage, groups via the story of Rob Coronado, one of the movement’s most active members. After an early victory sinking whaling ships in Iceland, Coronado mounted a series of “actions” over the years, breaking into fur farms and animal-testing laboratories, destroying cages and research documents, and often committing arson. The book provides an exhaustive account of Rod’s path through the fringe environmental movement, his evolving political philosophy and his deepening identification with his Yaqui ancestral beliefs, which embrace the environment as an integral element of human life. Simultaneously, it traces how Coronado became “isolated and paranoid” as the FBI intensified its manhunt and eventually arrested the man they characterized as a terrorist. Kuipers’s fascination for his subject veers dangerously close to awe at times, but he is generally fair in his depiction of the moral ambiguities at the heart of “eco-tage” and presents the voices of people negatively affected by Coronado. Anyone interested in the extreme edges of the environmental movement will be well served by this account, which throws a light on its often misunderstood philosophy. (June)

An astonishingly creative response to Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations, this groundbreaking analysis examines political trends through the prism of emotion, arguing that fear, humiliation and hope might be as influential as the cultural, social and economic factors that breed political conflict. Shedding keen light on the limitations of the geographic and cultural determinism that currently dominates international relations discourse, Moïsi uses these definitions to remap the world's political regions. Dexterously avoiding cliché or sentimentality, Moïsi studies how emotions interact (e.g., fear is the absence of confidence; hope is the expression of confidence; humiliation is the loss of hope that results from wounded confidence) and plumbs the roots of Asia’s culture of hope, the historical humiliation feeding Islamic extremism and the long-dominant emotions in the West: a fear of the “other,” confusion about national identity and an anxiety to maintain global relevance. This elegant thesis presents the very real consequences of the “Clash of Emotions” and concludes with well-reasoned if tentative conjecture about how these currents will shift in years to come. (June)

The monumental difficulty of running for president of the United States as a third party or independent candidate is the subject of this informative but sometimes tedious chronicle by Ralph Nader’s former campaign manager, who frames her crusade to get Nader onto the ballots in the 2000 and 2004 elections as a stand to give voters “more voices and more choices.” An NYU law school graduate, Amato brings a lawyer’s sensibility to the book and details the endless technicalities, lawsuits and court rulings that Nader’s team faced. This diligent chronicling could be essential reading for anyone planning to mount or advise an independent or third party run for president, but it is hard to imagine that the general reader will be captivated by the rented office space scandal of June 2004 and other such complications. Despite the book’s flaws, Amato displays an encyclopedic knowledge of election law, and her recommendations for election reform, including a comprehensive plan for “Federal Administration and Financing of Elections,” are crucial contributions to the debate over election law. (June)

English novelist Foster (and his intractable dog, Ollie) report on their further misadventures in this sequel to Walking Ollie. Ollie has become more manageable, but his continuing aloofness and general misanthropy—he “models himself on Howard Hughes”—lead Foster and his partner, Trezza, to adopt a Saluki named Dylan. The process is anything but smooth: Ollie ignores the new puppy, and Dylan brings his own series of neurosis: he is obsessed with chewing chairs, eating car headrests, rolling in fox excrement and disappearing into the woods to chase rabbits and squirrels. Foster introduces readers to a cast of strange and wonderful characters—both human and canine—and details myriad comic and calamitous anecdotes: Ollie’s sudden aggression toward other dogs, Dylan’s numerous vanishing acts, the purchase and deployment of Ollie’s muzzle and how the two dogs finally forge an affecting brotherhood. Among the humorous high points, the book also strikes more sober chords, allowing for a fully rounded depiction of how heartrending, frequently frustrating and blissful it is to share one’s life with a dog. (June)

This is the perfect cookbook for lovers of salt cod, and it just might be the perfect cookbook for those who dislike the mild, Atlantic fish. Leite, a three-time James Beard–award winner and proprietor of the Web site LeitesCulinaria.com, offers a wealth of recipes for the brackish dried fish, including a traditional version of pastéis de bacalhau (salt cod fritters). But cod is but one of the amaazing dishes offered here. By highlighting the eclectic ingredients and modern techniques that define the country today, Leite brings the often-overlooked foods of Portugal center stage. This fully illustrated book begins with an extensive glossary of Portuguese staples, plus a port primer and an introduction to Madeira, and ends with a chapter devoted to workhorse sundries such as fiery piri-piri paste and smoked paprika oil. Along the way home cooks are introduced to a delectable jumble of dishes that range from classic to contemporary. A comforting adaptation of the fabled stone soup is enlivened with spicy chouriço sausage; simple-yet-elegant duck breasts are sauced with white port and black olives; and a dip made with anchovies, green olives, cilantro, and whole milk is surprisingly harmonious. The desserts are comparatively docile—molasses cookies, baked custard tarts—but the recipe variation for fatias douradas (Portuguese sweet bread French toast) is truly over-the-top. (Aug.)

Positing that many Americans associate Mexican cuisine with shiny globs of orange cheese, Valladolid sets out to offer a broader, more diverse and healthier vision of south-of-the-border cooking. The Tijuana-born, Ritz-Escoffier–educated Valladolid is a young mother as well as a culinary television personality. As such, she values “weeknight” recipes that can be produced with a minimum of fuss and a few good flavors. Though Valladolid’s mission is to educate readers of the world beyond Old El Paso taco kits, she distinguishes herself from authenticity-focused Mexican cookbook authors such as Diana Kennedy, allowing for looser, creative interpretations that befit contemporary eaters: osso bucco with lime zest and chilis; mascarpone-stuffed squash blossoms with raspberry vinaigrette; and the decadent Mexican cake, pastel de tres leches, made with Italian meringue as a substitute for the traditional raw egg whites. Using ingredients that are readily found in the U.S., her creations are reliable and at times wonderfully simple, like a bright slaw of jicama, arbol chilis and uncooked beets with toasted sesame oil, or baked cod with anchovies, lime and a few kalamata olives and capers thrown in for good measure. Home cooks will appreciate Valladolid’s enthusiastic yet straightforward approach. (Aug.)

As one of London’s most celebrated chefs, Blumenthal delights in confounding diners’ expectations with unusual dishes like crab ice cream, but there is a scientific method to his madness. This book, like his last, accompanies his BBC TV series, in which he travels around the world to immerse himself in the history and popular ways of making eight well-known menu items (including hamburger and risotto), then breaks them down in his lab kitchen to understand their parts, and finally reinvents them from the bottom up based on his new knowledge. Blumenthal not only uses scientific technology like MRI machines and gas chromatographs, he also draws on cognitive neuroscience theories to investigate, for example, how a dish’s name influences the way people taste it, and he is as comfortable discussing technical details as he is rhapsodizing about a good baked Alaska. The recipes provided are clearly written, but the equipment, ingredients and time involved will dissuade many home cooks, and the book is really more about discoveries along the way than the end result. Blumenthal’s lively intellect and dryly humorous, evocative writing will appeal to anyone interested in the process behind molecular gastronomy or who has ever wondered why certain recipes are constructed as they are. (July)

Alexiadou, a chef well-regarded in Greece for her books and TV series, has compiled recipes from every corner of the country, for every section of the menu, beginning with a delightful array of mezedes such as wine-steamed mussels and fava bean croquettes, then going through soups and salads, pasta, fish and shellfish, all kinds of meats, and baked goods. Though she certainly includes classics like pastitsio, spanakopita and baklava, Alexiadou’s selections overall demonstrate the breadth and depth of Greek cookery with entries such as duckling with kumquats, pumpkin fritters and tangerine flutes. She opens with a brief tour of Greece’s main regions and their specialties, but the focus is more on cooking than chatting; a concise section offering historical tidbits and “general instructions” opens each chapter, and many recipes close with serving and presentation tips. Alexiadou’s aim is to provide a wide assortment of authentically Greek dishes, bringing the country to life through the recipes’ varied ingredients rather than through prose. Some of the ingredients, like colocasia, or sheep’s milk, will be harder for the home cook to obtain than others, but anyone seriously interested in learning the full repertoire of Greek cooking will be willing to make the effort, just as they will want this book. (May)

Moore, a frequent guest on the Oprah show, helms a list of “world class” female physician coauthors. The book opens with the old news that women’s wellness has taken a backseat to men’s, even though it’s been 20 years since the government insisted that clinical trials include women. The few reliable, comprehensive guides to women’s health include most notably Our Bodies, Ourselves and The New Harvard Guide to Women’s Health, but this new resource is not one of them. It offers broad coverage, but insufficient straightforward information. Opening with the familiar discussion about why women are different and deserve appropriate care, the book covers minimal basic explanations and advice for maintaining health and understanding and recognizing symptoms of disease. In an effort to offer nonalarmist guidance, the coauthors downplay the severity of certain conditions, including cancer, liver disease and coronary artery disease. Twelve of 16 chapters, each presenting short overviews, sidebars, charts, illustrations, symptom checklists and advice for self-care, focus on an individual physiological system (hormones, breast health, heart, etc.). The message that informed patients receive better care is here, but symptom checklists are incomplete and explanations cursory at best. (May)

Was it Freddie Mac in the conservatory with the predatory loan? The government in the billiard room with the deregulation? Four June books on the financial crisis round up the usual suspects.

In this scathing indictment of the Bush administration and the excesses of big business and corporate gluttony during the past eight years, North Dakota Senator Dorgan (D-N.Dak.) chronicles how Americans’ faith in government has been undermined by a lack of regulation and untrammeled greed. This former state tax commissioner takes wide aim, lambasting Bush and Cheney, financial institutions, the subprime mortgage mess, the current budget deficit, the Iraq War and war profiteering, big oil and what he regards as a flawed health-care system and grossly inequitable tax system. Dorgan’s arguments are convincing and credible, but his recounting of such issues as the mismanagement of Wall Street firms, the Bush regime’s mishandling of the Iraq War and the Bernard Madoff scandal seem late to the game and add little fresh analysis. Dorgan’s decidedly Democratic approach to repairing Americans’ “broken trust” is to increase regulation, police Wall Street and to tax the wealthy. Readers who can wade through his rehashing of wrongdoing will find his practical solutions persuasive and in alignment with the new administration. (June)

This richly detailed analysis of the recent (and ignominious) history of the American real estate market opens on a note of false optimism: in 1991, after 20 years of toil, urban housing activist Gale Cincotta successfully argued that Congress should require that 40% of the home loans issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac go to low-income buyers. The Clinton administration extended this campaign for higher ownership rates among low-income populations throughout the 1990s. Katz, a journalism professor at New York University, draws on an impressive number of interviews and thorough secondary research to illuminate the disastrous consequences of pushing underqualified buyers into ownership. Many of the topics she addresses will be familiar to readers by now—predatory subprime loans, get-rich-quick house flipping schemes, scandalous mortgage frauds—but Katz writes with authority and empathy. The many people the author interviews, from the single mother in Cleveland who lost her house just two years after buying it to the family living near Sacramento whose new home is already falling apart, become the heroes, victims and sometimes culprits in this gripping account of collective irresponsibility. (June)

Mason (Live Working or Die Fighting), the economics editor of BBC Newsnight, relies on accessible and pithy language to lay out the time line of the meltdown of the U.S. economy in September 2008 and its global reverberations. He details the root causes, names names with impunity and place the blame squarely on the shoulders of policymakers. He argues that when the law governing debt to capital ratios was quietly changed in 2004, this gave banks carte blanche to do whatever they needed to do to make money. Mason writes, “Had the old capital restrictions been in place, it is unlikely that any of the Wall Street banks could have built up toxic debts on the scale that eventually sank them.” With a quick history (and refutation) of neoliberal ideology, he makes his case that we are seeing the closing of an era; the future heralds the end of the old world banking system business model in favor of “low-profit, utility-style banking.” This is an instructive and succinct play-by-play of the global crisis, helpful for anyone in finance, economics or even policy. (June)

Former Goldman Sachs investment banker Talbott (Obamanomics) delivers a tightly written analysis of the financial crisis that while sufficiently credible and engaging, adds little to the conversation. Talbott launches a tirade against prevalent myths conveniently categorized as “Stock Investing Lies,” “Lies About the Global Economy,” etc. He summarily attacks the U.S. government, lobbyists, the media, Alan Greenspan and Henry Paulson, and pronounces the entire global banking system insolvent. Despite some bravado behind these sweeping claims, many of his assertions are convincing—the roots of the collapse of our economy are a lack of regulation, conflicts of interest between business and government and a preponderance of lying and cheating. Talbott sometimes stumbles (e.g., stating that companies that make addictive products are not good investments even when they consistently outperform other sectors) and while he promises to offer real solutions, he provides ideas that will win few fans, such as allowing the economy to contract, creating new bankruptcy processes to deal with the corporate fallout and permitting the government to inflate the currency. (June)