Nonfiction Reviews

Natural and man-made disasters can be “utopias” that showcase human solidarity and point the way to a freer society, according this stimulating contrarian study. Solnit (River of Shadows) reproves civil defense planners, media alarmists and Hollywood directors who insist that disasters produce terrified mobs prone to looting, murder and cannibalism unless controlled by armed force and government expertise. Surveying disasters from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, she shows that the typical response to calamity is spontaneous altruism, self-organization and mutual aid, with neighbors and strangers calmly rescuing, feeding and housing each other. Indeed, the main problem in such emergencies, she contends, is the “elite panic” of officials who clamp down with National Guardsmen and stifling regulations. Solnit falters when she generalizes her populist brief into an anarchist critique of everyday society that lapses into fuzzy what-ifs and uplifting volunteer testimonials. Still, this vividly written, cogently argued book makes a compelling—and timely—case for the ability of ordinary people to collectively surmount the direst of challenges. (Sept.)

Lichtenstein (Walter Reuther) offers a comprehensive if dry discussion of Wal-Mart—the world's largest private sector employer—and its place in the changing global economy. The author covers the company's rise from a group of tiny rural Arkansas stores to an enormous international entity, plagued by equally enormous problems: accusations of widespread sexual and racial discrimination, a history of dodging minimum wage law and unemployment claims, union-busting, destruction of smaller companies, chronic employee theft and bad publicity following the discovery of goods produced by child laborers. Though Lichtenstein speaks with bemused awe of Wal-Mart's omnipresence in commerce and culture, advanced logistics system and evangelical background, the message is that Wal-Mart—whose eerie motto “Our long-term strategy is to be where we're not”—has gotten too large and unwieldy to support its own weight. While it serves well as a primer on the company many Americans love to hate, the distant tone and ponderous detail will not help this book stand out from the rank and file of Wal-Mart exposés. (Aug.)

In the digital marketplace, the most effective price is no price at all, argues Anderson (The Long Tail). He illustrates how savvy businesses are raking it in with indirect routes from product to revenue with such models as cross-subsidies (giving away a DVR to sell cable service) and freemiums (offering Flickr for free while selling the superior FlickrPro to serious users). New media models have allowed successes like Obama's campaign “billboards” on Xbox Live, Webkinz dolls and Radiohead's name-your-own-price experiment with its latest album. A generational and global shift is at play—those below 30 won't pay for information, knowing it will be available somewhere for free, and in China, piracy accounts for about 95% of music consumption—to the delight of artists and labels, who profit off free publicity through concerts and merchandising. Anderson provides a thorough overview of the history of pricing and commerce, the “mental transaction costs” that differentiate zero and any other price into two entirely different markets, the psychology of digital piracy and the open-source war between Microsoft and Linux. As in Anderson's previous book, the thought-provoking material is matched by a delivery that is nothing short of scintillating. (July)

Mississippi State history mixes with the authors' personal memories in this vivid, often shocking look at the state's legacy of racism. Focusing on several of the most notorious racial incidents of the 1950s and '60s, including the violent opposition to the integration of the University of Mississippi; the murder of Mississippi's first NAACP field secretary, Medgar Evers; and the murders of civil rights activists Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, the book examines the complicity—and, just as often, outright support and collaboration—of the state's media, legal system and clergy in upholding a racial system that the authors persuasively refer to as “state-sponsored terror.” Alston Jr., a former president of the Mississippi Bar Association, and Dickerson (Goin' Back to Memphis) describe the activities of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a quasi-independent spy agency created in 1956 to monitor and intimidate supporters of civil rights and to “protect” Mississippi against integration efforts by the federal government. This thorough, absorbing overview of Mississippi's racist past is only impeded when the authors linger too long over irrelevant personal or professional history. (July)

In 1926, 18-year-old Trudy Ederle fascinated and inspired millions around the world when she became the first woman successfully to swim the English Channel. With great storytelling, sportswriter Stout (series editor of The Best American Sports Writing) chronicles Ederle's singular accomplishment and its significance for the future of women in sports as well as the tremendous challenges for any swimmer who would dare traverse the waves of the channel. At age five, Ederle (1908–2003) suffered permanent hearing loss, which made her reticent and shy; at age 10 her father taught her to swim. The ocean opened to her like another world, and she loved the feeling of floating and swimming in its vastness. After lessons at the Women's Swimming Association, Ederle developed her gift and emerged as one of America's fastest swimmers, earning a spot in the 1924 Olympics. Disappointed by winning only a bronze medal, she quickly turned to the challenge of swimming the English Channel—difficult due to its strong tides, winds and currents—and after an initial failure, Ederle conquered the channel on August 6, 1926. Stout's moving book recovers the exhilarating story of a young girl who found her true self out in the water and paved the way for women in sports today. (July)

Vietnam vet, cofounder of New England Monthly and a media consultant, Nylen, who died last year, shares with punchy humor and tremendous grace his tough approach to taking risks and staring down exacting bosses as well as cancer. Cherishing such stoical role models as Don Quixote and Ulysses S. Grant (as well as his own father, who spent his prime years as a DuPont executive before a traumatic fall altered his life permanently), Nylen celebrates America's admiration with gutsiness, and his own lifetime attempts (frequently foolish) to make the “Cool Guys Hall of Fame.” The bulk of this memoir is Nylen's facetious though moving account of his stint as an infantry officer in Vietnam in 1968, and the men he loved and lost—the ghastly experience, he assures readers, was never accurately depicted in popular movies. Shell-shocked, married after release from the army, “simulating a normal person” and appearing unemployable, he began his accidental career as a media ad salesman starting at Look magazine, dealing with tough bosses like Bill Dunn at U.S. News and World Report and Mike Levy at Texas Monthly before embarking on his own. Diagnosed with colorectal cancer stage III when he was 60, he endured treatments, surgeries, pain and frequent accidents of his own making, but preserves his cheerful, frank, optimistic and ever competitive spirit in the face of mortal adversity. (July)

Originally published in the noted director's native Germany in 2004, Herzog's diary, more prose poetry than journal entries, will appeal even to those unfamiliar with the extravagant 1982 film. From June 1979 to November 1981, Herzog recounted not only the particulars of shooting the difficult film about a fictional rubber baron—which included the famous sequence of a steamer ship being maneuvered over a hill from one river to another—but also the dreamlike quality of life in the Amazon. Famous faces swim in and out of focus, notably Mick Jagger, in a part that ended up on the cutting room floor, and the eccentric actor Klaus Kinski, who constantly berated the director after stepping into the title role that Jason Robards had quit. Fascinated by the wildlife that surrounded him in the isolated Peruvian jungle, Herzog details everything from the omnipresent insect life to piranhas that could bite off a man's toe. Those who haven't encountered Herzog on screen will undoubtedly be drawn in by the director's lyricism, while cinephiles will relish the opportunity to retrace the steps of one of the medium's masters. (July)

Cold weather systems the earth needs to thrive is the subject of Streever's well-documented book, using all of the author's expertise from his field trips to the world's most frigid environments. Streever, who chairs the North Slope Science Initiative's Science Technical Advisory Panel, writes of the frostiest experience: “We fail to see cold for what it is: the absence of heat, the slowing of molecular motion, a sensation, a perception, a driving force.” Rather than giving the reader a dry, academic lecture on snow, glaciers, wind-chill factors and icebergs, he delivers a poetic, anecdotal narrative complete with polar expeditions, Ice Age mysteries, igloos, permafrost and hailstorms. Two of the most fascinating segments are the arduous task of scientific reconstruction of past climates and the magical navigation of migratory birds to warmer lands. This is a wonderful collection of one man's first-rate observations and commentary about the history and importance of cold to the earth and its occupants. (July)

Rabin, a writer for the Onion's arts section, endured a dysfunctional childhood marked by parental abandonment, a stint in a mental hospital and an adolescence spent in a group home and a drug-ridden co-op house. And in this memoir, he views his life through the blurry lens of formative cultural influences. His episodic narrative recounts a sarcastic, insecure youth's gonzo misadventures with a cast of freaks, misfits and aloof or cruelly promiscuous girlfriends, then moves on to adult run-ins with air-sick celebrities, bored prostitutes and nutty Hollywood types. Convinced that cultural tastes reveal the soul, like a My Space page, Rabin opens each chapter with an earnest (though rarely incisive) appreciation of some favorite in a personal canon that ranges from rap albums to The Great Gatsby, and intrusively peppers his writing with pop culture references. There are, alas, limits to the evocative power of pop culture references, and the author's arcane allusions—“Susanne and Jack's relationship was like a gender-switched version of the star-crossed duo in the Stephen Malkmus song 'Jenny and the Ess-Dog' ”—test them. Rabin's vigorous, smart-assed prose sometimes brings the sideshow vividly to life, but it's marred by self-conscious fanboyism and labored jokiness. (July)

In this lively and highly literate explication of various American indie scenes and art forms, Oakes argues for the value and importance of a lively, community-based do-it-yourself tradition. In discrete chapters on zines, small presses, comics, independent music labels and numerous other subjects, Oakes focuses on a few exemplary artists or companies that embody the integrity that she lionizes. Her focus on independent publishing and writing—she is a cofounder of the eclectic Kitchen Sink magazine—provides a worthy parallel narrative to Michael Azzerad's essential indie music history, This Band Could Be Your Life, with which her book shares some heroes, most notably the affable Mike Watt of the Minutemen. Oakes begins the book with a much appreciated primer on some of the intellectual forebears of her book's central characters, including the poets Frank O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg and the revolutionary street theater group the Diggers. She ends it with a mournful chapter on the co-opting of indie culture by companies like Urban Outfitters and the TV show The O.C. The complex effect of the Internet on traditional indie culture is given relatively little space, which weakens the book's effectiveness as a guide to current trends and artistic networks, but as an explanation and excavation of the already fading recent past, it is essential reading. (June)

English novelist Cusk (Arlington Park) delivers a relatively humorless account of traveling with her husband and two children over three warm months in Italy, from Tuscany to Naples and Rome. She was in search of beauty, because she felt afflicted by England's bland obtuseness nurtured by a cold climate and unappetizing food, and felt Italy's pull through the characters in Tintoretto's painting The Last Supper. Driving through Italy, the family (her husband is mentioned only once; thereafter he is only part of the collective “we”) stayed longest in Arezzo, a pastoral spot in eastern Tuscany, where Cusk found herself on a trail named after the 15th-century painter Piero della Francesca; she felt herself on the edge of an “ocean of knowledge” that required “complete immersion.” Armed with Vasari's Lives of the Artists, she trekked to find these early Renaissance works of art, many reproduced here (as well as the family's own picturesque snapshots) and records her sympathetic impressions; of Cimabue's tremendously moving portrait of St. Francis, she writes what could also be the artist's visionary declaration: “I am nothing. I am everything.” Her observations of the ex-pat community and foreign tourists are critical and grumpy, and the last leg, through Pompeii and Rome, feels anticlimactic. (June)

Following conviction for bank fraud, White spent a year in a minimum-security prison in Carville, La., housed in the last leper colony in mainland America. His fascinating memoir reflects on the sizable group of lepers living alongside the prisoners, social outcasts among the motley inmate crew of drug dealers, mob types and killers. Narrating in colorful, entertaining snapshots, White introduces the reader to an excellent supporting cast in his imprisonment: Father Reynolds, the peerless spiritual monk; Mr. Flowers, the no-nonsense case manager; Anne, the sorrowful mother with leprosy whose baby was taken from her arms; and Ella the Earth Mother, with wisdom to spare. Brisk, ironic and perceptive, White's introspective memoir puts a magnifying glass to a flawed life, revealing that all of life is to be savored and respected. (June)

Allred played basketball with the University of Utah, then Weber State, before eventually joining the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2008, and recounts in folksy, unpretentious prose his long, arduous dream fulfilled to make the NBA. Rendered mostly deaf as an infant, possibly from complications due to his Rh blood incompatibility with his mother, Allred grew up in a fundamentalist polygamist commune in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana, founded by his own grandfather who was escaping government persecution for his pluralist beliefs. Infighting among the incestuous group members eventually drove the author's family out, and they settled in Salt Lake City. There the author, who grew to be 6'11", suffering from asthma, and obsessive-compulsive disorder and equipped with hearing aids, began to excel in high school basketball. Recruited on scholarship to Utah, he played three years under the brutally exacting coach, Rick Majerus, only to feel his sense of self slowly extinguished by the coach's abusive practices. Allred's voice is humorously self-deprecating and youthfully winning. Frank about his shortcomings (he had to scrounge for professional gigs in Turkey and elsewhere before hitting a spot in the NBA), he delivers an accessible, competent narrative, with highly unusual details about his Mormon roots. (June)

Pulitzer-winning historian Burns gives a brisk, readable tour of the history of the appointment of Supreme Court justices since 1789. In this respect, the book is fresh and compelling. But Burns (Running Alone) has another aim. Particularly aggrieved by the Rehnquist and Roberts courts, he argues that every president since Washington has sought to fill the Court with justices who think as he does; that judicial review is unconstitutional; that the unelected Court has never been “politically accountable to the American people”;and that a courageous president (like Barack Obama, he suggests) should simply announce that, like Andrew Jackson, he won't abide by Supreme Court rulings that invalidate laws enacted by Congress and signed by him. Known for the liberal flags he flies, Burns runs up the radical pennant here. There's no evidence that the American people are as aggrieved over the Court as Burns is. And the term “packing” should be reserved, as until now it has been, for extreme manipulative efforts like FDR's. This is a terrific little book—save for its politics run amok. (June)

The first U.S. surgeon to perform a near-total face transplant, in December 2008, could well be expected to deliver a compelling account of the groundbreaking procedure at the Cleveland Clinic—the same place where a Connecticut woman horribly disfigured by a friend's chimpanzee is recovering and may herself become a candidate. But Siemionow's purpose is larger: to lay out “the history, labor, challenges and need” for such transplants.Polish-born Siemionow does so precisely and winningly as she charmingly weaves her own personal history into the mix. “Someday the young lady may become a good surgeon,” she's told by the Belgian doctor to whom she's apprenticed in Europe. “I can't remember anything else that happened that day.” The extraordinary achievement that followed nearly 30 years later could only be realized after Siemionow negotiated a path fraught with ethical, biological and technical complexity. Yet the awesome science of her feat is never eclipsed by the heart that guides it: “for the patient and me, the reward will be something we're both waiting to see. A smile.” 8 pages of b&w photos. (June)

Barry, a neuroscientist at Mount Holyoke College, was born with her eyes crossed and literally couldn't see in all three dimensions. Barry underwent several surgeries as a child, but it wasn't until she was in college that she realized she wasn't seeing in 3-D. The medical profession has believed that the visual center of the brain can't rewire itself after a critical cutoff point in a child's development, but in her 40s, with the help of optometric vision therapy, Barry showed that previously neglected neurons could be nudged back into action. The author tells a poignant story of her gradual discovery of the shapes in flowers in a vase, snowflakes falling, even the folds in coats hanging on a peg. After Barry's story was written up in the New Yorker by Oliver Sacks, she heard from many others who had successfully learned to correct their vision as adults, challenging accepted wisdom about the plasticity of the brain. Recommended for all readers who cheer stories with a triumph over seemingly insuperable odds. Photos, illus. (June)

Historian and archeologist Hale brings both skill sets to bear in this account of an Athens whose golden age and democratic institutions depended on its navy. Between 489 and 322 B.C., Athens built, ruled and lost an empire extending from the Aegean to the Black Sea. The sea permeated every sphere of Athenian life, and most well-known Athenians were identified with sea power: Thucydides and Sophocles commanded fleets. The fleets were based on triremes, reflecting a doctrine favoring the craft and cunning of the steersman and rowers over brute force. Those skills were a product of the commitment and cooperation of free men who played an increasing role in Athenian politics at the expense of those better off and higher born. In times of crisis, all free adult males were expected to board the triremes. Athens's rule of the sea came to an end when a cabal of aristocrats betrayed the fleet to the Macedonians. And that was possible only because the “mysterious spiritual essence” sustaining Athenian effort and sacrifice had been lost as well. (June)

In April 1610, Henry Hudson set sail on the Discovery with a crew of 22 (including his 17-year-old son) on his fourth expedition in search of a shorter route to the Far East. USC historian Mancall (Hakluyt's Promise) vividly recreates the eager anticipation of the voyage, the lust for conquest and for spices, the voyage's risks and the joy and terrors that Hudson and his crew faced. But as winter approached, rather than return to England, Hudson set anchor in the bay named for him. Stuck in ice for seven months, their provisions dwindling, the crew mutinied in the spring, forcing Hudson, his son and seven other sailors into a skiff left floating in the bay. When the mariners on the Discovery returned to England without Hudson, they were tried for murder but never convicted. As for Hudson and the rest, their remains were never found and their fate is the stuff of legend. As Mancall so eloquently points out, the resolute will that had served Hudson so well in reaching this summit of exploration also made him unwilling to abandon his goal and led to his demise. Illus., map. (June)

The innocuous game of bridge turned deadly in Kansas City, Mo., in 1929 when Myrtle Bennett apparently shot her husband dead in a dispute over a game. In recounting this tale, Pomerantz introduces an ensemble of 1920s characters ranging from Ely Culbertson, who helped fuel the new bridge craze, to Fightin' Jim Reed, the U.S. senator from Kansas City who successfully defended the gorgeous Myrtle Bennett at trial. As promoted by Culbertson, bridge was a zone of equality between men and women—and the stage on which marital spats could escalate; it was, said Culbertson, “a way to defuse the petty inhibitions and tensions of daily married life.” Pomerantz (Wilt, 1962) offers a thoroughly researched historical tapestry with a mass of amusing anecdotes. But toward the book's end, he swerves into his own fascination with Myrtle Bennett as leading to his historical inquiry into these events. The most eloquent explanation of the similarities between a bridge partnership and marriage comes not from Pomerantz but from family therapist/bridge addict Frank Bessing, quoted in the book: “the main conflict is often, 'Who is in charge?' ” (June)

In 1969, the precocious 14-year-old Brookhiser wrote a cover story for National Review and began to correspond with founding editor William F. Buckley Jr., who serves as both hero and, sometimes, villain of this wistful memoir. After graduating from Yale, the author became Buckley's designated successor, his rapid ascendancy mirroring the prodigious gains of the conservative movement as championed by the magazine and led by Ronald Reagan. The book, like the author's life, takes an abrupt turn when the mercurial Buckley writes him a letter to say that he no longer considers Brookhiser an appropriate candidate to succeed him. Brookhiser offers accounts of writing his book on Washington, Founding Father, and his struggle with testicular cancer, but the book becomes less focused as the relationship between the author and his mentor becomes strained. Nevertheless, the author deftly sets his personal and professional biography in a sharply observed historical and intellectual context, while sharing his deep affection for—and occasional resentment of—Buckley with compelling candor. (June)

Playboy contributing editor Littman (coauthor of The Art of Innovation) and Hershon, comedian and branding expert, offer a guide for surviving corporate life, flush with clever nomenclature for specific types of exasperating co-workers, such as the “Stop Sign,” who always has a reason your idea won't work, or the “Bulldozer,” who bullies his projects through the system. But rather than offering constructive ways of collaborating with problematic colleagues, Hershon and Littman spend most of the book suggesting ways to avoid them altogether by being a “soloist,” a corporate loner who taps into innovative reserves rather than bending to be a team player. The authors give examples of such successful soloists as Craig Newmark, corporate misfit and founder of Craig's List. While amusing and filled with entertaining examples of antisocial geeks who made good, the aim and audience of the book is unclear. The reader is left wondering if it is better to opt out of corporate life altogether rather than have to confront co-workers who exhibit chronically unacceptable behavior. (June)

The dehumanizing rhetoric of war, especially the Iraq War, is examined but not illuminated in this turgid study. Berkeley literature professor Butler (Gender Trouble) asks why the lives of Muslims and Iraqis are treated by the U.S. government and media as less important—less “grievable”—than those of Americans, and develops an obscure theory of the “precariousness” of life as a rationale for opposing this bias, and state violence in general. She applies murky linguistic and aesthetic analyses to a hodgepodge of topics, including the notorious Abu Ghraib photographs, and claims that Islamic sexual puritanism poses a threat to gays and lesbians, a notion she contests at length. Butler's famously impenetrable, jargon-clotted style conveys no fresh thinking. “The state works on the field of perception and, more generally, the field of representability, in order to control affect—in anticipation of the way affect is not only structured by interpretation, but structures interpretation as well,” reads her laborious statement of the commonplace observation that the government tries to suppress upsetting photos that might provoke opposition to the war. The sludginess of Butler's prose and the banality of her ideas make the book virtually unreadable. (June)

Having cemented himself as one of the foremost American thinkers on race, Dyson, the author of 16 books on a range of subjects from hip-hop to contemporary politics, compiles his most quotable aphorisms from speeches and articles of the last two decades. The book's topics include Barack Obama, the arts, gender, sports and music, as well as such abstract areas as justice and wisdom. The excerpts range from single sentences (e.g., “Spirituality makes religion behave”) to pithy paragraph meditations. Because of the brevity of excerpts, Dyson's pronouncements can seem vague, out of context and even trite; they don't do justice to his typically insightful and complex investigations. However, those familiar with his work may appreciate this compendium for showcasing Dyson's singular ability to draw on sources as disparate as Albert Camus, Oprah Winfrey and Louis Armstrong. (June)

“As I write in February 2009, I am four months past due on my mortgage and bracing for foreclosure proceedings to begin.” Thus begins this cautionary and critical examination of the housing crisis, a story that turned personal when New York Times economics reporter Andrews got caught up in the housing bubble after falling in love with a woman and a house. Bringing in $120,000 a year in salary—most of which went to child support and alimony to his ex-wife, Andrews says he was able to get a “don't ask, don't tell” mortgage with the assumption that his new wife, Patty, would be able to get a job to keep them afloat, an expectation that didn't work out as planned. Because of his economics journalism background, Andrews says he “should have avoided the mortgage catastrophe,” and he castigates himself as well as fellow borrowers, the financial industry that took advantage of them and a government that didn't put the brakes on the crisis that many economists warned about but that Alan Greenspan, the Bush administration and others ignored. This deeply personal exposé is timely and sobering in its candor. (June)

Journalist Abramsky (Hard Times Blues) combines an account of his own seven-week experiment in living on a poverty budget with moving vignettes of men and women who have fallen through society's frayed safety net and are suffering from “food insecurity.” Tens of millions of Americans live in “a continual state of anxiety”; to malnutrition is added the further suffering of shame and despair. Focusing on communities in Western states, the author uncovers the tragedy of the collapse of the middle class. Unionized industrial giants like General Motors have fallen on hard times and global economic restructuring has had a devastating impact on many workers, often stripping them of benefits accumulated over decades. Although providing a vivid glimpse into the world of food banks and soup kitchens, the book, which reads like a series of newspaper articles, offers few suggestions for solving the problem aside from challenging political leaders to make corrections to a system gone tragically awry. (June)

As recounted in this dark and affecting memoir, Metz's discovery of her husband's long trail of philandering well after he died reveals the state of willful ignorance and comfortable self-deception that reigned in her marriage. At their home in the northern suburbs of New York City on June 8, 2003, Henry, her husband of 13 years, suffered sudden cardiac arrest, leaving the author, a 44-year-old graphic artist, widowed and the sole caretaker of their six-year-old daughter, Liza. Initially unable to face the details surrounding his death, she left to her friends the task of cleaning out her dead husband's office, though those same well-meaning people hid from her the truth they gleaned from Henry's computer files and correspondence: he had been enjoying a two-year affair with another woman in their town, as well as numerous other dalliances. Metz, after the shock of Henry's death, found solace in shopping and flirting with a much younger artist, Tomas, who was also friendly with Henry; once Tomas intimated that Henry had another life, the author began digging, calling and e-mailing every woman she learned had had a relationship with her husband, obsessed with finding the truth. Metz's road to emotional honesty proves cautionary and trying. (June)

Osborne's lively narrative brings Lady Idina Sackville (an inspiration for Nancy Mitford's character the Bolter) boldly to life, with a black lapdog named Satan at her side and a cigarette in her hand. Osborne (Lilla's Feast) portrays a desperately lonely woman who shocked Edwardian high society with relentless affairs and drug-fueled orgies. Idina's story unfolds in an intimate tone thanks to the author, her great-granddaughter, who only accidentally discovered the kinship in her youth with the media serialization of James Fox's White Mischief. Osborne makes generous use of sources and private family photos to add immediacy and depth to the portrait of a woman most often remembered as an amoral five-time divorcée: the author shows her hidden kindnesses at her carefully preserved Kenyan cattle ranch—a refuge from the later destructive Kenyan massacres. Still, Osborne unflinchingly exposes Idina's flaws—along with those of everyone else in the politely adulterous high society—while ably couching them in the context of the tumultuous times in which Idina resolved to find happiness in all the wrong places. The text, most lyrical when describing the landscapes around Idina's African residences, proves that an adventurous spirit continues to run in this fascinating family. 66 photos, (June)

The essay that accompanies this catalogue to an exhibition at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles is largely biographical. But since Outerbridge (1896–1958) has not yet been the subject of a major critical biography, the information is both fascinating and helpful in placing this major photographic innovator's work in context. Outerbridge focused on narrowing the gap between fine art and commercial work. His fashion and product display work for Vanity Fair and Paris Vogue was successful with both his employers and other artists. In 1930 he began working with color processing and for magazines and advertisers to help sell their products during the Depression. He mastered the difficult tricolor carbon-transfer printing process. Outerbridge's final years in Southern California were often financially difficult, and he slipped into obscurity. It was years after his death that his carefully preserved archives reintroduced his work. The Getty owns the largest public collection of Outerbridge prints, and this elegantly produced catalogue shows him to be not only a master printer but also an artist who continues to influence contemporary photographers. 59 color and 61 b&w photos. (May)