Nonfiction Reviews

Sheehan, a James Beard award–winning food writer at Westword, Denver's alternative weekly newspaper, knows the tradition he's working in: he walked up to the editor at one of his first writing gigs and introduced himself as “your Anthony Bourdain motherfucker.” Before that, he'd spent years bouncing around from one restaurant kitchen to the next—first in upstate New York, then in a disastrous move to Florida, and back to New York before heading out west to reunite with the woman he met during his failed one year of college. Sheehan's memoir is emphatically not about “the glam end of cooking” or celebrity chefs, but about “a straight blue-collar gig,” where the kitchens are staffed by the kind of guys who get off on the fact that the work is insanely grueling. As Sheehan puts it, “I was being paid to play with knives and fire.” The war stories are as profane and outrageous as you'd expect, and Sheehan finds just the right balance between bravado and humility. There's a subtle shift in emphasis once his personal life (and, eventually, writing career) gains traction, but the kitchens where the best stories take place are never far from sight. (July)

British travel writer Bennett informs and endears in his quixotic quest to trace the provenance of his underpants in order to learn something about the “commercial and industrial processes on which [his] easy existence depends.” Despite his publisher's misgivings, the author travels to the outskirts of Shanghai, posing as an underwear buyer and scheming his way into factories and showrooms to piece together the (increasingly) mysterious origins of his underpants. He heads toward the cotton factories, where few Westerners venture and the population is ethnically closer to Afghan than Chinese, and sober accounts vie with marvelously silly escapades around Bangkok and rural Thailand in search of rubber trees (or more specifically, the origins of his elastic waistband). Bennett's education in the world of global commerce sparkles with humor and sharp observations on modern China's competing strains of enduring Confucianism, vestigial communism and the government's ruthless economic ambitions. (July)

What begins as skillful (and scary) prognostications about climate change's impact devolve into an unfocused mishmash in this mélange of history, philosophy, science and anthropology. Air America Radio Network host Hartmann (The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight) marshals solid research to demonstrate how overpopulation, pernicious trade policies, rampant consumerism and other excesses are devastating the Earth. The utopia he envisions, which owes much to Scandinavian social democracies, is unimpeachable, what with its emphasis on gender equality, ecological consciousness and a renewed spirit of democracy. Unfortunately, the author cannot direct his ire, and the book buckles under breathless plaints that leap from the history of lacrosse to neurology to our relationships with animals in the span of a few pages. The result is a frustrating, hard-to-follow conclusion that obscures the valuable arguments that distinguish the book's striking opening. (July)

As a media-stoked panic about immigrant youth gangs flared across the U.S. in the 1990s, national violent crime rates were actually plummeting, suggesting that “reports” of internationally networked Central American gangs invading idyllic American suburbs masked more than it revealed. Moreover, the image anticipated the post-9/11 panic over foreign terror cells that dovetailed with a renewed backlash against undocumented Latino immigrants. In this engrossing case study of suburban gangs in Long Island's Nassau County, investigative journalist Garland demystifies the sensationalist rhetoric and simplistic media coverage stemming from the economic and demographic transformation of suburbia. Garland humanizes her subject through long-term, in-depth interviews with current and former gang members; extensive footwork across the U.S. and Central America; and a formidable command of relevant foreign and public policy decisions. While offering a detailed look inside such notorious gangs as Mara Salvatrucha and its self-styled affiliates, Garland makes a persuasive case that her subjects' attraction to gang life had less to do with what gangs offered than with “what America did not.” (July)

Although most people imagine widespread enslavement only in the historical past, human trafficking continues to exist today in myriad forms around the world. In this informative call to action, Bales (Disposable People), sociologist and president of Free the Slaves, and Soodalter (Hanging Captain Gordon), a historian, document routine coercive slave labor in domestic service, prostitution, farm labor, factories, light industry, prisons and mining operations. While many sensational cases have been well publicized, the authors demonstrate that slavery exists in mundane and unexpected forms. Their case studies begin in an American suburb and traverse the globe to urban China and rural Ghana, returning to Los Angeles, Calif., and East Orange, N.J., just a few of 100-plus documented cases in the U.S. The second half of the book focuses on causes and solutions, with a helpful emphasis on how ordinary individuals can recognize and report coercive situations, creating a humane and helpful primer on how to sever the links that create and hide human bondage. (July)

The earlier entries in this panoramic compilation of gay male autobiography rely mostly on letters and journals, mined by Bergman for homo-affectionate allusions: 19th-century writers such as Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman and Henry James thus reveal themselves. Excerpts of work by more contemporary authors, from poet Edward Field and historian Martin Duberman to science fiction author Samuel R. Delany and performance artist Justin Chin—the youngest born in 1969—are more explicit about their queer lives. Paul Monette, dying of AIDS, writes movingly about hoping to outlive his dog, and a strutting John Rechy, still very much alive, writes puckishly about prissy homosexuals of the '70s. Gay literary (and living) icons Edmund White, Andrew Holleran and David Sedaris are rightly represented, but works by David Wojnarowicz, David Feinberg, Essex Hemphill and Gil Cuadros, all dead of AIDS, are a poignant reminder of literary lives cut short. Bergman's selections artfully avoid the standard coming-out tropes of 20th-century writers in favor of intimate, immediate literature penned by homosexuals well out of the closet. (July)

Canadian journalist Farquharson takes readers on her 366-day journey to live a more environmentally conscious lifestyle, making one positive change each day. While a few changes are worthy (the author sells her car), some seem a bit bizarre (she turns off her fridge and freezer—though she doesn't divulge exactly where her food is coming from after that point) and many are superficial or symbolic efforts rather than well thought out and executed commitments. In her first month, for example, she pledges to check her tire pressure and opt for natural glass cleaners, while three months later she's promising to “fill the kettle with exact amount of water needed,” recycle her wine corks and forgo Q-tips. While the details of her environmental crusade can weary, her griping about the efficacy of chemical-free shampoos and deodorants and the ugliness of sustainable footwear is fresh and funny; in these moments, Farquharson's appealing candor and nonsanctimonious attitude make other ecowarriors seem dour by comparison. (July)

Most Americans have encountered unpleasant or even hostile colleagues and bosses, but incivility is more than just a human resources problem: it also has a financial cost, argue Pearson and Porath, management professors at Thunderbird School of Global Management and the University of Southern California, respectively. The authors identify the range of behaviors that may be perceived as rude (e.g., inappropriate use of cell, texting during meetings, shutting someone out of a network or team) and quantify the costs of lost time and productivity by disgruntled workers making reduced efforts and possibly suffering from weakened commitment, stress or health problems. Citing such companies with positive cultures as Cisco Systems and Starbucks, the authors illustrate how strong leadership nurtures an environment of cooperation and respect. While the data on the prevalence of rudeness in the workplace is disturbing, the authors maintain an optimistic tone and provide credible, useful tips for managers who recognize that valuing people is not only the right thing to do but the key to profit and productivity. (July)

McNair (How You Make the Sale) distills his management wisdom into 119 aphorisms grouped into nine crucial categories: vision and planning, motivation, expectations, coaching, feedback and performance management, rewards and consequences, relationship management, self-management, and leadership. Each chapter ends with questions for reflection and a challenge designed to help the reader apply the proffered wisdom. Specifically tailoring each rule to the management field, McNair offers such adages as “If you listen long enough, people will tell you what motivates them”; “The seeds of our destruction are sown in the soil tilled by our gifts”; and “People don't care how much we know until they know how much we care.” The last chapter focuses on shaping one's personal management philosophy, which many managers fail to consider. Concise and informative, this collection holds value for all managers, no matter the level or the experience. (July)

Pushcart Prize–winning journalist Rice captures the horrors of Idi Amin's eight-year reign of terror over Uganda. At the core of the book is an unsolved disappearance: Eliphaz Laki, a local leader with ties to the anti-Amin opposition, vanished in the early days of the Amin regime. When his son, Duncan, uncovered a clue to his father's disappearance 30 years later, the investigation eventually implicated Amin's second-in-command, Maj. Gen. Yusuf Gowon. With Amin living out his years safely in Saudi Arabia, the trial of Gowon forced Uganda to confront its brutal past. Treating the Lakis' story as a microcosm of Uganda's own, the author weaves together the family's search for truth and justice with Uganda's history. From its intimate portrait of Eliphaz's grieving family to the wide-angle perspectives of the tumultuous postindependence years as Ugandans struggled to knit together a nation from the ethnically, linguistically and religiously diverse peoples within their colonial borders, the book recasts a familiar history in an entirely new light. Photos. (July)

Undoubtedly, the Bard himself would be amused to learn all about the fate of the book compiled after his death by fellow actors and colleagues John Heminge and Henry Condell. It was, a collector said recently, “the most important secular work of all time.” Collins (Sixpence House), an English professor and NPR regular, is passionate, knowledgeable and sassy in bringing this story to glorious life. Collins divides his work into five acts, leading his reader on a whirlwind trip through the Four Folios eventually printed, into feuds between Alexander Pope and Lewis Theobald and to the opportunistic reach of a financially desperate Dr. Johnson. Over the next 200 years, there are the stories of Henry Clay Folger as well as an ingenious collating machine and related technologies for today's textual scholars. Collins's remarkable voyage through time and across the globe leads to Japan, where the most obsessive collectors of “Sheikusupia” reside. This is for anyone with an interest in how Shakespeare has come down to us, the nature of the book business, the art of editing and the evolution of copyright law. A 20-page “Further Readings” section is by itself a sheer delight. (July)

Three decades after publishing a novel on the Battle of the Crater, Wesleyan professor emeritus Slotkin offers a historical analysis of an event meant as a turning point in the Civil War but remembered instead as one of its greatest failures. Most accounts focus on the slaughter of hundreds of black Union troops; Slotkin takes a broader perspective. The Crater was intended to draw on the Union's strengths, like the mastery of industrial technology, and the physical energies liberated by black emancipation. A regiment of coal miners dug a 500-foot tunnel under a Confederate strong point and packed it with four tons of blasting powder. A division of African-Americans was to exploit the blast to open the way to the Confederate capital, Richmond. The Civil War might have ended by Christmas. Instead, Slotkin describes a fiasco. “Jealousy, intransigence, incompetence, and even cowardice” among Union generals resulted in “a combination massacre and race riot,” as white Union and Confederate troops turned on the blacks. Slotkin depicts all this and the army and Congress's subsequent whitewashes with the verve and force that place him among the most distinguished historians of the role of violence in the American experience. (July 21)

Anderson (The Moon Reflected Fire) has led an amazing life—before, during and after his 1967–1968 tour of duty as a navy corpsman with the 1st Marine Division in Vietnam. He has been a jazz drummer, a playwright, an actor, an alcoholic and son of an alcoholic, a college dropout, a college instructor, a drug abuser, a PTSD sufferer and a poet. In his first book of nonfiction, Anderson tells his story in inviting, poetic prose. He begins with his dysfunctional childhood in Memphis, then offers an evocative depiction of his service in Vietnam, which included a firefight on his first day in the field and more than his share of closely observed horror. He shows the hell of war as he went through it. Only in recent years did Anderson stop drinking, find meaningful work as a poet and teacher, marry and make a life-changing trip back to Vietnam in 2000. Yet what Anderson dubs “Snakebrain” (the demons inside him) remains a part of him. His beautifully told story is one of redemption, but also one without a happy ending. (July)

This true crime caper by Heidenry (The Gashouse Gang) of a 1953 Kansas child kidnapping gone bad carries a solid punch. The young victim, Bobby Greenlease, the six-year-old heir of wealthy businessman Robert Greenlease, never had a chance when Carl Austin Hall and Bonnie Heady—both formerly wealthy ne'er-do-wells making one last stab at making their fortune—botched the snatch and demanded a ransom of $600,000, the largest ever in U.S. history up to that time. Heady took Bobby from his Catholic school, claiming to be his aunt and that his mother had had a heart attack. Bobby inexplicably went quietly with the strange woman and met his violent end. Heidenry, a contributing editor to the Week, aptly describes Hall, the down-on-his-luck playboy; Heady, the former horsewoman turned prostitute; Robert Greenlease, the woeful car magnate; and a sordid cast of supporting players, including coldhearted mobster Joe Costello and the two corrupt cops who stole much of the ransom. Heidenry neatly tells this harrowing tale and its impact on all involved. 8 pages of b&w photos. (July)

Slate columnist Kaplan takes a contrarian view to the common wisdom that the '60s were the source of the cultural shift from pre-WWII traditions to the individualistic, question-authority world of today. In Kaplan's view, the watershed year in this transformation is 1959. He delves into that year's cultural and political scene, citing Miles Davis and his revolutionary album Kind of Blue; William Burroughs and his equally revolutionary novel, Naked Lunch; and the opening of Frank Lloyd Wright's radically designed Guggenheim Museum in New York City as examples of fundamental breaks with past conventions. Kaplan's case is cemented by three 1959 events that he convincingly argues were catalysts for paradigm changes in relationships between men and women (the pharmaceutical company Searle sought FDA approval for the birth control pill), in how citizens view their government (the first American soldiers were killed in Vietnam) and in communications and information transfer (the microchip was introduced to the world). Kaplan doesn't quite convince that 1959 was “the year when the shockwaves of the new ripped the seams of daily life,” but his writing is lively and filled with often funny anecdotes as he examines some key elements in the transition from the mid to late 20th century. 16 b&w photos. (July)

Breakups are hard to forget, and this collection—surprisingly restrained yet full of emotion—is equally memorable. Patty Van Norman's two-frame graphic story “Dear Ugly, Dear Fatso” (other graphic entries are from Lynda Barry and Emily Flake) resonates like a quick punch to the solar plexus. Josh Kilmer-Purcell writes of the lover who could only perform with Wonder Woman on the television. George Singleton urinates a bellyful of beer into his ex's kitty litter box. Maud Newton tells of a sex- and rage-filled relationship, wondering: “was he the abusive one, or was I?” Taeckens, publicity director at Algonquin Books, anthologizes modern heartbreak in stories replete with contemporary commentaries (e.g., using Match.com to express a new relationship status). In a book full of hits, Amanda Stern's “Scout's Honor,” about camping in the Washington Cascades, stands out. The collection's material could make one feel a bit voyeuristic, but throughout this tender book one instead feels like a privileged confidant. (July 28)

The conflicted, ultimately tragic experience of an American soldier in Iraq is explored in this moving homage. U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Skip Griffin saw heavy fighting during several tours in Iraq before he was killed by a sniper in Baghdad in 2007. His father's memoir portrays Skip as a thoughtful man (he read Plato at age 13) imbued with a skeptical patriotism; despite his deep misgivings about the war, he volunteered to cut short a yearlong break to return to Iraq. Skip's own perceptions emerge through extensive excerpts from his e-mails, blog and other writings. In these he criticized the Bush administration's reasons for the war, deplored the failings of American counterinsurgency strategy and the woeful performance of the Iraqi armed forces, and evinced a growing weariness, edging toward despondency, at the carnage around him. Darrell Sr. overquotes his son's grandiose and not always cogent ideas about religion, philosophy and politics. But when the book sticks to Skip's everyday impressions of the conflict, it presents a harrowing, unsanitized vision of the war and the toll it takes on our soldiers. Photos. (June 29)

Nehring's opening assertion that she “argues by provocation” and aims “to anger” reveals the rhetorical nature of her argument that our tepid age needs a return to true Eros. Just what she advocates is unclear, since her examples range from the chaste passion of Emily Dickinson through the frenzied sexuality of Edna St. Vincent Millay to the open relationship of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Nehring does regret the collateral damage of this last pairing (“a couple of cases of insanity” and one suicide among their other lovers) and acknowledges that most of her case studies demonstrate excesses not to be emulated. That reduces her call for boldness in love to familiar clichés: absence makes the heart grow fonder; play hard to get; and defy social conventions in love (what is more of a postmodern cliché than advocating “transgression”?). Nehring, who has written for Harper's and the Atlantic among others, is a keen, empathic reader of literary texts, drawing attention to undervalued love writings like the letters of Horace Walpole and Madame du Deffand, and offering an astute reading of Dickinson's much-debated “Master letters.” But overall, she is more preachy and patronizing than provocative. (June)

In the last year and a half, Americans have been bombarded with more economic jargon, theories and potential solutions to our nation's financial problems than any time in recent history, and many struggle to make sense of how all these concepts fit together. Frank (The Economic Naturalist), a regular economic columnist for the New York Times, has long been a voice of common sense, and in this latest work he attempts to group complicated concepts into a handful of easily understandable principles. Compiling some of his most cogent essays on economic subjects, Frank tackles topics as complicated and controversial as taxes and job creation, health care, borrowing, saving and investing. Unfortunately, although the essays themselves are amusing, enlightening, instructive and easy to understand, their groupings often look forced. While economic principles should be timeless, many essays were written as far back as 2000, and the subject matter is dated and less relevant to our current economic crisis than most readers might prefer. Despite the brilliance of the individual pieces, the whole is disjointed and fails to offer the reader the clear picture of the commonsense principles promised in the title. (June)

Grandin, an NYU professor of Latin American history, offers the thoroughly remarkable story of Henry Ford's attempt, from the 1920s through 1945, to transform part of Brazil's Amazon River basin into a rubber plantation and eponymous American-style company town: Fordlandia. Grandin has found a fascinating vehicle to illuminate the many contradictory parts of Henry Ford: the pacifist, the internationalist, the virulent anti-Semite, the $5-a-day friend of the workingman, the anti-union crusader, the man who ushered America into the industrial age yet rejected the social changes that followed urbanization. Both infuriating and fascinating, Ford is only a piece of the Fordlandia story. The follies of colonialism and the testing of the belief that the Amazon—where “7,882 organisms could be found on any given five square miles”—could be made to produce rubber with the reliability of an auto assembly line makes a surprisingly dramatic tale. Although readers know that Fordlandia will return to the jungle, the unfolding of this unprecedented experiment is compelling. Grandin concludes that “Fordlandia represents in crystalline form the utopianism that powered Fordism—and by extension Americanism.” Readers may find it a cautionary tale for the 21st century. 54 b&w photos. (June)

A fresh, forthright, affecting memoir by Jamaican performance artist Chin finds warmth and humor in her abject, parentless childhood. The “Paradise” of the title is the slum of Montego Bay, Jamaica, where Chin spent her hardscrabble adolescence, and her remarkable memoir is framed around her mother's rejection of her and her older brother, Delano, and the uncertainty about who Chin's father really was. Born to a young, street-savvy girl with a “penchant for distinguished older men with money” (in this case, a local Chinese businessman who always insisted he was not Chin's father), Chin spent her early years along with Delano under the care of their stern, God-fearing, illiterate grandmother. Early on, the spirited, defiant youngster learned to lie about her parentage, while the poverty and neediness of the siblings rendered them charity cases for relatives in Bethel Town and Kingston. Once, their mother came to visit them from where she lived in Montreal, Canada, though she quickly foisted them onto other relatives for good, leaving Chin, at age nine, to fend for herself in the shack of her harsh great-aunt whose boys routinely attempted to rape her. Nonetheless, Chin excelled at school, thanks to financial help from the man who refused to acknowledge his paternity, and became an emigrant success story later in New York. Her courage in coming out as a lesbian underscores her intrepidity in making this story her own. (June)

The 500-mile route along the Camino Frances, from the base of the Pyrenees to the shrine of St. James at Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain, has afforded a sacred pilgrimage to Christians for centuries, and German comedian Kerkeling, somewhat whimsically, resolved to hike it. At 36, a self-described “pudgy couch potato” who suffered some health problems, Kerkeling, wanting to know who God is, set out along the route in the summer of 2001 with an overheavy knapsack only to nearly give up at the first pass. There are nearly 40 stops along the way (helpfully laid out on a map insert), and chapter by chapter, Kerkeling chronicles nearly every one. Pilgrims must get their credencial del peregrino (passport) stamped at official hostels, usually dreary bunk-packed dorms, as they go, but Kerkeling, a fastidious German craving privacy and hot baths, mostly chooses to stay in hotels. As well, he jumped into cars and trains whenever his feet were smarting. Encounters with other pilgrims enliven this travel account, especially the two English-speaking ladies who accompanied him toward the end; as they approached Santiago, they all felt emotionally uplifted. While the author is better known in Germany and his antics somewhat lost in translation, his emotionally probing narrative develops depth and a touching sincerity. (June)

Lest new parents forget the age-old reasoning behind choosing baby names, circumcision and infant sleep training, journalist Apple (Schlepping Through the Alps) gathers some helpful, not terribly groundbreaking but pleasantly humorous information for clueless, fully participatory first-time fathers. After dispensing in the first chapters with the hard-sell commodities market offered by “the baby industrial complex” (with his own wife several months pregnant, Apple admits to a kind of personal identity crisis when trying on the BabyBjorn at a mega–baby store), the author regards the various rituals of child birthing and raising in these snappy essays with a fresh, healthy skepticism. He wonders (without pursuing very deeply) whether the naming of a child brings happiness or grief. He takes a look at some of the labor-easing efforts that have emerged over the decades, such as water birth, Lamaze and hypnosis, and their histories and debatable rates of success. (Readers might be amazed to learn that the so-called Lamaze method originated in Soviet Russia as a way to avoid the use of pain medication.) As part of his unorthodox hands-on research, he tracks down his own mohel (a Jewish circumciser, nicknamed the Yankee Clipper) and accompanies the founder of a nanny-surveillance outfit on a stakeout. Throughout these instructive essays, Apple maintains a calm, bemused tone. (June)

“No one has ever been as sublimely uncomfortable about being a pop star,” says Hopps, describing Morrissey, the lead singer of the 1980s band, the Smiths, who went on to a successful solo career in the following decade. But Hopps wants to argue that his hero is more than just a pop star: he's “a radical subversion of the traditional values of pop music” who restored the genre's ability to give voice to dysfunction and alienation. The argument veers from the defensive to the impenetrably academic; the lyrics of one song, for example, are described as “an unshackling of the referential function of language,” while another is “an urban parody of the Liebestod of Tristan and Isolde.” It's not that Morrissey can't be compared, as he is here, to the likes of Oscar Wilde, Ronald Firbank and Christina Rossetti—or, perhaps most extensively, Samuel Beckett. As a singer and a songwriter, he is by just about any standard a significant artist. But Hopps's enthusiastic appraisal is at times so overwrought that it almost feels as if he's trying to convince himself as much as his academic colleagues of the validity of pursuing a thesis that is not nearly as provocative as it hopes to be. (June)

Iraqi food is simple, homey and thanks to this rather sensibly presented cookbook, easy for nonnatives to prepare. Author Ibrahim—who was born in Baghdad and now lives in London—presents more than 200 recipes in what was initially an attempt to capture for her children in written form the cooking traditions handed down orally through the generations but which has evolved into a formal compendium, illustrated by color photographs. There are earthy bean soups accented with cumin, turmeric and vermicelli; dense breads stuffed with ground meat, cheese or dates, and a host of light vegetable salads accented with lemon juice, parsley and olive oil. Ibrahim devotes an entire chapter to kubba, cracked wheat or rice flour domes that are filled with all manner of stuffings and then deep-fried, boiled or baked in sauce. Fried fresh-water fish, ground meat kebabs and cinnamon-spiked rice biryanis are other staples, followed by date and almond sweets and rosewater-doused pastries. With the easygoing style of a casual home cook, Ibrahim describes her dishes and ingredients in an appealingly narrative manner, encouraging a relaxed approach to preparation while explaining the customs and rites of Iraqi eating. Fresh and simple, Ibrahim's cookbook is a welcome addition for those interested in exploring an intriguing cuisine through its most authentic flavors. (July)

Bittman here offers a sampling of 404 inspiring recipes. But don't expect another How to Cook Everything. This newest is of a different kind—simple and snappy, and rarely calls for measuring spoons. The no-sweat recipes are divided into four sections: summer, fall, winter and spring, capitalizing on the freshest ingredients of each season while whittling down the prep time of ordinarily elaborate dishes like coq au vin and ricotta cheesecake to 10 minutes or less. The book includes a drill-down of how best to stock your kitchen, and given the impromptu nature of the book, the substitution grid proves indispensable. While many dishes are sandwiches, dips or salads, Bittman offers a handful of innovative gems like figs in a blanket and pasta jambalaya, drawing from a diverse gastronomical panorama including Latin, Asian, Mediterranean and Creole flavors. And while quick, Bittman's recipes don't lack his signature creative punch. Lavender-thyme braised chicken, scallop and peach ceviche and a five-spice lobster sandwich will make most readers both salivate and appreciate the ease of his recipes. (June)

Meyer has long been a hero to New York City restaurant goers via his eclectic and acclaimed eateries—the upscale Gramercy Tavern, exotic Tabla and low-down Blue Smoke and Shake Shack. Now, perhaps in a nod to the economic climate, Meyer befriends the stay-at-home crowd with an excellent guide to the affordable luxury known as the artisanal cocktail. Resisting the capitalistic impulse to crank out a book representing each of his establishments, he instead pulls recipes from all of them, 140 in toto, providing enough martinis, highballs and infused liquor to withstand any recession. He stacks the drinks into five different categories. Favorite Classics (old-fashioned, Negroni and such); New Classics like a Pomegranate gimlet and a modern martini with cilantro-infused gin; Inspired Flavors such as the Kachumber Kooler (a favorite at Tabla made with muddled cucumber, cilantro and chili pepper); Elegant Sips, where Champagne and sherry make their presence known; and Casual Libations for the beach, the backyard or the mojito-fueled dance party. And because no one should have too many blood orange margaritas on an empty stomach, Meyer concludes with a chapter of Bar Fare. The kick from his five-spice cashews, Thai trail mix and hot garlic potato chips all require that a tall glass of ice water be added to the evening's drink list. (May)

In this informative guide, five authors—two physicians, a psychologist, an epidemiologist and a lawyer—combine their expertise to explore and explain the various pathways to parenthood. Noting that each year in America hundreds of thousands of couples seek fertility advice after being unable to conceive, the authors set out to help readers decide on a strategy. Part one describes the options available: early fertility assistance, including hormone stimulation and intrauterine insemination; assisted reproductive technology (ART) such as in vitro fertilization using a couple's own eggs or sperm or donor sperm, eggs or embryos; using a surrogate; and domestic or international adoption. The authors assure that in most cases couples are able to reach their goal of birthing or adopting a child within two years, and although challenges for single, gay, lesbian or other nontraditional families may be greater, they are not insurmountable. The key, the authors argue, is knowing when to call a halt to a particular pathway that isn't working and move on to another: remaining flexible and open to various options is crucial to success. In part two, emotional, financial and legal issues are covered. First-person accounts, often quite fascinating, conclude each chapter. This panoramic view of the many routes to parenthood is both practical and encouraging. (June)

As the Obama administration unveils its plans for a broader American presence in the region, two new July books weigh in on the history—and costs—of foreign interference in Afghanistan.

Loyn's dense chronicle of foreign meddling in Afghanistan reveals the country's long history “of confounding the optimism of invaders.” The stories that Loyn (Frontline), a longtime BBC correspondent with considerable experience in Afghanistan, recounts bear this out with chilling inevitability—generations of British, Soviet and most recently American leaders are confounded by shifting regional allegiances and unanticipated violent religious movements. Loyn's book is packed with details and anecdotes about the personalities that shaped the country, such as the Scottish adventurer Mountstuart Elphinstone, who first explored the region in 1808 armed only with Alexander the Great's account as guide; Abdur Habibullah, the obese turn of the century Afghan emir who rode around on a tricycle; and Charlie Wilson, whose funding of the mujahideen during the Soviet invasion is given an appropriately darker shading than in the recent book and film. Loyn's book suffers at times from a surfeit of dates and names without clear organization, and his eagerness to equate past conflicts and leaders to current ones results in frenetic time jumping. Nevertheless, the weight of the material that Loyn has gathered makes his book extremely valuable given our current circumstances. (July)

Since 2001, RAND Corporation political scientist Jones (The Rise of European Security Cooperation) has been observing the reinvigorated insurgency in Afghanistan and weighing the potency of its threat to the country's future and American interests in the region. Jones finds the roots of the re-emergence in the expected areas: the deterioration of security after the ousting of the Taliban regime in 2002, the U.S.'s focus on Iraq as its foreign policy priority and Pakistan's role as a haven for insurgents. He revisits Afghan history, specifically the invasions by the British in the mid- and late-19th century and the Russians in the late-20th to rue how little the U.S. has learned from these two previous wars. He sheds light on why Pakistan—a consistent supporter of the Taliban—continues to be a key player in the region's future. Jones makes important arguments for the inclusion of local leaders, particularly in rural regions, but his diligent panorama of the situation fails to consider whether the war in Afghanistan is already lost. (July)