Nonfiction Reviews: Week of 6/1/2009

On October 17, 2006, 28-year-old Iraq war veteran Zackery Bowen leapt to his death from a New Orleans hotel roof, leaving a suicide note directing police to the dismembered body of his girlfriend, Addie Hall. In journalist Brown’s (Snitch) account of Bowen’s life, the deterioration of the vet suffering from PTSD parallels that of Katrina-whipped New Orleans, its residents left as stranded as unsupported veterans like Bowen. A high school dropout, New Orleans bartender and a father at age 18, Bowen was determined to improve himself and do well by his child and Lana, his wife, and enlisted in the army, serving as an MP in Kosovo and Iraq. Granted what Brown says was an unfair general (under honorable conditions) discharge, Bowen returned to New Orleans in late 2004, where, abandoned by Lana, he began a turbulent relationship with Hall, culminating in Bowen methodically dismembering and cooking her remains. After covering the murder-suicide for Penthouse in 2007, Brown moved to New Orleans, and his detailed reconstruction of both Bowen’s life and the city’s deterioration make heartbreaking reading. Perhaps most poignant is the message painted on Bowen’s apartment wall: “please help me stop the pain.” 14 b&w photos. (Sept. 1)

Eminent neoconservative Podhoretz (World War IV) surveys the centuries of atrocities that, he says, have pushed most Jews to the Left, notably the persecutions by medieval Christendom, from blood libels to expulsion to ghettoization, and in modern times the Dreyfus affair and Nazism. Immigrant American Jews were attracted to the Democratic Party, says Podhoretz, because it was the closest counterpart to the European leftists who had favored Jewish emancipation. Phenomena like conservative opposition to fighting Hitler and Truman’s recognition of Israel in 1948 kept Jews faithful to “the 'Torah’ of liberalism.” But Podhoretz calls on Jews to shift their allegiance, maintaining that Democratic attitudes toward Israel range from unsympathetic to passionately hostile while the Republicans, with some exceptions, have been solidly to fervently supportive since the end of the 1967 Six-Day War. Podhoretz writes scathingly about what he views as the Nation magazine’s naked anti-Semitism, taking particular aim at a 1986 piece by Gore Vidal, but, refreshingly, also excoriates conservatives like Pat Buchanan and right-wing publications like Chronicles magazine for their anti-Semitism. Although preaching to the converted and at times rambling, Podhoretz is an astute and joyously provocative and partisan observer of the political landscape. (Sept. 8)

With the resurgence of red wolves and California condors, there is good news on the species front, as chronicled in this collection of success stories by renowned chimp researcher Goodall. Section one recounts the revival of six mammal and bird species, including Mongolian miniature horses and Australian wallabies, that became extinct in the wild but are being reintroduced to their natural habitat through captive breeding. Section two describes efforts to bring species back from near extinction, among them Brazil’s golden lion tamarin and the North American whooping crane. Section three details continuing efforts to preserve 11 species, including the giant pandas of China, whose bamboo diet is disappearing, and the Asian vultures of India, whose “disastrous population drop”—from a reported 87 million birds to 27 breeding pairs in 2006—has led to a dramatic rise in disease incubated by putrefying cattle carcasses once scavenged by the carrion-loving birds. Goodall is no Pollyanna about species reclamation—she acknowledges that there have been more losses than gains—but these accounts of conservation success are inspirational. (Sept. 2)

At 14, Lanier was the youngest of the “Little Rock Nine,” who integrated Little Rock Central High School in 1951; she went on to become the first African –American young woman to receive a diploma from the school. Her memoir provides a firsthand account of a seismic shift in American history. She recalls the well-reported violence outside the school and daily harassment and ineffective protection from teachers and guards. Away from school, the Nine were honored and feted, but their parents found their jobs—even their lives—in jeopardy. Lanier’s house was bombed, and a childhood friend, Herbert Monts, was falsely accused and convicted. Monts’s account of his experiences, shared with Lanier, 43 years later, is historically newsworthy. Lanier’s recollections of family history and her relatively pedestrian experiences after high school graduation (graduate school, job hunting, marrying, finding her new home in Denver) lack the drama of her historical moment. In a sense, Lanier didn’t make history, history made her. Her plainspoken report from the front line is, nevertheless, a worthy contribution to the history of civil rights in America. (Sept.)

Lawyer and journalist Bach exposes a litany of failures and systematic shoddiness at the core of the American criminal justice system that goes unchecked because the people affected tend to be poor, minorities or both, and because problems are so pervasive that they have become invisible to defenders, prosecutors and judges alike. Bach sees this blindness as a product of a public that cares little for the rights of the accused so long as someone—anyone—is convicted and a courthouse community where prosecutor, defending attorney and judge share a commitment to maintaining order, even at the expense of justice. Readers looking for solutions will be disappointed; the author offers only a call for transparency, particularly the creation of metrics for courtroom success, and nationwide monitoring. More compelling is her portrayal of the people hurt in this system—the victims of crimes, the falsely convicted and the defenders, prosecutors and judges whose own humanity is undermined when they lose sight of the justice they supposedly serve. (Aug.)

Fleet (Demystifying Wall Street) offers familiar advice awkwardly wedged into parable. The author has a good handle on decent if ubiquitous bare-bones financial wisdom—the importance of long-term planning, ethical business dealings, altruism, living below your means and business savvy, but he splices his advice, somewhat perplexingly, with stories of King Solomon and his young protégé, Abidan. Fleet’s admiration of Solomon—who he claims was the richest and wisest man of all time (even after adjusting for inflation and IQ reporting) comes through loud and clear, but the connection between the biblical stories and the financial lessons feels contrived at best. By attempting to juxtapose two very different objectives, Fleet has created a book that’s neither fish nor fowl—with no obvious message—tied together by a gimmick with limited appeal. (Sept.)

Legendary sports agent Dell reveals the secrets to successful negotiating in this spellbinding, behind-the-scenes look at deal making in the high stakes world of professional athletics. The treasure trove of practical advice is backed up by mesmerizing tales of the deals Dell closed on behalf of such stars as Arthur Ashe, Michael Jordan, Jimmy Connors and Patrick Ewing. The author drives home simple yet powerful business lessons: he recalls how his negotiation for a new Michael Jordan basketball shoe reached an impasse until Nike exec Peter Moore blurted out a clear concept for a line called “Air Jordan,” which subsequently became the biggest licensing deal in history; and his own temper cost him a deal signing a promising young tennis star. Sidebars offer advice from athletes, politicians and dealmakers including former senator and Basketball Hall of Fame player Bill Bradley and former senator George Mitchell, who negotiated the Good Friday peace agreement of 1998 in Northern Ireland. Dell reveals that successful deal making requires strong relationships, trust, self-awareness—the very qualities his star clients embody. (Aug.)

Pulitzer Prize journalist Jones (coauthor of The Patriarch) argues that the demise of the newspaper industry is corroding the “iron core of information that is at the center of a functioning democracy.” Increasingly, he contends, what is passed off as news is actually entertainment; puff pieces have replaced the investigative reporting that allows citizens to make informed decisions. “We seem poised to be a nation overfed but undernourished, a culture of people waddling around, swollen with media exposure, and headed toward an epidemic of social diabetes,” he writes. Sifting through a history of the media that touches on such technological improvements as the Gutenberg press and the telegraph, Jones focuses on the Internet and the damage he believes it has wrought on print newspapers. Weaving in the story of his own family’s small newspaper in Tennessee, Jones presents an insider’s look at an industry in turmoil, calling plaintively for a serious examination of what a nation loses when its newspapers fold. Unfortunately, he offers few answers for saving print journalism, but his compelling narrative will incite some readers to drum up solutions of their own. (Aug.)

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois prophetically labeled the central challenge of the 20th century “the problem of the color-line.” Six years later, in 1909, he joined black and white civic leaders and activists to form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the country’s oldest civil rights organization. Rejecting Booker T. Washington’s Southern-based economic uplift strategy, the NAACP—celebrating its centenary this year—favored Du Bois’s emphasis on complete equality for African-Americans as guaranteed by the Constitution, joining the fight at a time of deepening racism throughout the U.S. Spurred on by Woodrow Wilson’s segregationist policies, the young NAACP rapidly grew to a formidable nationwide, grassroots-driven endeavor, waging campaigns in public squares, law courts, legislatures and—with Du Bois helming its organ, the Crisis—the court of public opinion. Historian Sullivan (Days of Hope) delivers a solidly researched examination of the organization’s growth and influence, leaving us with a vital account of 100 years of foundational civil rights activism. (Aug.)

In this collection of 24 essays written during a long career as a literary biographer (Archibald MacLeish), Donaldson analyzes numerous aspects of the careers and lives of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The volume serves as an unconventional dual biography for serious readers of the two writers, both of whose lives have previously been exhaustively chronicled and dissected. Donaldson moves effortlessly between the “works” and “days”—a pair of essays highlights the materialism of The Great Gatsby and the snobbery of Nick Carraway; immediately following is a piece that lays bare the confluence of these factors in the writer’s own life. Meanwhile “The Crisis of 'The Crack-Up’ ” traces the genesis and aftermath of Fitzgerald’s pioneering confessional essay. Donaldson’s selection of essays about Hemingway is no less generous, tracing his evolution as a reporter for the Toronto Daily Star and Star Weekly, evaluating the significance of the sums of money owed and exchanged in The Sun Also Rises and charting Hemingway’s passionate support of the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War. The last two essays in the book, on Hemingway’s relationship with fame and his suicide, are a sad coda to an exemplary selection. (Aug.)

One of celebrated novelist Ernest Hemingway’s more quixotic exploits opens a window into his soul in this sprightly biographical study. During WWII, Hemingway and a volunteer crew ran patrols on his boat, Pilar, looking for German submarines along the Cuban coast. They never found any, and his wife, Martha Gellhorn, whose eye-rolling presence pervades the book, deemed the operation just a grandiose excuse to go fishing and drink with cronies. Mort (The Reasonable Art of Fly Fishing) notes that U-boats were a real threat, though he allows that Hemingway’s plan to attack with grenades and tommy guns could only have made the Germans die of laughter. Mort also gives an interesting rundown of the submarine war. But the patrols’ real significance, in his estimation, lies in their resonance with Hemingway’s imagination and literary oeuvre. The resulting analysis can be a bit blunt (“the U-boats were the sharks in The Old Man and the Sea... the bulls in the ring at Pamplona”). But this colorful, subtle portrait offers insights into Hemingway, making him as vivid as his fictional heroes, a tribe of romantic existentialists: domineering, brave, foolhardy, secretly vulnerable, larger than life. (Aug.)

A bear of a man, with flowing white hair and beard, the flamboyant and magic-obsessed Robertson Davies (1913–1995) was the Canadian literary equivalent of Orson Welles. As this oral history shows, he was by turns vain, vulnerable, intimidating, kind, depressive, bossy, charming, imposing, even in passing vaguely anti-Semitic. He was a great mentor for many as master of Massey College, in Toronto, which he founded with Vincent Massey. Davies’s life and art are celebrated in this lively remembrance by some 100 contributors. Journalist Ross, who died in 2008 shortly after completing this book, is not so much its author as its organizer, providing the narrative that connects the many voices that celebrate the man, his work and reputation. These include Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, John Irving and Norman Jewison. Among the unexpected highlights of this artful biography is the description of a joint reading tour with a young Sri Lankan novelist and Davies’s nose-holding encounter with Andrea Dworkin. Davies gets his due as one of the 20th-century’s literary voices of English-speaking Canada. (Aug.)

They were a gaggle of misfits—nerdy, old, bookish and sometimes pompous and abrasive. Yet the group of Allied soldiers nicknamed “the Venus Fixers” believed that saving Italy’s culture—from bombing, from Göring’s coffers, from careless soldiers—was an essential component of the war effort. Initially, it was the Italians who tried to find safe havens for the art, and then the job fell to the Venus Fixers, who performed triage after an area was secured by the military. In one harrowing tale, Brey describes how the Venus Fixers saved delicate manuscripts from being bulldozed along with rubble into the Arno. Often these artistic subversives were at odds with their own armies. In her first book, journalist and translator Brey isn’t as skilled as one would like in bringing her soldiers to life on the page—a shame, given what a unique bunch they were and what an unusual task they had—but the book makes a strong case for what the Allies were fighting for in Italy: its history, and the artworks that continue to inspire us today. 8 pages of b&w illus. (Aug.)

This often enjoyable but flat-footed compilation and study of jokes from the Soviet bloc has a hard time justifying its existence. Journalist and documentarian Lewis (who made a film of the same title for the BBC) started by imagining Communist jokes as a subversive critique that undermined the totalitarian state, but concludes that they were a politically irrelevant distraction. He looks to them as a window into Communist society, but discovers that most probably they originated long before Lenin appeared. If truth be told, Communist jokes are often pretty lame. For every clever one-liner—capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, while communism is the exact opposite—Lewis unearths 10 clunkers like, “Why are the East Berliners dumber than the East Friesians? They built a wall and placed themselves on the wrong side.” Lewis’s explications of jokes are more interesting than the jokes, as are his fencing sessions with unapologetic ex-Communist apparatchiks and with his artist girlfriend, a humorless nostalgist for East Germany. The rueful punch line Lewis leaves us with, almost despite himself, is that Communism was no laughing matter. Photos. (Aug.)

In 1978, Knoedelseder (Stiffed: A True Story of MCA, the Music Business, and the Mafia) was a journalist assigned to cover newcomers transforming the comedy clubs: “For the next two years, I had stage-side seats at the best show in show business.... I met and wrote about Jay Leno, David Letterman and Richard Lewis before the world knew who they were.” Mitzi Shore, recently labeled “the Norma Desmond of Comedy” by the Los Angeles Times, took over L.A.’s Comedy Store in 1973 with a no-pay policy because she saw it as “a training ground, a workshop, a college.” It became a focal point for local comics, including Lewis, his friend Steve Lubetkin, Elayne Boosler, Tom Dreesen, Letterman, Leno and many more. Some were in desperate circumstances, surviving by living in their cars and eating bar condiments. Driving a silver Jaguar to her “massive, cash-generating laugh factory,” Shore was seen as “cunningly manipulative,” and her unfair payment policies led to an organized strike in 1979 by the CFC (Comedians for Compensation). This confrontation of comics vs. club owner (“Not... one... red... fucking... cent”) is the core of the book, with the suicide of Lubetkin taking the tone from comedy to tragedy. Filmmakers will eye this as a potential property similar to Bill Carter’s The Late Shift (1996), about Letterman and Leno. Knoedelseder skillfully layers powerful dramatic details, and readers will shelve the book alongside those other key classics on comedy: Steve Allen’s The Funny Men and Janet Coleman’s The Compass. (Aug. 24)

In this posthumous memoir, Kane details his outlandish experiences as bassist for the proto-glam/punk band the New York Dolls. Each of the brief chapters is like a Dolls’ song in and of itself; discrete “New York stories,” which, taken together, flesh out with great energy what it meant to be a young and daring artist in the gritty Warhol-driven art scene of 1970s New York. As a former design student, Kane spills his passion for the band’s unique and influential DIY fashion across nearly every chapter, unfortunately at the expense of any significant discussion of the Dolls’ equally influential music. Kane’s sense of humor is the book’s greatest strength (he describes the experience of his pants splitting open during the Dolls’ first concert as “the dreaded banana-peeling feeling”), expanding colloquial vocabulary with a Mel Brooks-on-LSD kind of timing suggesting the very spirit that infused the Dolls’ New York milieu. At times, however, Kane’s over-the-top prose renders his musings and recollections inchoate, particularly when his animosity toward the Dolls’ early management degrades into near-incomprehensible rants. The foreword and epilogue, carefully and lovingly written by his widow, Barbara, fill in the space created by Kane’s bombast. (Aug.)

After a conversion experience at the Los Angeles farmers’ market where he first tasted the sweet, succulent plum-apricot hybrid known as a pluot, freelance food writer Brantley embarked on this tasty exploration of the stone-fruit industry. In his telling, it is that rare acre of American agriculture that still has room for independents, like legendary fruit breeder Fred Zaiger, whose epic labors—he waits years to learn whether a new hybrid will be edible or growable—sparked an industry shift toward fruit that actually tastes good. Brantley delves into the complicated, sometimes cut-throat world of the San Joaquin Valley’s family fruit growers and marketers, squeezed by rising costs and ever more powerful and demanding retailers, always angling for the “Summer Passionate” consumer segment of lifestyle epicureans. In his chronicle of the 2007 growing season, their livelihoods hang on the unpredictable whims of nature and marketplace; perfect weather yields a delicious crop, yet the fickle Summer Passionates refuse to buy. The light-handed tome is more of a snack than a banquet, but Brantley’s engaging mixture of agronomy, reportage and food porn—“When I bit into it, it felt almost liquid, like plum jelly”—goes down easy. (Aug.)

Al-Shaykh, a Lebanese journalist and author of six novels (including Story of Zahra), finally succumbs to her illiterate mother Kamila’s haranguing to write her story. The result falls somewhere between memoir and biography as she recreates and undoubtedly takes literary license with her mother’s history. Kamila and her brother grow up in poverty, estranged from their father, until their mother moves them to Beirut to live with their older siblings from her first marriage in the 1930s. Soon, one of their sisters dies of rabies and the family marries 14-year-old Kamila unwillingly to the widower, Abu-Hussein, 18 years her elder. Kamila torments her husband to show her displeasure, but bears him two children by the age of 17. Her starry-eyed love of the cinema is all that assuages her unhappiness but also fuels her affair with a man her own age, Muhammed. After the 10-year affair has shamed both their families, she is granted a divorce from Abu-Hussein but must leave her two daughters behind, including the author, Hanan. Kamila has five more children with Muhammed. Though at times Kamila’s life feels overly condensed, the author’s journalistic talent reveals itself in her ability to get past her own abandonment to paint Kamila as a vivid, willful girl who lived as though she were the heroine of a great film. (Aug.)

Squires, a newspaperman–turned–horse breeder who bred 2001 Kentucky Derby winner Monarchos (chronicled in his 2003 book, Horse of a Different Color), offers a meandering though at times hilarious and informative look at the troubled condition of horse racing at the end of 2008. The book is a subjective combination of memoir, recent horse-racing history and rant at the use of steroids, “subprime” sales agents and the tradition-laden powers who oversee the horse business, known as “the Dinnies.” Squires, a self-described “pygmy breeder,” spins some engaging stories, especially about the exploits and influence wielded by the late veterinarian Dr. Alexander Harthill on the outcomes of the Kentucky Derby. Although Squires is critical of much in horse racing, he writes persuasively about the love for horses that he and his wife share with “real horse people.” And Squires makes a passionate defense of the integrity of Larry Jones, who trained Eight Belles, the horse euthanized on the track after finishing second and then breaking both ankles in the 2008 Kentucky Derby. For casual horse-racing fans, though, some of his exposition on the multifarious boards that run the industry or the minutiae of X-rays given to horses may be more detail than necessary. (Aug.)

A dark thread of crime and corruption weaves insidiously through the fabric of Sicilian society in this intricate historical study. Historian Lupo focuses on the Italian branch of the Mafia, following it from its roots in Italy’s 19th-century wars of unification to the anti-Mafia maxi-trial of the 1980s and 1990s, and tracing its infiltration of citrus-growing, construction and other sectors of the economy. He rejects the idea of the organization as a holdover from a traditional Sicilian peasant culture with a socially benign ethos of solidarity and honor as a self-serving Mafia mythology. Instead, he argues, mafiosi run a thoroughly modern, prosaic, protection racket, fomenting crime and then posing as intermediaries who can suppress it, seeking protection and wielding influence in the highest economic and political circles, eager to abrogate omertá and cooperate with the police when it suits their interests. Lupo’s rather dense academic treatment of the subject presupposes a good knowledge of Sicilian history as it proceeds through highly detailed but too loosely organized accounts of specific mafioso life histories, police initiatives and major trials, in which one often loses sight of the forest amid the trees. There are stimulating insights, but the book is almost as byzantine as the Mafia intrigues it appraises. (Aug.)

This follow-up to Morris’s 2005 The Naked Woman rambles aimlessly around each part of the male body, beginning with hair and working down to the feet, jumping from evolutionary matters to strange, tangentially related social ones. Discussing the mouth, for instance, Morris begins with the unusually fleshy human lip, proceeds to the teeth and soon digresses to why women visit the dentist more often than men and the latest trends in false teeth. Bits and pieces of the book are entertaining, but Morris regularly falls back on anecdotes rather than scientific evidence for his arguments. And while he espouses equality for both women and homosexuals, he can still express the view that it is men, not women, “who have been driven on by their genetically installed ambitions actually to take the great steps necessary to build our towering civilisations.” And current scientific evidence runs counter to his view that “from an evolutionary standpoint, there is only one valid biological lifestyle for the human male and that is heterosexual.” Morris’s writing is simple (perhaps too simple), clear and occasionally entertains, but it makes for poor science. Photos. (Aug.)

In this sophisticated yet homecentric cookbook, Peel, the longtime chef/owner of Los Angeles’s Campanile restaurant has assembled favorite dishes from his famed Monday night Family Dinners. In signature style, Peel, writing with Shulman (Mediterranean Harvest), elevates the common vernacular of comfort food —veal scaloppine, grasshopper pie—to refinement with select ingredients like smoked mozzarella and homemade vanilla ice cream, respectively, plus a bit of extra-mile technique (running a pureed potato leek soup through a sieve or toasting and grinding spices for a shrimp boil. If a reader needs an excuse to revive clams casino in the home kitchen, he’s given ample justification with a simple, no-fail recipe, but if there is a hankering, say, for a more seasonal, green market dish like fresh shell-bean ragout, Peel’s got it covered, too. Peel offers tips on menu planning, choosing produce and environmentally friendly seafood choices. The skill level required varies—making Peel’s labor-intensive lobster potpie will demand more experience than his tuna confit. In most cases the ingenuity of process trumps conceptual creativity, and readers will find comfort in the familiarity of the dishes, which will make any home table proud. (Oct.)

This follow-up to Raw Food/ Real World offers 100 new recipes inspired by the New York City restaurant Pure Food and Wine, where Melngailis is a partner and executive chef. The restaurant is swanky and the book is irreverent (there’s even a photo of one of the staff smoking)—it’s hardly a paean to an obsessively ascetic raw lifestyle. But the recipes are legit: at once sophisticated and rigorously raw, they range from quick and easy milks, juices and items from Pure Food and Wine’s “family meal” (that’s the staff meal, in non–restaurant speak) to intriguing dishes off the restaurant menu. Baby fennel and truffle-cream tarts; beet ravioli with pine nuts and goat cheese; pumpkin gnocchi with walnut cream sauce, spiced pumpkin seeds and crispy sage; and vanilla panna cotta with tarragon-peach sauce all have gourmet appeal well beyond those already committed to the raw food movement. And nonpreachy primers on ingredients and techniques used in raw preparations make the book accessible and usable for a wider audience than might typically go for a raw foods cookbook—if cookbook is even the right term for a volume of vegan recipes in which nothing is heated over 118 degrees Fahrenheit. (July)

Star of the Food Network’s Quick Fix Meals with Robin Miller and author of Robin to the Rescue, Miller offers an organized, simple approach to dinner for the time challenged. She provides a year’s worth of weeknight flavorful, healthful and varied meals that make the most out of seasonal produce. Each chapter includes a prep list of steps that can be done in advance, and throughout Miller offers time-saving tips, such as cooking extra chicken breasts now for a second meal later in the week. Recipes have prep and cook times listed and most double easily and freeze well. When appropriate, she offers suggestions for morphing one meal into another: grilled steak with shiitake mushrooms, wilted arugula and shaved parmesan can be served the following night as beef and noodles in whiskey cream sauce. Miller also includes suggestions for quick side dishes and desserts, including cumin-roasted Yukon Gold potatoes, buttermilk onion rings and banana-blueberry fool with honey-roasted peanuts. With today’s busy lifestyles in mind, Miller offers cooks a wealth of options for making appealing, healthy meals, even on hectic weeknights. (July)

Psychologist Gopnik (The Scientist in the Crib) points out that babies have long been excluded from the philosophical literature, and in this absorbing text, she argues that if anything, babies are more conscious than grownups. While adults often function on autopilot, getting through their busy days as functional “zombies,” babies, with their malleable, complex minds and penchant for discovery, approach life like little travelers, enthralled by every nuance of their exciting and novel environment. Gopnik compares babies to the “research and development” department of the human species, while adults take care of production and marketing. Like little scientists, babies draw accurate conclusions from data and statistical analysis, conduct clever experiments and figure out everything from how to get mom to smile at them to how to make a hanging mobile spin. Like adults, the author claims, babies are even capable of counterfactual thinking (the ability to imagine different outcomes that might happen in the future or might have happened in the past). As she tackles philosophical questions regarding love, truth and the meaning of life, Gopnik reveals that babies and children are keys not only to how the mind works but also to our understanding of the human condition and the nature of love. (Aug.)

While the conventional wisdom condemns it as an environmental nightmare, Manhattan is by far the greenest place in America, argues this stimulating eco-urbanist manifesto. According to Owen (Sheetrock and Shellac), staff writer at the New Yorker, New York City is a model of sustainability: its extreme density and compactness—and horrifically congested traffic—encourage a carfree lifestyle centered on walking and public transit; its massive apartment buildings use the heat escaping from one dwelling to warm the ones adjoining it; as a result, he notes, New Yorkers’ per capita greenhouse gas emissions are less than a third of the average American’s. The author attacks the “powerful anti-urban bias of American environmentalists” like Michael Pollan and Amory Lovins, whose rurally situated, auto-dependent Rocky Mountain Institute he paints as an ecological disaster area. The environmental movement’s disdain for cities and fetishization of open space, backyard compost heaps, locavorism and high-tech gadgetry like solar panels and triple-paned windows is, he warns, a formula for wasteful sprawl and green-washed consumerism. Owen’s lucid, biting prose crackles with striking facts that yield paradigm-shifting insights. The result is a compelling analysis of the world’s environmental predicament that upends orthodox opinion and points the way to practical solutions. (Sept.)