Nonfiction Reviews: 6/15/2009

Although the Tudor era has inspired a flood of literature, de Lisle (After Elizabeth), in her second book, illuminates three remarkable characters of the time, the Grey sisters, who were named by both Henry VIII and his son, Edward, as heirs to the throne. But, says de Lisle, “Dynastic politics, religious propaganda, and sexual prejudice have since buried [the sisters] in legend and obscurity.” ' De Lisle demonstrates that while Jane, long viewed as helpless, was indeed young and pressed to accept the crown, she was exceptionally intelligent, educated and confident as England's first queen regnant and a passionate Protestant evangelical leader. Under Elizabeth I, Jane's sister Katherine married secretly without the queen's consent and was imprisoned because her pregnancy threatened Elizabeth with the possibility of a legitimate royal heir; after seven years in prison, Katherine died, likely of self-starvation. Mary also married without Elizabeth's consent and was imprisoned for seven years, but was eventually rehabilitated at court only to die of plague at age 33. De Lisle has produced an excellent, assiduously researched account of dynastic politics at its worst, focusing on three fascinating and often overlooked women. Photos.(Oct. 1)

Flannery (The Weather Makers) makes a valuable contribution to global warming literature with this slim and eloquent brief that challenges readers to dispense with the dangerous notion that “the earth was made for us”—a convenient extrapolation of social Darwinism that the author argues is used to justify reckless treatment of the environment and smacks of embarrassing impracticality and myopia. He states that humans were made to shepherd the Earth through environmental crises and contribute to the efficiency of its massive metabolism; humans are the brains of this complex system and must make bold choices to either save the corpus totum or destroy it. A re-evaluation of human purpose on Earth is required, Flannery maintains, with a true understanding of sustainability removed from trendy “green” marketing connotations. Flannery's compelling arguments and accessible language will move the passive bystander, persuade the skeptic and rouse the activist. (Oct.)

Fischer injects both passion and verve to this account of medical breakthroughs. “I am a physician writing a book on hope,” says Fischer, who works at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center's Health Sciences Center at Brooklyn. He's also urging doctors to better communicate the impressive list of routine miracles the profession regularly performs: minimally invasive spinal surgery on pain-wracked patients that gets them on their feet immediately afterward; tiny catheters that reverse a stroke; drugs that lower the mortality rate of congestive heart failure; laser procedures that cure deafness; advances in pain management and targeted cancer therapies, to name just a few. Fischer also shows how a doctor's empathy—even when it has to be learned—is the real glue between physician and patient. “Most patients I approached about this project readily agreed to be interviewed, and many seemed hungry to be heard, to have the ear of a doctor who at least was deeply interested in the emotional aspect of their illness,” he notes. That's a miracle that should always be routine.(Sept.)

In Strasbourg in 1518, a dance craze began that, far from being a mere fashion, was a form of hysteria in which people literally danced themselves to death. The plague began on July 14, 1518, when Frau Troffea stepped into the streets of Strasbourg and danced madly for hours despite extreme exhaustion and swollen, bleeding feet. In the end, over 100 people died of what came to be known as St. Vitus's dance. What caused this “dancing plague”? In his sometimes compelling and often superficial tale, Michigan State medical historian Waller draws on fresh historical evidence to recreate a society stricken by famine, in which illness was seen as a punishment from God, and laypeople resented the corruption of priests and nobles. These factors resulted in hysteria that contributed to the dance plague, and Waller concludes that the dancers entered a deep trance that enabled them to dance through their exhaustion. But compared with other historical examinations of mass hysteria, Waller's analysis lacks breadth and depth—a shame, given the fascinating material he has to work with. (Sept.)

The lasting impact of the Holocaust on a survivor and her daughter emerges in this joint account by Lurie-Gilbert and her mother. Lurie was five when a farmer agreed to hide her along with 14 Polish-Jewish relatives in his attic in exchange for jewelry and furs. While in hiding, Lurie witnessed the Nazis shoot a cousin and an uncle; her younger brother and mother died in the stifling, stinking hideout (years later her daughter, Gilbert-Lurie, wonders if the boy was smothered to quiet him and if her grandmother died of a broken heart). After the war, in an Italian DP camp, Lurie's father remarried to a stepmother Lurie resented; her father became increasingly depressed and remote when their fractured and traumatized family relocated to Chicago; and deep depressions haunted Lurie's own otherwise happy marriage. Gilbert-Lurie in turn recalls her mother's overprotectiveness, her career as a TV executive, a 1988 visit to her mother's childhood village and her own guilt, anxiety and sadness. Although the voices and experiences expressed are valuable, the writing is adequate at best, with none of the luminosity of Anne Frank, to whom Gilbert-Lurie compares her mother. Photos. (Sept. 1)

Volcanoes in their full glory at the height of an eruption seem more a life force than one of inanimate nature. The temperamental monster Vesuvius, on the east side of the Bay of Naples, well deserves this lively and generously illustrated account of its past 2,000 years. Scarth (Savage Earth) gives detailed accounts of each of the volcano's known eruptions, including the possible geological causes, remarkably precise (considering the large historical distance) analysis of lava and pyroclastic flow patterns, and the aftermath. Scarth discloses that the cone we call Vesuvius wasn't the mountain that buried Herculaneum and Pompeii; that mountain constantly rebuilt itself over the millennia. And more strangely, Vesuvius the destroyer is also Vesuvius the nurturer, as the lava and ash from each eruption eventually became fertile soil. Scarth also tells the fascinating story of Sir William Hamilton, famously cuckolded by his wife, Emma, and Lord Nelson. Hamilton left a more noble legacy: through his studies of Vesuvius, he established the science of volcanology. Readers interested in the earth sciences, antiquity or just a good read will find Scarth's book hard to put down. 101 b&w illus. (Sept.)

From 1866 to 1870, Philadelphia native Thomas Eakins spent four very formative years abroad in Paris and Spain. Homer (Thomas Eakins: His Life and Art) has for the first time gathered and translated (from Eakins's Italian, French and even Old French) all of Eakins's private correspondence during this period. Arranged chronologically with brief summaries before each letter, the letters' covered topics range from painting to hats to Dante. They are chiefly written to Eakins's parents; his sister Fanny, to whom he most fully revealed himself; his other sister, Maggie, and to the artist Emily Sartain, to whom Eakins was connected romantically. One of the collection's first letters is also one of its most vivid; as he sailed to France, Eakins describes his flea-ridden hotel in New York, characterizing the city as having “a great deal of life... too much in fact for the size of the place” and contrasts the gallantry of the Frenchmen aboard with the baseness of Americans. On art, his most interesting comments are to his father and in the private notebook he kept in Spain, which concludes this essential contribution to the field of Eakins scholarship. 68 illus. (Sept.)

Musician, musicologist and longtime New York resident, Sublette revisits his Southern roots and recounts a 2004–2005 pre-Katrina research sojourn in New Orleans in this blunt, eloquently humane and musically astute memoir—a worthy companion to his acclaimed The World That Made New Orleans, a music-laden cultural history of the city to 1819. Sublette delves into some quintessential dynamics of modern American popular culture—including racism and poverty as well as restive imagination and invention—through the prism of his childhood in virulently segregated, early rock 'n' rolling Natchitoches, La., and the fraught but idiosyncratic culture he finds in pre-flood New Orleans. If discussions of Elvis, early rock 'n' roll and hip-hop millionaires straight out of New Orleans's projects inevitably rehearse familiar narratives, Sublette carefully marks them out as part of a larger personal and social landscape. Sublette's sensitivity to the precariousness of a system that collapsed completely after he returned to New York is more than mere hindsight; his worldview dovetails movingly with his turbulent and alluring subject and its dogged rebirth. (Sept.)

Ridge, the first secretary of homeland security, recalls the agency's creation and early history in a memoir of his time performing “the most thankless yet rewarding job in America.” The author was governor of Pennsylvania when President Bush tapped him to coordinate the federal domestic counterterrorism effort after September 11. In a massive reorganization, Congress consolidated 22 agencies—from the Coast Guard to the INS—under the Department of Homeland Security. Ridge acknowledges his missteps, laments the baleful effects of “politics and turf” on his department and decries unfavorable media coverage. He also endeavors, unconvincingly, to defend the work of the Transportation Security Administration and the color-coded terror alert system. Hurricane Katrina did not occur on Ridge's watch, but disaster relief is one of DHS's responsibilities, and he cannot resist a self-serving analysis of the debacle. Ridge concludes with a series of recommendations for his successors, including “a national identification system,” immigration reform, energy independence and a reorganization of DHS “along regional lines.” DHS remains a work in progress, and Ridge's singular perspective recommends his memoir to policy makers, students and concerned citizens. (Sept.)

Washington Post correspondent Reid (The United States of Europe) explores health-care systems around the world in an effort to understand why the U.S. remains the only first world nation to refuse its citizens universal health care. Neither financial prudence nor concern for the commonweal explains the American position, according to Reid, whose findings divulge that the U.S. not only spends more money on health care than any other nation but also leaves 45 million residents uninsured, allowing about 22,000 to die from easily treatable diseases. Seeking treatment for the flareup of an old shoulder injury, he visits doctors in the U.S., France, Germany, Japan and England—with a stint in an Ayurvedic clinic in India—in a quest for treatment that dovetails with his search for a “cure” for America's health-care crisis, a narrative device that sometimes feels contrived, but allows him valuable firsthand experience. For all the scope of his research and his ability to mint neat rebuttals to the common American misconception that universal health care is “socialized” medicine, Reid neglects to address the elephant in the room: just how are we to sell these changes to the mighty providers and insurers? (Sept.)

Sociologist Beauboeuf-Lafontant explores the “sociocultural lore” invoked in imaging the strong black woman. Bypassing familiar literary recreations of the oversacrificial Mammy and the oversexed Jezebel, she attends to the “growing autobiographical and clinical literature by Black women experiencing compulsive overeating and depression.” She foregrounds the intersection of race and gender with fresh and thought-provoking insight as she challenges “the racialization of depression as a white illness” and of eating problems as exclusive to the privileged. She interviews 58 black women ranging in age from 19 to 67 about “what strength means to them.” While many of her subjects reveal the involvement of familial communities in setting “the standards of stoicism, care, and selflessness that Black women encounter from girlhood through adulthood, at home and at work, among intimates and strangers,” one-third were “strength-critical women,” proponents of “self-care rather than self-neglect.” This book may be too academic in tone to appeal to the popular reader, but one hopes her message will trickle out. (Sept.)

Billed as the sequel to the best-selling The Diamond Cutter, this slim volume lays out its “Eight Rules of Karmic Management,” a business philosophy predicated upon helping “karmic business partners”—co-workers, customers and suppliers, the world—succeed. With brief testimonials from hip-hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons and advertising executive Linda Kaplan Thaler, the guide lays out a mishmash of Eastern religions and such New Age strategies as visualizing future endeavors with a 100% success rate. Much of the book yields more puzzlement than enlightenment: the authors offer unfocused personal anecdotes, and various contradictory statements create further confusion (e.g., an assertion that the method “always works” is followed by the qualifying “If it works, then you have a friend for life in KM”). Also befuddling (and troubling) in a treatise espousing altruism toward competitors is praise for retailing giant Wal-Mart, whose evisceration tactics against rivals are widely documented. (Sept. 1)

A team of scholars and journalists explore the implications of Barack Obama's speech “A More Perfect Union,” given in the heat of the 2008 primary campaign, in this volume edited by Sharpley-Whiting (Pimps Up, Hos Down). Written by Obama in response to the media frenzy over statements by his pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright, “A More Perfect Union” addressed the enduring legacy of slavery and racism and instantly entered the canon of great American oratory. The contributors use the speech as a starting point to examine the divide between civil rights–era activism (and activists) and the politics of a younger generation that has grown up in its shadow, as well as the development of black oratory, the meaning of a “postracial” society, the immigrant experience and divisions between the descendants of American slaves and postcolonial immigrants from the Caribbean, Africa and Latin America. Scholarly without being dry, the book offers a way forward from what has become a stalemate between a “color-blind” white America that sees racism as a problem solved in the 1960s and a nation of ethnic minorities that experiences daily its structural inequities. (Aug.)

Journalist Lynch's mission—to “unashamedly and sympathetically chronicle... the tragic Palestinian nation and its defiant, inspiring people”—is fulfilled in a heartrending account of the suffering of Palestinians under occupation. Lynch (Radical Politics in Modern Ireland) has not only covered the big events but also lived in the West Bank, witnessing up close Israeli raids, checkpoint lines and agitated soldiers and the privations created by Israel's 250-mile-long security wall. He impressively and seamlessly combines storytelling with reportage and fact-finding. His failures are thus all the more unfortunate: the book's scarce sourcing ensures that only those with a background in the field can judge his findings, and in his efforts to validate the Palestinian narrative, he too easily dismisses the Israeli counterpart. While Lynch takes pains to acknowledge Israeli humanity, calling Zionism “a colonizing project like most others” might lose the book some readers who might have been open to broadening their understanding of the conflict.(Aug.)

While the summer of 2008 may have been “the summer of love” for American same-sex couples, as thousands flocked to California for marriage licenses, the summer of 2009 may go down in history as a time of profound contention and confusion over Proposition 8, which revoked those couples' right to marry. Still, as Badgett, the research director of the Williams Institute for Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at UCLA, argues, the transformation of the policy landscape for gays and lesbians was nothing short of remarkable, considering the very real possibility of a constitutional amendment to ban it just a few years earlier. Despite her optimism about gay unions, however, Badgett sets out to examine their potential impact in the U.S., using European Union countries, specifically the Netherlands—where same-sex couples have had the right to marry since 2001—as her rainbow-hued road map. Badgett's cogent and comprehensive study of the societal implications of same-sex marriage is learned and persuasive; gays and lesbians who once again pick up their protest signs and banners might do well to bring along Badgett's book as well. (Aug.)

Zinni, former special envoy to the Middle East, and Koltz (coauthors of The Battle for Peace) turn their focus to what they regard as a profound leadership crisis in America. Leaders—in politics, the military and business—have failed to evolve with the times, say the authors, who identify 11 core elements of new (and effective) managers, including developing a strong ethical sense and honing listening and decision-making skills. The authors dedicate entire chapters to each of these elements and explore what it takes to shepherd nations, companies and families in times of crisis as well as how to nurture and train future leaders. Zinni's principles of governance—applicable to parents as well as presidents—touches everything from the Spitzer scandal to U.S. policies in the Middle East and dispenses practical guidelines with particular relevance and resonance. (Aug.)

Building on the foundation he laid in Framing the Early Middle Ages, award-winning Oxford historian Wickham constructs a magisterial narrative of the political, economic, cultural and religious fabrics that constituted the crazy quilt of Europe's Dark Ages. Negating what he calls a common “teleological” view of this period as the source of European nations and a modern sense of European identity, he draws on archeological evidence and rich historiographical methods Wickham challenges standard views of the early Middle Ages as barbarous and bereft of political and cultural structure, and recreates a stunning portrait of the breakup of the Roman Empire and its consequences for Europe. Wickham looks at the immediate post-Roman polities in Gaul, Spain and Italy; the history of Byzantium, the Arab caliphate and its 10th-century successor states, including Muslim Spain; the Carolingian Empire and its successors and imitators, notably Russia and Scotland. Under this narrative layer lies a focus on the accumulation of wealth, the institutionalization of politics and the culture of the public. Wickham's achievement contributes richly to our picture of this often narrowly understood period. Maps, illus. (Aug. 3)

Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan have sensitized Americans to the nuances of defeat in war. In this anthology, Fawcett, who rivals Jim Dunnigan as a general-audience military analyst, brings together 11 first-rate writers on military history to offer two dozen case studies of wars that should have been won—but were not. The conflicts range from the Peloponnesian Wars to the first Gulf war. The contributors range from established authors like Roland Green and Bill Forstchen to first-rate newcomers like Paul Thomsen. Their essays incorporate a combination of perceptive analysis and a light touch that earns the book a classification as history/humor without lapsing into the unsubtle mockery frequently informing writing on defeat. They understand that nobody sets out to lose—but the same impulses generating war can prefigure defeat. This can involve the arrogance of Napoleon in 1812 or the thirst for glory that dominated Pyrrhus of Epirus in the third century B.C. The common threads are underestimating the enemy and “being so taken with yourself and your army that you fail to learn from the mistakes others have made before you.” A chapter on Iraq will be correspondingly welcome in a second edition. (Aug.)

Vigorous, self-assured, self-consciously youthful and proudly bilingual, Naca's debut should get many times the attention afforded most poets' first books. Poems short and long, made of family anecdotes and (like Neruda's) of impressionistic lists, poems of remembered place (“The Adoration at El Montan,” set in San Antonio, Tex.) and poems of sexual joy between women give uncommon variety to the collection, even as Naca's fast pace, mixed English and Spanish (with bits of Tagalog), and first-person emphasis give it obvious unity. “Spanish means there's another person/ inside you,” she remembers her father saying. Poems composed originally in English mix with poems composed in Spanish and printed with her English translations. The next-to-last poem finds Naca in Mexico City, “City so high that passion lacks heat... City where I spoke a word of Spanish, and like a spigot, my dreams squeezed shut.” She also takes up, repeatedly, her Filipino-American background, the Pittsburgh of her youth, and the wide-open spaces she saw as an optimistic young writer in Nebraska. Chosen for the National Poetry Series' new mtvU award by Yusef Komunyakaa, the volume might be noticed by young people who may not otherwise purchase poetry but may discover Naca on cable TV. (Oct.)

Addonizio's gifts—clarity, wicked wit and directness about sex—remain on view in this, her fifth, collection, albeit with slightly diminishing returns. The Bay Area poet (What Is This Thing Called Love) extracts humor from headlines, takes comfort in the everyday and manages both to celebrate and to decry her complicated sexual self: “My Heart, “she says, is “That initial-scarred tabletop,/ that tiny little dance floor... That dressing room in the fetish boutique... That funhouse, that horror, that soundtrack of screams.” Verse about modern love can push the bounds of the art, or of the unartful: poems try coyly “to say things/ disallowed from serious poetry/ and employ instead the lexicon of porn spam.” Such work can certainly entertain. Less happily, poems based on fairy tales land too close to their older model, Anne Sexton, and poems about public catastrophes (Hurricane Katrina, the Asian tsunami of 2004, the Iraq war) end up neither funny nor seriously powerful. Some of Addonizio's best poems ought to be popular—a counterpart, as it were, to chick lit fiction (“I lost you like that grape jawbreaker/ I'd saved for last”) and far better technically than many kindred poets. Fans of Addonizio's prior books will find much to like, but newcomers might do better with earlier volumes. (Sept.)

Chinese experts rate Wei among the greatest poets of China's classic era, right alongside Tu Fu and Li Po; severe, self-critical, openly political and prone at times to self-pity, Wei remains obscure in the West and shouldn't be. The prolific translator Red Pine has made a striking selection, 170 poems in a facing-page edition with storylike notes on each. Born to privilege in the last flowering of the T'ang dynasty, Wei (c. 737–791) entered the civil service in his youth and became a provincial official in a time of civil war, enforcing harsh laws he disliked, missing his literary friends and welcoming time alone. Some of Wei's poems are pellucid, brief impressions: “the sound of mallets at the foot of leafless hills.” Others give moral advice, or show introspection: “Governing a prefecture takes no special skill/ what bothers me is eating for free.” Wei's poetry reflects a sensibility and history that only Chinese traditions could produce. Some of its powers come from Wei's whole life, others inhere in single vivid moments: “when will I hold someone's hand again/ the flowers overhead look like sleet.” (Sept.)

This second collection from Olstein is an impressive sequence of prose poems spoken in the voice of a lepidopterist engaged in isolated research on butterflies and moths near a village whose residents reluctantly embrace her presence. Flirting with fiction without quite unfurling a clear narrative, Olstein's speaker finds correlatives for her lonely if exploratory inner life in the insects—living and dead—she is studying: “I have long recognized kindness in the way they fly.” She thinks about and longs for a companion named Ilya, whose advice she mulls over often (“It is customary to pray for sound health and good understanding. Ilya says to be more specific is unwise—it's a mistake to believe we know what we require”); eventually, he joins her in her work. Most appealing is Olstein's sensitive, quietly pained and earnest tone, which, more than the unusual subject, is the real star of this book. It's as if everything Olstein says gains dire importance: “I want nothing to end, not a single observation, despite longing for what remains unknown.” (July)

For the inaugural volume in its new Spotlight series, a sequel to City Lights' famous Pocket Poets line (in which Ginsberg's Howl first appeared), the publisher has chosen this retrospective collection by San Francisco poet Cole. A disciple of Robert Duncan, Cole casts her short poems in jagged verse and prose blocks, by turns abstract (“Imaginations law hits frames”), surreal (“Bark grew up over their faces”) and painterly in a manner that will be familiar to fans of Barbara Guest: “This is the image of effort.” Other pieces work more like disjunctive fables: one such prose poem describes how “A little of life simply escapes from a shallow dish.” Cole is far better known on the West Coast and in experimental poetry circles than anywhere else; in fact, her work is surprisingly accessible given its avant garde origins and ambitions—beautiful phrases and lines leap off the page (“Then his/ signature will have taken place,” reads one poem)—and this concise gathering of poems from her 15 small press books should bring Cole much deserved attention. (June)

Sze's sparkling ninth collection is largely obsessed with people, animals, plants and planets, caught in moments that suggest (without exactly revealing) their place in a cosmic order. In the first poem, “a praying mantis on the floor sips water,” “an ex-army officer turned critic frets,” a welder watches an overpass, “teenage girls compare bra sizes,” “light from a partial lunar eclipse/ diffuses down skylight walls”; in the last “Cottonwood leaves/ drift on the surface; a polar bear leaps off ice.” In between, the images—as in the compound eye of a beautiful insect—add up to a persistent, even a single-minded, whole: Sze's free verse emphasizes at once how difficult, and how necessary, it is for us to imagine our world as a system whose ecologies and societies require us to care for all their interdependent parts. At worst, the poetry looks like a set of lists, an interminable photo album; at best, as he says, “we lift and turn the incidents until... we find their true and living place.” Sze (Quipu) weaves southwestern sights, Native lore, pre-Columbian peoples and languages, and East Asian poetry and thought throughout his verse, along with almost photographic reports on things seen: for him “Memory is encounter: each incident,// a bee thrumming in a hive.” (June)

Marchant remains best known for his poems against war: he left the Marines as a conscientious objector, the first officer to do so during the Vietnam War. Marchant (Tipping Point) remembers in this third book how his service troubled him and registers his dissent from more recent wars in energetic lines. He devotes more space, though, to more general lessons: “like the squirrels in the pine,” he writes, “I would teach my heart how to be a heart.” Marchant has long cherished connections to Ireland and to Irish poetry: “I loved the sweet silence of hay as it cured” on an Irish farm, he says, “and the labor too,/ the mowing and tossing,// letting grass breathe itself dry.” Like William Stafford—the influential American pacifist poet, whose poems Marchant edited—Marchant can see himself as a spiritual teacher, recording his struggles to set an example: he is most interesting when those struggles fail, and the poems present not wisdom but frustration—at the senseless illness of his sister, at nature (“the whorl of planets, a gristly wheel of trees”), at “the frantic,/ grinding inability to attend/ to anything but sere thwarting/ of yourself.” (June)

Careful, profound and much celebrated in Poland, Szuber seems the logical heir, in some ways, of Czeslaw Milosz. Throughout these gravely melodious short poems, Szuber remains reverent before all manner of fleeting worldly beauties, yet prone to introspection and self-accusation, and unable to get away for long from the disastrous 20th century. One sonnet begins humbly, with “a trip to the attic sprinkled with yellow dusty loams,” but ends in fear: “Somewhere out there was history with a capital letter,/ Clouds, fathomless thunderbolts.” Szuber can sound religious, but he treasures each moment on Earth: “Don't say you can't accept/ This here,” he warns. “There will never be/ Anything else.” And though he names places and individuals, frequently Szuber still yearns for a lyric universality, as in quatrains about an old photo album: “Who in truthful verse will briefly tell/ Of eternity, impermanent as a broken fan?” Born in 1947, Szuber represents not the new voice of postcommunist Poland, but the last flowering of the world-class lyric gifts—allegorical, pious, careful, self-estranged—that grew up in the shadow of the Iron Curtain, which deserve our attention. (June)

Avant gardist Kim's fifth book is a diligent inquiry into the relationship between language and power. The poems take place in a wasteland where war and, as the title would suggest, poverty are the norm; immigrants are treated with harsh suspicion and interrogated repeatedly, and Kim's rage at injustice and suffering rings loudly: “[lookout post] / Are these your names/ From we are from where are you from/ Say this may speaking// To burn or expose to the threat of the sun a person with a pigeon chest and protruding stomach.” The most fragmentary of these poems, which sprawl inventively across the whole page, can be quite difficult to parse, at times overwhelmingly so; still, a sense of urgent confusion comes to the fore, enriching the book's overall texture. Finally, this is an unsettling, collection that staunchly confronts a point in history “when the fish die all at once and appear on/ the banks all at once.” (June)

“I remember it vividly, where I was, the day I learned not to fear mental phenomena,” declares the prolific Rohrer (Rise Up) in this 55-part series of seven-line poems, each line a sentence long. What is thinking, and where do thoughts come from? Rohrer, in a state of startling tranquillity, looks within and without for answers and delivers an astounding array of possibilities, sometimes reaching into the ephemeral (“I wake indistinguishable from the washed-out morning”) and sometimes happily insular (“I feel like I really am my thoughts”). Either way, the act of connecting—to one's own mind, to the world outside of the mind and to both simultaneously—is the supreme thrust of the book, and it is impossible to resist participating in this nonchalant adventure in metaphysical perception. Full of unforgettable, aphoristic lines (“I have to go up to the roof to polish the moon”; “I'm on the subway where the mind is meaningless”), this beautifully designed book— including flip-book style illustrations that, from back to front, depict the disappearance of a plate of chicken—though small, has a huge capacity to stimulate and surprise. (June)

Baus's second collection picks up where his debut, To the Sound, left off, exploring the ways we mishear, misread and misunderstand, and offering novel means of reading a kind of insular, new language. The prose poems and sequences that compose this book are fragmentary, funny and willfully confusing in the service of pointing up what words can't say. One poem, “Orange Water” reads, in part, “The bloom. The boiling water. Bees. Real flowers release bees. Real flowers bloom orange. Real bees bloom in boiling water. Real water releases bees. Boiling real bees release flowers. The flowers bloom.” The poem flirts with both sense and nonsense. This kind of poetry is not for everyone, but to fans and curious readers looking for unusual ways of thinking about what words can do, Baus may seem capable of casting a spell with language, sound and sense. (June)

In her second full-length collection, Levitsky (Under the Sun) challenges readers with an expansive sequence of poems that vigorously dissemble and reassemble notions of what a poem is and does, a work that she refers to as a “spew, log, manifesto, confession—definitely not a poem!” Meditating on and inhabiting a wide variety of disciplines and ideas—from architecture to religion, the state to the domicile—Levitsky draws many unexpected connections, sometimes to dizzying effect: “In fact I was entering into a feeling of absolute chaos, and had to grab the closest thing I could find. I didn't want to be excluded but my choices caused me to limit my involvement.” Levitsky writes about the act of writing itself, candidly struggling with the solitude that writing requires; in the process, she faces her own wish to be elsewhere or doing something else (“I want this to be a novel”). While the self-awareness can become excessive, this is a decisively innovative book; Neighbor is brimming with sharply reported discoveries. (June)

Richard Bach, the author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, is back with another inspirational allegory; his son James's story is more down to earth, literally and metaphorically.

The hero of Bach's new book, pilot and flight instructor Jamie Forbes, is on a routine run when Maria, the panicked spouse of another pilot, radios that her husband has collapsed at the controls. Forbes talks her through the steps to land safely. Maria's explanation to reporters that Forbes “hypnotized” her sparks a series of memories for Jamie, and the events that follow force him to examine what constitutes reality, to contemplate what lies beyond the edges of our carefully constructed worlds and whether those edges are real or created by our own limitations. While it mines the same territory as The Secret, Bach's book is far richer, raising provocative questions and striking the perfect balance, providing answers without implying that they are the only—or necessarily the right—ones. (Sept.)

This is an informative and entertaining account of how to acquire a great education and a good job without classroom instruction or, as Bach puts it, how to become a buccaneer scholar. At 20, he became the youngest technical manager at Apple Computer and probably the only one whose highest academic credential was—and still is—an eighth-grade diploma. Now in his 40s, Bach runs a successful consulting business, and his work has been assigned reading for students at Stanford and MIT. As this book makes clear, Bach is also a gifted teacher. The steps along his road to achievement are detailed in clear chunks. Anyone looking for an instruction manual on how to get a high-quality education without having to show up for classes will find all they need here. The book may also be a healing balm to parents whose children are struggling in school, providing both with helpful tools. (Sept.)