Nonfiction Reviews: 8/24/2009

In this enthusiastic yet first-rate biography, veteran British historian Johnson (Modern Times) asserts that Winston Churchill (1874–1965) was the 20th century's most valuable figure: “No man did more to preserve freedom and democracy....” An ambitious, world-traveling soldier and bestselling author, Churchill was already famous on entering Parliament in 1899 and within a decade was working with Lloyd George to pass the great reforms of 1908–1911. As First Lord of the Admiralty, he performed brilliantly in preparing the navy for WWI, but blame—undeserved according to Johnson—for the catastrophic 1915 Dardanelles invasion drove him from office. Within two years, he was back at the top, where he remained until the Depression. Johnson delivers an adulatory account of Churchill's prescient denunciations of Hitler and heroics during the early days of WWII, and views later missteps less critically than other historians. He concludes that Churchill was a thoroughly likable great man with many irritating flaws but no nasty ones: he lacked malice, avoided grudges, vendettas and blame shifting, and quickly replaced enmity with friendship. Biographers in love with their subjects usually produce mediocre history, but Johnson, always self-assured as well as scholarly, has written another highly opinionated, entertaining work. B&w photos. (Nov.)

A tumultuous year yields a trove of political journalism in this anthology of magazine pieces. Leading off are sharp accounts of the Obama, McCain and Clinton campaigns, as well as Adam Sternbergh's smart look at how baseball statistics can inform election prognostications. A section on the economic meltdown features incisive analyses—and consistently dire forecasts—by Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman and James K. Galbraith. Profiles of the incoming Democratic regime include Michelle Cottle's savvy take on Obama's laboriously constructed, Gatsbyesque veneer of cool. Foreign-policy dispatches range through Christopher Hitchens's memoir of being waterboarded, Mark Danner's harrowing investigation of CIA torture methods and disquieting reports from Michael Hastings and Dexter Filkins on America's sputtering war against Islamic extremism in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Editor Flippin doesn't seem very widely read: the pieces are mainly culled from the New Yorker, New York magazine and the New York Times Magazine. (Brian Doherty chips in the lone conservative perspective in a sour piece on Obama as stealth dictator.) There are few surprises, but the compendium does showcase centrist flagship journalism at its most effective. (Nov.)

Turan, now the film critic for the Los Angeles Times, was approached by theatrical producer Joe Papp in the 1980s to develop an oral history of the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater, then blocked the book from publication after reading an early draft. Years later, we can understand some of Papp's reluctance: former colleagues speak frankly about his failure to share credit for success with others, and why the effort to move his radical style of theater into Lincoln Center met with failure. Papp's personality can be prickly, to say the least; one of his first reactions to a surprise birthday party thrown by his staff was to wonder what else they could be doing behind his back. But stories like this, or accounts of the backstage turbulence on plays like That Championship Season or True West, never overshadow Papp's creative legacy and his engagement with New York City's diverse society. As dozens of actors, from the late George C. Scott and Anthony Quinn to Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline, share their memories, it's easy to see how the constantly hustling Papp became “larger than life just by being himself.” (Nov. 3)

Two Googles emerge in this savvy profile of the Internet search octopus. The first is the actual company, with its mixture of business acumen and naïve idealism (“Don't Be Evil” is the corporate slogan); its brilliant engineering feats and grad-students-at-play company culture; its geek founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two billionaires who imbibe their antiestablishment rectitude straight from Burning Man; its pseudo-altruistic quest to offer all the world's information for free while selling all the world's advertising at a hefty profit. The second Google is a monstrous metaphor for all the creative destruction that the Internet has wrought on the crumbling titans of old media, who find themselves desperately wondering how they will make money off of news, music, video and books now that people can Google up all these things without paying a dime. The first Google makes for a standard-issue tech-industry grunge-to-riches business story, its main entertainment value being Brin's and Page's comical lack of social graces. But New Yorker columnist Auletta (World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies) makes the second Google a starting point for a sharp and probing analysis of the apocalyptic upheavals in the media and entertainment industries. (Nov. 3)

Antiques restorer Huggins delivers a knowledgeable, however overstuffed and ultimately frustrating, frolic through the high-end world of the buying and selling of early American decorative arts. Well experienced in spotting potential masterpieces from her longtime work as a furniture and mirror restorer for antiques dealer Israel Sack Inc. and the big New York auction houses, Huggins by chance found a large, exquisite rococo mirror at an auction in Clayville, R.I., and for the next 10 years allowed it to follow her around “like a beloved pet elephant.” Obsessed by tracking down its provenance, she knew only that the fanciful carving of the gilded frame, modeled on the Aesop's fable she calls Fox and Grapes, must have been from a Thomas Johnson design, while the wood was North American white pine and the primitive craftsmanship probably American. As an early Block Islander, Huggins was familiar with the old families of Rhode Island, and delves into the probable original owners, the Browns of Providence, specifically, Anne Brown Francis Woods and her daughter, whose first (rejected) suitor was the future Irish statesman Charles Parnell. The Irish question takes Huggins into a valid, unfashionable consideration of the mirror's manufacture in Dublin, although her long digression into the imagined lives of these families strains reader patience. Nonetheless, so-called experts (all male) are deliciously proved fallible in this informative, creative exegesis on how antiques attain their value. (Nov.)

Yale doctoral candidate Carson cobbles together previously published pieces of literary criticism by writers like Eudora Welty and Lionel Trilling with essays, several newly composed, by contemporary writers like Anna Quindlen and Fay Weldon. Pride and Prejudice fan Somerset Maugham finds Emma a snob and Mansfield Park's Fanny and Edmund intolerable prigs. Virginia Woolf contemplates what books Austen might have written had she lived beyond 42, speculating that her satire would have been more severe, and Amy Heckerling describes how she transformed Emma into the teen romance film Clueless set in 1990s Beverly Hills. C.S. Lewis finds that Austen's hard core of morality is what makes good comedy possible, and in one of the most personal essays, Brian Southam tells how he searched out a volume of juvenilia at a Kentish farmhouse belonging to Austen's great-great-niece. Heckerling aside, dissections of very particular plot and character points in most essays make this volume more appropriate to students than lay readers. And while separately the pieces make many astute points about Austen's oeuvre, overall the volume feels disjointed. (Nov.)

According to Agin, a molecular geneticist at the University of Chicago (Junk Science), a “silent pandemic” is causing untold damage to babies while they are in the womb. Toxic chemicals in the environment are assaulting developing fetuses, as are substances (such as alcohol and nicotine) ingested by pregnant women and capable of dramatically altering developmental pathways. According to Agin, the role of the intrauterine environment has largely been ignored by scientists who look to genes and a child's postbirth environment to explain behavior issues, mental illness and IQ. He demonstrates, too, that all the fuss about race and IQ is meaningless because the prenatal environment may have a huge role in determining intelligence. Agin is at his most powerful in the final chapter, in which he argues that without good prenatal care, poverty “readily transforms into an inherited disease.” Agin marshals the scientific data to build an impressive case for his perspective, particularly regarding developmental problems in American babies compared with those in the rest of the world—it is frightening and deserves widespread attention. (Nov.)

Thomas, the doyenne of the White House press corps for over 30 years, stops asking questions and starts giving answers in this how-to guide to the American presidency. Having covered every president since Kennedy, Thomas offers up a “lesson plan” drawn from the foibles and successes of presidents past, with praise and admonition meted out in equal measure. While Carter gets high marks for his honesty (his poor political gamesmanship is served up as a warning), Nixon takes a predictable beating for his paranoia and combative stance toward the press while Kennedy alone slips through unscathed, described as “our best president of the later twentieth century.” While the book sometimes devolves into platitudes (“Telling hard truths makes great leaders”) accounts of Thomas sparring with press secretaries like George Stephanopoulos (who infamously compared her voice to the Wicked Witch of the West's) and Ari Fleischer are entertaining. Her incessant questioning of power also drives home the underlying message of the book: it's a primer not, at heart, for those who would be president but for those who would elect one. (Oct.)

Cleland's memoir details his remarkable journey from smalltown Georgia to Vietnam to a U.S. Senate seat, his trajectory serving as scaffolding for a withering critique of the Bush administration's handling of September 11. “America sends the flower of its youth abroad to fight its wars,” he writes, describing losing both legs and one arm during his tour in Vietnam. From his friendship with fellow Georgian Jimmy Carter to a meeting with the young governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, Cleland's life seems inextricably bound to the nation he has served. As such, the he and the nation share crises of confidence: both fall into bitter disillusionment over the Vietnam War, culture wars and political infighting, and Cleland is candid about his periods of depression and the counseling that renewed his faith in himself and his country. Concluding with a meditation on his frustration with the Iraq War—during which he helped to create, and later resigned from in protest, the 9/11 Commission—Cleland's life seems to once again be attuned to the national mood. Photos. (Oct.)

Historian Stuermer attempts to shed light on Vladimir Putin's 2000–2008 presidency and his vision for a new Russia in this thorough but poorly organized and overly complex book. Putin is “a man from nowhere,” an understated and effective KGB agent turned city administrator who moved from near-anonymity to the presidency in a few years. Putin is portrayed as both insider and outsider, but untrammeled by the political infighting and corruption of the post-Soviet Russian political machine. He quickly showed his mettle: revitalizing Russian industry, upgrading a decaying military and shifting top positions from the hands of career bureaucrats to former intelligence officers, producing a government of unparalleled obscurity. This book could have been an invaluable guide for Americans—post-Soviet Russia remains a major global force yet is woefully misunderstood by Westerners complacent after “winning” the cold war. But basic facts about Putin and post-Soviet Russia are glossed over, leaving the layperson to wade through a labyrinth of unfamiliar names, government agencies and corporations. Readers who manage to make sense of all this will find that the author's analyses of Russia's changing demographics, its status as a nuclear power and the future of its petroleum-based economy insightful and, often, troubling. (Oct.)

Bailey, now a Tennessee circuit court judge, was one of “hundreds of student leaders” expelled from black Southern colleges in the 1960s for political activities. A scholarship for expelled Southern students led him north to Clark University, where his education and activism continued as he realized that “the North wasn't miraculously more rational or egalitarian than the South.” By his senior year, he was on the front lines at the demonstrations at Gwynn Oak Amusement Park in Baltimore (July 1963), participating in the March on Washington a month later, but with reservations (“the original idea for the march so dissipated that the final gathering seemed more like a picnic than protest”). In focusing tightly on those “foot soldier” years that shaped his adult convictions, “the story of my life as a college student caught up in the movement,” Bailey takes the reader inside the student debates and deliberations, the organizing and strategizing activities of the early '60s, adding a valuable dimension to the history of the civil rights movement. (Oct.)

Presenting a startling dissection of the historically elusive Jane Grey's 13-day reign, British scholar Ives (The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn) decodes the character, actions and motives of the key figures responsible for the fate of the Tudor teenager. He maintains that Jane herself, while precociously intellectual, was the least influential figure in the succession crisis of 1553. Taking center stage is her father-in law, John Dudley, duke of Northumberland, who in Ives's hands isn't England's most powerful man, compelling King Edward VI to add Jane to the succession to make her husband, and Dudley's son, king upon Edward's death. Rather, Ives posits the Dudley-Grey marriage as a routine aristocratic alliance and that Northumberland, as the son of an executed traitor, was obsessively loyal to an independent Edward; Edward initiated Jane and her possible future sons' promotion to achieve his long-term goal of an all-male succession. Moreover, Edward's privy council endorsed Jane's accession because they saw Jane as the rightful queen of England. Turning traditional scholarship on its ear, Ives's radical reinterpretation of one of history's briefest, most puzzling reigns is masterfully researched, authoritative and a difficult but seductive read. Illus., one map. (Oct.)

From the Defenestration of Prague in 1618 until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, brutal warfare swept across Europe. In his monumental study of the causes and the consequences of the Thirty Years War, Wilson, a professor of history at the University of Hull in England, challenges traditional interpretations of the war as primarily religious. He explores instead the political, social, economic as well as religious forces behind the conflict—for example, an Ottoman incursion left the Hapsburg Empire considerably weakened and overshadowed by the Spanish empire. Wilson then provides a meticulous account of the war, introducing some of its great personalities: the crafty General Wallenstein; the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus, who preserved his state through canny political treaties and military operations; and Hapsburg archdukes Rudolf and Matthias, the brothers whose quarrels marked the future of Bohemia, Austria and Hungary. By the war's end, ravaged as all the states were by violence, disease and destruction, Europe was more stable, but with sovereign states rather than empires, and with a secular order. Wilson's scholarship and attention to both the details and the larger picture make his the definitive history of the Thirty Years War. 16 pages of color photos; 22 maps. (Oct.)

Ohio State history professor Roth's ambitious project—analyzing American homicide from colonial times to the present—makes for an intriguing if dense read. He distills his argument into several key statistics, all of which hinge upon the fact that Americans are murdered more frequently than citizens in any other first world democracy: U.S. homicide rates are between six and nine per 100,000 people. Roth refutes popular theories about why this is so (e.g., poverty, drugs) and lays out an alternate hypothesis: “increases in homicide rates” correlate with changes in people's feelings about government and society, such as whether they trust government and its officials and their sense of kinship with fellow citizens. Roth examines homicides by historical period, race and region, especially significant when comparing the ante- and postbellum North and South—turmoil and divisiveness in the South led to an explosion of murder in some areas during the war that continued during Reconstruction. Readers impatient with statistics or desiring a more narrative overview may be disappointed, but those wanting to learn what history can teach us about this most primal act of aggression will find Roth's analysis fascinating. (Oct.)

Miami Beach proves a multilayered topic for Posner: investigative journalist, bestselling author (Case Closed) and denizen of America's most “decadent” city. Posner examines how Miami Beach turned from a quiet resort into the interconnecting site of crime, finance and politics (which one mayor described as “a blood sport”). The author gives a penetrating look at the sun-drenched history of South Florida, the swampland and scoundrels, rumrunners and smugglers in speedboats from Prohibition on, a major military training center during WWII and the glitzy playground of mobsters. The book comes alive from the start with an account of South Florida overwhelmed in 1980 by the influx of 125,000 Cuban refugees, followed by gritty segments on the coke wars, South Beach fun and frolic, the gay glam party life and the revitalization of key areas of the Beach. Corruption in City Hall and immoral real estate moguls conclude this thoroughly entertaining analysis of one of the original American pleasure domes and the good times that continue to roll. 8 pages of b&w photos. (Oct. 13)

With 26 essays collected from 15 publications, New Yorker contributor Kolbert (Field Notes from a Catastrophe) has pulled together a magnificent display of writing. There's not a weak piece in the bunch. Kolbert's choices provide a sense of major themes in science today, with five pieces focused on evolution and seven on environmental topics. As Kolbert notes, “Darwin's ideas seem ever more central to our culture, even as their implications continue to challenge us.” As Benjamin Phelan shows, there's controversy even among biologists about some aspects of evolution, such as whether humans are still evolving today; Phelan presents the evidence that we are. John Broome discusses the ethics of climate change while Michael Specter is insightful on the difficulties of measuring one's carbon footprint; he concludes counterintuitively that, in many cases, it may make more environmental sense to purchase imported food than to buy locally. Other entries show what might have been prior to the Big Bang, the use of virtual reality games to quell post-traumatic stress disorder in Iraqi War veterans and much more. The collection is a joy to read and one to savor. (Oct. 8)

We've all experienced the “tyranny of e–mail”: the endless onslaught, the continual distraction, the superfluous messages clogging our inboxes. Freeman, acting editor of Granta magazine, captures viscerally “the buzzing, humming megalopolis” that “tunes into this techno-rave of send and receive, send and receive.” And he draws effectively on psychological and social research to describe the harm this “tsunami” of e-mail is causing: fragmenting our days, fracturing our concentration, diverting us from other sources of information and face-to-face encounters. Freeman is best when he is on point. But when he drifts into history—granted, to make the salient point that this feeling of life speeding out of control overwhelmed people with the arrival of the railroad and the telegraph (though, strangely, he omits the telephone, our e-mail enabler)—he offers more postal and telegraphic details than most people will want and hammers his main points into the ground (e.g., we need to be needed, and receiving e-mail gratifies that need). But his closing “manifesto for a slow communication movement” could fuel an e-mail rebellion, and his tips on how to slow down are sensible and mostly doable, except perhaps for the most hard-core e-mail addicts. (Oct.)

While, as the authors state, “practically every article and book, every therapist, and every relationship guru in the media focus almost exclusively on 'primary relationships,' ” there is a dearth of attention paid to individuals' secondary—or tertiary—connections: the butcher, the dry cleaner, the proprietor of the bodega where we shop daily. Transient individuals, friends of friends and their acquaintances play critical roles in our lives, say Baby Whisperer Blau and Purdue professor Fingerman. These people have access to resources intimates might not and can challenge our belief systems. This book is especially cogent today when so many unemployed are relying on social networking contacts on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, where “friends” most likely aren't part of an inner circle, but could know of a job not publicly advertised. Anecdotes, television, scholarly studies and Blau and Fingerman's own experience—they were “consequential strangers” who first met via telephone—illustrate the importance of individuals we often take for granted yet who enrich our lives in ways not immediately noticeable but that could prove highly significant. (Oct.)

Author and blogger VanderMeer (Finch) outlines ways for writers to harness both the emerging power of the Internet and their own creativity in this informative guide. VanderMeer differentiates between a “Public Booklife” (marketing the book and the writer) and a “Private Booklife” (strategies to help get words on the page) and suggests that one's ideal Booklife is a dynamic balance of the two. Even though the Web's landscape is constantly shifting, his hints about ways to maximize a writer's exposure—including weighing the pros and cons of Facebook, MySpace and Twitter—can certainly be applied to future social networking sites and blogs. The tips for creating a flourishing Public Booklife will appeal to a wide variety of writers, from those just starting out to those trying to navigate the changing world of book publishing, while the Private Booklife section seems more tailored to new authors. With anecdotes from VanderMeer's own life as a writer, reviewer and blogger, as well as input from agents, editors and publicists, this guide will surely help writers traverse the often difficult journey from first draft to finished product. (Oct. 15)

Liebman, arts editor of the hip Jewish lifestyle magazine Heeb, introduces a refreshing set of essays that reveal an array of both ordinary and extraordinary modern-day Jewish experiences. Arranged by theme (sex, drugs, work, youth, family, body and soul), these four dozen essays—the products of a Heeb storytelling performance series—explore the humorous, scandalous and often sentimental moments in life. Rebecca Addelman re-evaluates the college summer she spent in Israel getting naked with another kibbutz volunteer and a middle-aged Israeli. Andy Borowitz conveys the irony of a Jewish Harvard graduate (himself) writing a hip-hop sitcom for Will Smith: The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Most outstanding is Eric Weingrad's account of spying his loathed Hebrew school teacher naked during a Sabbath night spent at her house. The contributors—musicians, actors, comedians and writers—will be familiar to many. Full of wit, irony, heartbreak and vindication, these essays will undoubtedly please those in search of an honest but creative look at Jewish life and its many trials. B&w photos. (Oct. 26)

“I was one of those kids who was always putting on a show,” The View cohost Shepherd writes in this tell-all memoir loosely structured as a self-help book; after every tumultuous chapter Shepherd gives the reader permission to do this or not do that based on her own experience (“Write yourself a permission slip that says, 'I tried, and I can't handle this' ”). Shepherd is a feisty African-American single mom, comedian and former Jehovah's Witness. The tone is good-natured, rueful and funny. Yet it will be no surprise that Shepherd has had a few bumps in the road: among others, being shamed by her family and church for having sex at age 14; rejected in her showbiz career; and the birth of a severely premature baby, divorce and a diagnosis of diabetes. Shepherd is a woman coming to terms with her altered looks as she passes 40 alone and raising a child. She is still religious, and occasionally the reader may pull back, such as when Shepherd admits she does not believe in evolution. All in all, though, this is a good, dishy read, if not easy to apply to one's own everyday life. (Oct. 14)

Brand, co-author of the seminal 1969 Whole Earth Catalog, compiles reflections and lessons learned from more than 40 years as an environmentalist in this clumsy yet compelling attempt to inspire practicable solutions to climate change. Brand haphazardly organizes his “manifesto” into chapters that address environmental stewardship opportunities, exhorting environmentalists to “become fearless about following science”; his iconoclastic proposals include transitioning to nuclear energy and ecosystem engineering. Brand believes environmentalists must embrace nuclear energy expansion and other inevitable technological advances, and refreshingly suggests a shift in the environmentalists' dogmatic approach to combating climate change. Rejecting the inflexible message so common in the Green movement, he describes a process of reasonable debate and experimentation. Brand's fresh perspective, approachable writing style and manifest wisdom ultimately convince the reader that the future is not an abyss to be feared but an opportunity for innovative problem solvers to embrace enthusiastically. (Oct.)

Stuart (The Bloodless Revolution) writes of the perilous illusion of abundance and how countries can reduce food waste by accurately examining how much they toss away due to poor storage or unused surplus—and why. European and American food manufacturers, supermarkets and consumers throw away between 30% and 50% of their food supply—enough to feed the world's hungry. Waste also occurs as a result of inadequate harvesting and farming techniques, prevalent in countries like Pakistan, where the author examines the need for better grain harvesting and land cultivation. Stuart's thoughtful illumination of the problem and his proposed solutions are bound to get even the most complacent citizen thinking about how slowly wilting vegetables might have a second life. Simply growing more food, Stuart argues, is not necessarily the answer. Agriculture takes up space and often results in deforestation. If rich countries could cut waste by treating food more carefully, while developing countries gained the equipment necessary to improve their output, he contends, a significant reduction in global food waste—and even global hunger—could be achieved. Stuart's brief is passionately argued and rigorously researched, and is an important contribution to the discussion of sustainability. (Oct.)

Krames (Inside Drucker's Brain) employs an extended tennis metaphor to explain why some managers succeed and others fail. “In professional tennis, the player with the fewest unforced errors usually wins,” he writes. “The same is true in business.” The unforced error—a mistake that is committed without a cause by a player with the ability to keep the ball in play—is used to describe a variety of career-killing moves (e.g., choosing an unsatisfactory work partner, being ill-prepared). Citing statistics of the growing number of CEOs who have lost their jobs as a result of inadvertent errors, Krames shows how easy it is for even the most talented managers to fall victim to these mistakes. Like a good coach, he guides readers to improve their game with numerous examples from the careers of such business luminaries as Jack Welch and Peter Drucker as well as tennis greats Steffi Graf and John McEnroe. Each chapter also includes a bulleted list of key chapter points for easy skimming. Insightful and with an original presentation, this book will be of great interest to managers and executives hoping to avoid unforeseen and costly pitfalls. (Oct.)

Yet another rallying cry to the banner of turning your passion into a career, from braggadocio-ridden entrepreneur Vaynerchuk. After taking over his father's local liquor store, Shopper's Discount Liquors, and building it from a $4 million business to a $50 million one, he created the wine-tasting blog Wine Library TV and discovered the power of the Internet for driving sales. This book shares his experience and step-by-step advice for using Twitter, Facebook, etc., and suggestions for monetizing an online persona, reiterating that the Internet makes it possible for anyone to make serious cash by turning what they love most into their personal brand. His enthusiasm is admirable and his advice solid, but there's nothing new here, and his unappealing swagger—repeated stories of how he “crushed it” and “dominated” grate particularly—gives his story more the tone of adolescent peacocking than of worthwhile and sober business advice. (Oct.)

Stuever, a Washington Post staff writer and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, has appeared on The View, The Today Show and NPR with his incisive commentaries. Following Off Ramp, he returns for another heartland safari, this time to observe Christmas celebrations in Frisco, Tex. He explains: “This book takes place over three holiday seasons (2006, 2007 and 2008) among three unrelated families who live in a new megaworld north of Dallas, a place that often seemed to have surrendered its identity to the shopper within.” His seasonal survey begins with Tammie Parnell, who runs a business decorating other people's homes. In the chapter “There Glows the Neighborhood,” he describes the “Trykoski lights,” a house decorated with 50,000 lights, and traces this holiday history back to 2004 when Carson Williams scored a million-plus Internet hits after synchronizing 16,000 lights to music. Stuever watches the 1.1 million-square-foot Stonebriar Centre mall being decorated at midnight. While single mom Caroll Cavazos shops with her family at Best Buy, the author has an epiphany (“I see it as Caroll sees it. Real lives are being lived here”), and later he goes with her to church and a potluck dinner gift-swap. With impeccable research and solid reporting, Stuever has written the gift book that keeps on giving—Christmas consumerism wrapped together with traditional family values. (Nov. 12)

“Paris has better French restaurants, Madrid has better Spanish restaurants, and Tokyo has better Japanese restaurants,” Grimes concedes, but “no city... offers as many national cooking styles, at all price ranges, as New York does.” It wasn't always this way. As Grimes points out, it wasn't until the early 19th century that Manhattan and Brooklyn's culinary offerings extended beyond boardinghouse and tavern. His lively, profusely illustrated history veers in one fascinating direction after another, from the proliferation of oyster houses in the 1800s to the original recipe for chop suey. Grimes hits all the obvious high points—Delmonico's, the Automat, Le Pavillion, etc.—but also puts a spotlight on forgotten venues like Forum of the Twelve Caesars, an outsized theme restaurant from the same company that owned the Four Seasons. He gets personal in the final chapter, describing the scene of the late 1990s and early 2000s from his front-line perspective as the restaurant critic for the New York Times. (He has since moved on to the book review desk.) All the material is so fascinating that you'll wish every chapter was at least twice as long, but it's hard to imagine a more entertaining introduction to the subject. (Oct.)

“Elusive, mysterious, strange, eccentric, weird, genius”—the legend of jazz pianist Thelonious Monk began early in his career, propagated by supporters and detractors in equal measure. Kelley (Race Rebels) breaks down the mythology, taking great pains to establish, for example, that Monk, far from being an untutored savant, was intimately familiar with classical and popular music. Every step of Monk's musical journey is teased out in meticulous detail, from his childhood piano lessons to his groundbreaking half-year run headlining at New York's Five Spot, along with behind-the-scenes stories from the recording sessions for classic albums like Brilliant Corners and Monk's Music. Kelley also explains Monk's most notorious behaviors—stony silences when confronted in public, exuberant dancing during concerts—as the outward signs of a bipolar disorder that went unrecognized for much of his life, with immeasurable impact on his career. (He was often unable to even play in New York jazz clubs because his reputation precluded him from getting a work license from city authorities.) Sometimes, the sheer amount of information can be overwhelming, but whether he's charting the highs or lows of Monk's emotional swings, Kelley rarely strays from his central theme of an extraordinary talent pushing against the boundaries of his art. (Oct.)

Best known as the drummer for the rock power trio, the Police, Copeland has developed a successful career composing for film and stage, post-Police, as well as a deep passion for polo. Given such a pedigree, his autobiography might be read as that of a seriously rarefied man—a rock star, composer and English country gent. Yet Copeland's natural humility and sincerity encourage a most intimate, even familiar read. However, his memoir emerges as a series of extended but sometimes haphazardly arranged reminiscences, which occasionally distort his personal chronology. During such disjunctures, Copeland's otherwise smart and easygoing prose morphs into a rather laborious, even confusing read. But the work is worth it. Copeland's confessions from the 2007–2008 reunion tour of the Police, which make up the more engaging second half of the book, form a seamless and irresistible narrative. The ego-driven tempests that have articulated the life and times of the Police are laid out by Copeland in a fresh and honest way, not without self-implication either. More than anything else, however, Copeland makes readers feel as if they were on stage with him, Sting and Andy Summers, sharing with us the thrill of performing with one of the great bands of all time. (Oct.)

“Grievances in my family are like underground coal fires,” Friend confides, “hard to detect and nearly impossible to extinguish.” But a remembrance of his mother that appeared in the New Yorker brought many of those tensions to the surface; shortly afterward, his father accused him of being “a prisoner of Freudianism” for dwelling on the theme of emotional distance. Nevertheless, Friend pushes forward, combining family history and memoir as he recounts his youthful efforts to prove “my family was not my fate” and break away from the “cast of mind” circumscribed by his WASP upbringing—the firm handshakes, the summer homes, the university clubs. Friend knows exactly how privileged he is and recognizes that readers won't easily feel sorry for someone who can spend more than $160,000 on therapy. (“My birthright in wherewithal,” he quips, “seemed to me almost perfectly balanced by my birthright in repression.”) Instead of asking for sympathy, he works at showing how his efforts at emotional integration have begun to pay off, including the relationship with his own wife and children, in a story of cross-generational frustration and reconciliation that transcends class boundaries. 8 pages of b&w photo. (Oct.)

Journalist Pogrebin (Stars of David) explores in a palatable, nonscholarly format some of the sticky issues of identity that accompany being a twin. Enjoying an “extreme intimacy” from embryo to adulthood, twins, especially identical, achieve a unique, somewhat exclusive self-sufficiency that can be comforting and enriching as well as stifling and restricting. Pogrebin, whose own twin, New York Times reporer Robin, grew less needy for the other's presence as they grew older, interviews numerous twins in various walks of life to probe the source and stages of their emotional development, from football stars Tiki and Ronde Barber to a pair of 86-year-olds who were operated on by Dr. Mengele at Auschwitz. Some of the recurrent topics that Pogrebin superficially explores include the sense of not needing other people as much as twins need each other, thus making it harder to find intimacy outside of the duo; feeling “jilted” when the other finds a partner or spouse (“Anybody who marries a twin,” asserts one, “has to understand that they're marrying two people”); dealing with the amplified competition and constant comparison; parental favoritism; and the importance of establishing a distinct identity from the other. Touching on timely medical topics such as the “risky business” of multiple births, especially by in vitro fertilization, and recent discoveries in DNA research, Pogrebin's personal journey will prove helpful to other twins, but is not the end word on the subject. (Oct.)

[Signature]

Reviewed by Kirstin Downey

Historian Linda Gordon presents us with a portrait of the artist as a woman in her fascinating new biography of photographer Dorothea Lange [1895–1965], who captured the images of Americans on the move during the Great Depression.

Lange's most famous picture features a migrant woman in California, a refugee from the Dust Bowl. She sits by the side of the road in her lean-to tent, her children draped on her body, hanging from her haggard frame like dead weights, as she stoically looks out into the distance.

But the book's central focus is the journey made by the woman standing behind the camera lens. Lange was raised on New York City's Lower East Side and overcame obstacles almost from the start. During her childhood, her parents separated, which Dorothea experienced as a desertion by her father, and a bout of childhood polio left her with a permanent limp. She spotted an opportunity, however, in photography, which was a burgeoning new art field. Dorothea apprenticed herself to a master to learn the craft, giving herself a new identity. She dropped her childhood name, Dorothea Nutzhorn, and adopted her mother's maiden name instead.

She further redefined herself after making a westward trek in 1918. Within two years, she emerged as a prosperous society photographer in San Francisco who specialized in portraiture of the city's elite, but that work dried up in the 1930s. Lange shifted course again, becoming a documentary photographer for New Deal programs. From 1935 to 1941, Lange was virtually a migrant worker herself, traveling from place to place, photographing farm workers in fields and primitive labor camps.

Gordon wrestles with the issue of how Lange dealt with her role as a woman in a society where family burdens are disproportionately borne by females. Raising a large brood of children and stepchildren, Lange frequently had to put her own work aside to run the household. She also became the primary breadwinner for her first husband, cowboy artist Maynard Dixon, and later supported the career of her second husband, economist and diplomat Paul Taylor, despite her own failing health.

Lange privately railed at her family obligations. She shipped the children away when their care conflicted with her schedule or that of her respective husbands. And sometimes she could be cruel: she took revenge on her adolescent stepdaughter, whose father dumped her in Dorothea's lap for months at a time, criticizing and carping at her and photographing her in ways that an adolescent girl would likely have found humiliating.

Dorothea Lange's talented eye brings the Great Depression home for us even today, but an observer might suggest that Dorothea, despite her fame and talent, was as much a captive of a woman's societal roles as the migrant mother she so brilliantly photographed. (Oct.)

Kirstin Downey is a former staff writer at theWashington Post and author of The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR's Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience (Doubleday/Talese).