Nonfiction Reviews: 9/28/2009

Family tragedy is healed by domestic routine in this quiet, tender memoir. When his daughter Amy died suddenly at the age of 38 from an asymptomatic heart condition, journalist and novelist Rosen-blatt (Lapham Rising) and his wife moved into her house to help her husband care for their three young children. Not much happens except for the mundane, crucial duties of child care: reading stories, helping with schoolwork, chasing after an indefatigable toddler who is “the busiest person I have ever known,” making toast to order for finicky kids. Building on the small events of everyday life, Rosenblatt draws sharply etched portraits of his grandchildren; his stoic, gentle son-in-law; his wife, who feels slightly guilty that she is living her daughter's life; and Amy emerges as a smart, prickly, selfless figure whose significance the author never registered until her death. Rosenblatt avoids the sentimentality that might have weighed down the story; he writes with humor and an engagement with life that makes the occasional flashes of grief all the more telling. The result is a beautiful account of human loss, measured by the steady effort to fill in the void. (Feb. 16)

Computer scientist and Internet guru Lanier's fascinating and provocative full-length exploration of the Internet's problems and potential is destined to become a must-read for both critics and advocates of online-based technology and culture. Lanier is best known for creating and pioneering the use of the revolutionary computer technology that he named virtual reality. Yet in his first book, Lanier takes a step back and critiques the current digital technology, more deeply exploring the ideas from his famous 2000 Wired magazine article, “One-Half of a Manifesto,” which argued against more wildly optimistic views of what computers and the Internet could accomplish. His main target here is Web 2.0, the current dominant digital design concept commonly referred to as “open culture.” Lanier forcefully argues that Web 2.0 sites such as Wikipedia “undervalue humans” in favor of “anonymity and crowd identity.” He brilliantly shows how large Web 2.0–based information aggregators such as Amazon.com—as well as proponents of free music file sharing—have created a “hive mind” mentality emphasizing quantity over quality. But he concludes with a passionate and hopeful argument for a “new digital humanism” in which radical technologies do not deny “the specialness of personhood.” (Jan.)

A fascinating and deeply personal look at the lives of six defectors from the repressive totalitarian regime of the Republic of North Korea, in which Demick, an L.A. Times staffer and former Seoul bureau chief, draws out details of daily life that would not otherwise be known to Western eyes because of the near-complete media censorship north of the arbitrary border drawn after Japan's surrender ending WWII. As she reveals, “ordinary” life in North Korea by the 1990s became a parade of horrors, where famine killed millions, manufacturing and trade virtually ceased, salaries went unpaid, medical care failed, and people became accustomed to stepping over dead bodies lying in the streets. Her terrifying depiction of North Korea from the night sky, where the entire area is blacked out from failure of the electrical grid, contrasts vividly with the propaganda on the ground below urging the country's worker-citizens to believe that they are the envy of the world. Thorough interviews recall the tremendous difficulty of daily life under the regime, as these six characters reveal the emotional and cultural turmoil that finally caused each to make the dangerous choice to leave. As Demick weaves their stories together with the hidden history of the country's descent into chaos, she skillfully re-creates these captivating and moving personal journeys. (Jan.)

This breezy, engaging book does not explicitly attempt biography; instead journalist Abramsky dissects the personality of Barack Obama, examining the qualities—focus, self-confidence and curiosity—that fueled his meteoric rise. The book, the fifth in this series, draws on an impressive number of interviews with Obama's friends and associates—though not one with the president himself—and includes illuminating anecdotes from every phase of the president's life. Case studies of the Iowa caucus, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy and the appointment of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state bring the book's arguments into focus. Abramsky does little to conceal his enthusiasm for Obama, comparing him repeatedly to Lincoln and Kennedy and labeling him a potential “once-in-a-generation leader.” Skeptics are likely to find the author's praise off-putting (he includes dissenting views but generally dismisses them). None of the book's insights are revelatory—for example, Obama's poise and calm under pressure have been fodder for journalists and talking heads since the primaries began—but supporters are likely to enjoy the book's concision and fresh approach to familiar material. (Dec.)

Brief, punchy slices of daily life originally published in her Philadelphia Inquirer column allow novelist Scottoline (Everywhere That Mary Went) to dish on men, mothers, panty lines and, especially, dogs. Somewhere in her mid-50s, twice divorced (from men she calls Thing One and Thing Two) and living happily in the burbs with her recent college-graduate daughter and a passel of pets, Scottoline maintains a frothy repartee with the reader as she discusses ways she would redecorate the White House (“Cupholders for all!”), relies on her built-in Guilt-O-Meter to get dreaded tasks done (a broken garbage disposal rates only a 1, while accumulating late fees at the library rates a 7) and contemplates, while making a will, who will get her cellulite. For some quick gags, Scottoline brings in various family members: mother Mary, a whippersnapper at 4'11” who lives in South Beach with her gay son, Scottoline's brother Frank, and possesses a coveted back-scratcher; and her Harvard-educated daughter, Francesca. Plunging into home improvement frenzy, constructing a chicken coop, figuring out mystifying insurance policies and how not to die at the gym are some of the conundrums this ordinary woman faces with verve and wicked humor, especially how her beloved dogs have contentedly replaced the romance in her life. (Dec.)

Singer-songwriter Joey Ramone, who cofounded the rock group the Ramones in 1974, died of lymphatic cancer at age 49 in 2001. Born Jeff Hyman in Manhattan, he grew up in Forest Hills, Queens, with low self-esteem and what is described as an obsessive compulsive disorder, but he soon escaped to Greenwich Village, where he became a punk pioneer. Commercial success was elusive. While the Ramones remained an underground band, they are regarded today as a huge influence on the entire punk rock movement. Joey's brother, Mickey Leigh (who formed his own band), recreates that electric era, striking all the right chords in this dynamic biography. With skillful writing, he finds Joey's musical roots in their dysfunctional family life. As they attempted to deal with their mother's divorce and remarriage, the accidental death of their stepfather, financial worries and neighborhood bullies, their interest in rock, drugs and far-out fashions escalated. With angst-ridden anecdotes, the book traces the trajectory of the Ramones over two decades, from early gigs and recording sessions through sibling rivalry, feuds, fights, eccentric escapades and 2,000-plus performances before they disbanded in 1996. Leigh and Legs's mashup of memories with solid research makes for revelatory reading in this compelling portrait of a musical misfit who evolved into a countercultural icon. (Dec. 1)

Weiland's lively, vernacular memoir tells the sadly wasted but ultimately self-directed tale of her meteoric rise as a model from impoverished, half-Mexican roots to a precipitous plunge into drug addiction. Growing up in a broken Southern California home in the 1980s, where she lived mostly with her working Mexican mother in near poverty, the author, née Forsberg, found autonomy and financial independence early on in modeling; by age 14 she was a finalist for a Seventeen magazine modeling contest and traveling to New York; by 16, she had quit school, been legally “emancipated” and booked overseas jobs. She also became infatuated with aspiring rock and roller Scott Weiland, who was briefly her driver, and as he became hugely successful with his band, Stone Temple Pilots, he slid into heroin addiction and dragged her along with him. He was also involved with another woman, and the author's account is a painful re-enactment of her youthful abasement. From partying scene to junkie desperation to psychiatrist's office, jail and rehab, Forsberg Weiland battled her demons, learning with some surprise that she suffered from bipolar disorder. Having two children with Scott turned her around, though her marriage crumbled when he didn't change. Weiland's forthright, resilient can-do spirit injects this sad story with a healthy moral. (Dec.)

Five generations of Italian immigrants carry on a love affair with America in this sprawling, exuberant memoir. Graziano's narrative, padded with reams of invented dialogue, stretches back to his 19th-century ancestors in the Italian village of Maida, a semifeudal society whose rigid class hierarchy and hopeless poverty are reinforced by a church-inculcated fatalism. (The author's anticlericalism is pronounced.) But for those with gumption, America beckons: a harsh but dynamic place where opportunities abound despite anti-Italian bigotry. The story gradually refocuses on Graziano's lush reminiscences of his Depression-era boyhood in Nyack, N.Y., where his family weathered hard times thanks to clan solidarity and his father's Herculean work ethic. The author includes iconic vignettes of steerage and arrival, lengthy digressions on Italian history and sociological exegeses of the ways in which immigrants adapted Italy's peasant culture to America, along with novelistic domestic scenes—family dinners, street vendors, wash-day rituals—that are almost Proustian in their detail. The book is a bit schmaltzy and sometimes feels like an overstuffed photo album full of rose-colored stories about half-remembered cousins, but its evocations of family life make it a rich study of the immigrant adventure. Photos. (Dec.)

Haywood, a Canadian model who was 20 when the events of this book occurred, reassured herself and her husband, Matt, that working as a Tokyo hostess in an upscale Roppongi bar was more akin to being a geisha than a prostitute. Once she got the temporary but full-time job as hostess at Greengrass, all she had to do was look hot in a dress and heels, keep the rich customers drinking, make conversation and occasionally sing karaoke, all for a couple hundred dollars a night. Or so she thought. As she quickly learned, she had to be popular with the clients by building relationships, going on dohans, or dates, outside the club, and generally being at her favorites' beck and call. Some of the clients got pretty weird, such as the importunate, chatty surgeon Nori, who took the author on extravagant shopping sprees in the hope that she would love him, and the dangerously morose, cocaine-fueled Yoshi, the scion of a Japanese entertainment empire whose jaded diffidence Haywood began to fall for. Gradually, the mollifying of lonely older men's egos began to grate on the author, and she succumbed to a punishing routine of drink, drugs and late nights, rarely spending time with her husband (he also worked at a club), while declaring that Matt was “completely supportive.” Haywood's sulky pose at decadence is not quite convincing. (Dec.)

Everyone may have a story in them, but the memoir of former 1960s model-turned-journalist Bing raises the question: does every story need to be told? Bing, who wrote the award-winning gang exposé Do or Die, is less successful at turning her journalist's eye on her own life. The book starts slowly with exposition-heavy memories of her childhood, in which she was raised by her wealthy grandparents and saw her aloof mother only on weekends. The book takes on color when Bing begins to work as a runway model in New York, mainly because of the high-profile people who populate her stories, from mobster Micky Cohen to director Mike Nichols and composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. In fact, the book is a name-dropping delight, full of brushups with the rich and famous—Bing had a several years' long affair with artist Ed Ruscha, was close friends with Mama Cass and hobnobbed with plenty of actors. While Bing can turn a lovely phrase and displays intelligence, the book is so outwardly focused that Bing herself seems merely a bit player in her own life. The book really comes alive near the end when curiosity about homeless kids in Venice, Calif., leads her to write an article that unexpectedly launches her journalism career. (Nov.)

“I live on land that has not surrendered the last of its wildness,” Shetterly (The New Year's Owl: Encounters with Animals, People and the Land They Share) writes of her home in rural Maine. “It keeps secrets, and those secrets prompt us to pay attention, to look for more.” In her first essay collection in more than 20 years, she beautifully renders some of what she's learned in the decades since she and her then husband moved into an unfinished cabin—“idealistic, dangerously unprepared, and, frankly, arrogant, she can see now.” Most of these essays, however, focus on life after she's settled in, when she's learned to listen for the sounds of the coming spring through her open bedroom window or impulsively stands down a bobcat that's chased a baby rabbit into the middle of the road. Shetterly's eye for poetic detail is exquisite, especially in longer essays such as the story of how she nursed an injured raven back to health, after which it set up home on her roof and became best friends with her terrier. But she writes about her neighbors (even those she admits she never really knew) with equal grace and empathy. Let's hope it's not another quarter-century before her next collection arrives. (Nov.)

Willis (Reflections in Black), a MacArthur fellow and chair of New York University's photography department, curates a collection of iconic portraits and snapshots by anonymous photographers in a “history of beauty that merges gender, race, family, class.” Willis's words, a distillation of her inquiries into beauty and race, are few—the images speak for themselves. The photographs, organized thematically, reach back to the 1890s and forward to the current first family. Famous photographers share perspective with family photographers and those known only as “Unidentified Photographer.” The recognizably famous—James Baldwin, Marian Anderson, Joe Louis—appear along with those known only as “Mom and Friend,” “Two women holding magazine, ca. 1950s” or “Barber cutting man's hair outdoors, ca. 1930s.” Willis's content is groundbreaking; rarely, for example, are men this adequately represented in a work devoted to “beauty within black culture.” For Willis, this extraordinary compilation is “the culmination of my exploration of beauty within black culture and through the medium of photography.” For readers, this is a dazzling eye-opener. (Nov.)

Stanger, professor of international politics and economics at Middlebury College, comes to admirably nuanced conclusions in this important assessment of the trend of outsourcing critical tasks in the areas of foreign aid, defense, diplomacy and domestic security. Her analysis finds nothing inherently pernicious in the Bush administration's outsourcing of Iraqi security and reconstruction; contracting is a necessity given the ascendancy of the private sector as a key player in diplomacy in a globalized world. The executive branch's error has been to outsource “proper oversight” and contractor accountability—a “laissez-faire” approach she finds dangerous. Stanger is also troubled by the Pentagon's usurpation (and militarizing) of diplomatic and nation-building roles previously under the aegis of the State Department. She argues that the government must recognize that power in the 21st century “flows from new sources” and complacency at this stage threatens the government with enervation and possible obsolescence. These are vital, well-made and worrying points—readers will hope that the executive branch will heed the author's call to “take the plunge and re-imagine government itself.” (Nov.)

Fresh off the 2008 election and anticipating an ascendancy of leftist thought and political success, Bérubé (Rhetorical Occasions), cultural studies and literature professor at Pennsylvania State University, provides robust intellectual arguments for how to reshape leftist thought into a powerful, constructive and measurably successful political philosophy—and how to mitigate the damage caused by the “Manichean” left: notably Chomsky and other members of the hard left whom he disparagingly describes as ready to sympathize with “any 'anti-imperialist' who comes along to challenge the Western powers, from Milosevic to Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.” He provides an assessment of Chomsky's appeal and a balanced critique of Chomsky's failings, juxtaposing him with Stuart Hall, who brings what Bérubé believes is the necessary nuance to leftist thinking. Bérubé forthrightly identifies himself as a social democratic leftist, and his effort not only identifies left-wing excesses and elevates its more viable and strategically sound currents, but puts critical thinking back into vogue on both sides of the political spectrum. (Nov.)

Nobel Prize–winning economist Becker (Human Capital) and U.S. Court of Appeals judge Posner (How Judges Think) apply economic perspectives to a wide range of contemporary issues in these unwieldy essays culled from their jointly written blog. Social problems ranging from terrorism and pre-emptive war to Internet gambling and steroid use are subjected to analysis yielding surprising arguments; for example, they argue that drunk-driving laws penalize behavior that is not criminal (drinking) instead of the harmful outcome (accidents) and ask, “Why punish the 99-plus percent of drunk driving that is harmless?” The book is most compelling when addressing the legal aspects of eminent domain and pharmaceutical patents, much less so when it pans over national and global issues like ethnic profiling, where the arguments feel well-worn. Despite some valuable insights, the writing itself is ponderous and lacks the references and rigor to make it genuinely academic, but comes across as too dense for good blog writing. And even though the authors acknowledge that their audience might be unfamiliar with the economic principles they apply, their only concession is a brief overview of economics in the introduction. (Nov.)

Gay liberation's activist past and pragmatic present are merely prologue to a queer cultural future, Muñoz (Disidentifications) suggests in this critical condemnation of the political status quo. Casting his vision of a radical gay aesthetic through the prisms of literature, photography and performance, the author dismisses commonplace concerns like same-sex marriage as desires for “mere inclusion” in a “corrupt” mainstream. More defiantly, he exalts the persistence of commercial sex spaces in the face of “antisex and homphobic policings,” and celebrates the overlay of punk and queer in performance spaces. Muñoz draws on a dynamic roster of seminal artists to illustrate his vision of a utopian queer future, from the well-known (LeRoi Jones, James Schuyler and John Giorno) to edgy artists, including homo-core punk queen Vaginal Davis, club photographer Kevin McCarty and drag chanteuse Kiki (Justin Bond). Queer theorists will find the book's provocative thesis stimulating; lay readers unfamiliar with Ernst Bloch and the Frankfurt School of philosophy on which the author builds his argument may find it a slog. (Nov.)

Leader—the British psychoanalyst who famously described shrinks as “mutants scavenging after a nuclear holocaust”—gives the profession a sound scolding for mishandling and misunderstanding depression. Our current idea of depression, he says, was created to fit the symptoms (such as insomnia and lack of appetite) that antidepressants treat. Leader goes back to Freud's classic 1917 essay, “Mourning and Melancholia,” to show what depression is really about: the loss of an important relationship. He presents a thorough and thoughtful review of what happens when the work of mourning (“detaching ourselves from the loved ones we have lost”) or melancholia (where what is lost is not so obvious to the patient) goes undone. He also rails at the erosion of public mourning rituals that can ease the process. Leader manages to bring not just a fresh look at Freud and grieving but adds rich context from his own case studies and the culture around us, from John Cleese's hilarious eulogy for his Monty Python colleague Graham Chapman to Brokeback Mountain. It's an astounding analysis of a pressing mental health issue that melds old and new. (Nov.)

Published on the tercentenary of Dr. Johnson's birth comes yet another biography (after two in 2008) of the greatest personality in English literature. Nokes stakes his ground by putting to rest the notion of Johnson's overwhelming fear of his own insanity—“a fact” insisted on by Boswell as well as Hester Thrale, a much younger woman in whose husband's household Johnson spent the last 20 years of his life and the woman to whom he entrusted his most intimate confidences. If the massively awkward Johnson had one overarching obsession, it was, in his own withering observation, that too much of his life consisted in time wasted. Nokes, a biographer of Jane Austen and professor at King's College, London, is aware, almost to the point of constraint, that Johnson both invented the modern biography and was himself the subject of the greatest ever written. On the flip side, there is something almost Johnsonian in Nokes's unfashionable but commonsensical approach. For example, in dealing with the infamous padlock belonging to Mrs. Thrale and her teasing journal footnote on it, or in his examination of Johnson's largely unhappy marriage to a woman almost twice his age, Nokes refrains from prurient speculation. 8 pages of b&w photos. (Nov.)

From North Ayrshire, Scotland, to Northern Ireland to various locations throughout North America, a middle-class family named Hammill is documented with stringent attention to detail by Matthews, founder of Chicago Review Press and a Hammill family descendant. Weaving historical prose with mawkish (though clearly set-off) sections of “fictions of my own devising,” Matthews attempts to illustrate a multigenerational drama in order to convey the history of ordinary people. The best documented family history begins with John Hammill, who left Northern Ireland for Maryland colony in 1725, yet even here the author occasionally injects a personal note (“I hope that Lucretia rose above her housewife's dismay”). Matthews is at her best relating major events that draw on primary sources, such as the transcript of the post–Civil War trial of Virginian Hugh Hammill, charged with providing a boat to the Confederates, or the trek west made by William and Lucretia Hammill in the 1880s. Matthews succeeds in showing that “the Hammill family passed along its preferences” through several generations, yet fails to validate her dubious claim that “if more people... retrieved and told their family stories to see what they reveal—well, this would be a better world....” Illus., maps. (Nov.)

In an animated overview up to the present time, Cambridge historian Reynolds (In Command of History) captures the sprawling chronicle of a nation forged from the fires of revolution, populated by immigrants and constantly evolving politically and culturally. Reynolds constructs his story around the “richly, sometimes fatally ambiguous” themes of empire, liberty and faith in the nation's development. The American colonists who overthrew an imperial government themselves created an empire based on manifest destiny and removal of Native Americans to reservations. As for liberty, Reynolds reminds us that it was built on the backs of black slaves, but white Americans were free from the intrusion of the federal government in their personal lives until the New Deal, which dramatically changed the nature of American liberty. The development of religious denominations in America contributed moral fervor to many progressive causes, such as temperance, and animated America in the cold war and George W. Bush's “war on terror.” Reynolds draws on letters and other documents from ordinary Americans to show the uneasy relationship among empire, liberty and faith. Most readers will find Reynolds's epic overview provocative and enjoyable. 3 maps. (Nov.)

Having covered Lenin and Stalin, Oxford history professor Service completes his biographical trilogy with the life of Leon Trotsky. Thick and intensely researched but a pleasure to read, it should remain the definitive work for some time. Trotsky (1879–1940) “flashed like a comet across the political sky,” sharing credit with Lenin for winning the 1917 revolution but losing the battle to succeed him after his 1923 death. While this outline is well known, Service mines new and old sources to fill in the details. A brilliant writer and speaker but too arrogant to attract a following, Trotsky had no chance against the methodical Stalin, whom he repeatedly insulted. Stalin forced him into exile in 1929 and had him murdered in 1940. Before and during exile, Trotsky poured out histories, memoirs and journalism, heavily influencing our picture of the revolution and its major figures. Service emphasizes that he was no objective observer. Stalin was not as stupid as portrayed, and Trotsky had no objection to mass murder when it served his purposes. This is a thoughtful, rewarding and essential contribution to 20th-century history. 50 b&w photos. (Nov.)

Revisiting one of the most dangerous WWII missions ever, O'Donnell (We Were One) examines the planning and execution of a 1944 strike by Jewish soldiers against a top-secret target in Austria that, it was believed, could shorten the conflict. He fleshes out the tale of sacrifice, spies, courage and betrayal organized by the American Office of Strategic Services to take on Gestapo troops in a heavily fortified district, Alpine Redoubt, the site of a planned bunker where Nazi leaders would hide after the Allies arrived in Germany. Under the command of Frederick Mayer—a German-Jewish refugee, naturalized American citizen and Wildcat Ranger—Operation Greenup was a brazen military exercise behind enemy lines, using a core of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and locals to gather intelligence and reduce the resistance from SS soldiers. Armed with research in the National Archives, confidential documents and personal interviews, O'Donnell tells a heart-stopping tale of sabotage by men and women who placed everything on the line against a seemingly unstoppable tyranny. 8 pages of b&w photos; map. (Nov.)

Schwab, a former senior analyst for the CIA's South American division and a professor of history at the University of Alabama, unravels the complex past of Guantánamo, Cuba, the U.S.'s oldest overseas base, where so-called enemy combatants in the war on terror have been imprisoned and tortured. Posing the critical question of why Guantánamo is needed for American security, Schwab looks at the early rise of this national interest under President Theodore Roosevelt, who placed a naval base there, giving the U.S. a presence in the Caribbean, despite solid local resistance and prominent critics such as Jane Addams and Mark Twain. Real benefits were reaped during WWII as the U.S. Navy used the base to quell Nazi U-boat aggression in the region. The base remained a hot spot during the cold war, with Castro and LBJ tussling over water rights for navy staff there, and later as a center for trying to stem the flow of drugs and undocumented aliens to the mainland. Well-researched, sharply written, Schwab's book fills in the crucial gaps on this controversial base, now as notorious as Iraq's infamous Abu Ghraib prison. 20 photos, 5 maps. (Nov.)

A veteran chronicler of the mafiosi, Carlo (The Ice Man) turns his attention to Tommy “Karate” Pitera, a brutal capo in the Bonanno crime family who allegedly killed 60 people. Carlo traces the rise of Pitera, born in 1954 into a modest Brooklyn family, to an honored place with the Bonannos, whose reputation for widespread drug peddling and bloody rubouts struck fear in their rivals. After spending two years in Japan, Pitera returned home with mastery in martial arts, efficiency in killing and a love for drama, often dressing as a rabbi, a woman or in other wacky disguises to score a hit. The other fascinating character of this gangster saga is Jim Hunt, a tough DEA officer, who assembles a dragnet of smart methods, snitches and turncoats, and snares Pitera and his crew after several savage murders. Carlo's scalding depiction of this mob mad man is enhanced by 16 unpublished photos not seen by PW, but apparently so gruesome Carlo feels compelled to warn readers in an author's note. (Nov.)

Crime novelist Kurland (The Empress of India) takes his cue from the rash of other surveys detailing crime-solving techniques after successful shows like CSI, in an uninspired fashion. He covers the basic techniques of forensics, from fingerprinting and ballistics to blood spatter analysis and DNA. Each of the “founding fathers” gets his due: French ex-criminal-turned-detective Eugène François Vidocq, the inspiration for Poe's fictional Dupin and the first to index criminals; Alphonse Bertillon, another Frenchman and the inventor of anthropometrics (or Bertillonage), which identified criminals by physical measurements; and Edward Henry and Juan Vucetich, who, in the late 19th century, developed independently of each other the first reliable methods of classifying fingerprints. Each breakthrough is punctuated by cases illustrating its usefulness, such as computerized fingerprint databases, which led to the 1989 arrest of “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez. Kurland shifts abruptly between detailed descriptions of techniques and oversimplifications like “DNA is the stuff that people are made from,” which will surely frustrate forensic fans eager for in-depth analysis. Illus. (Nov.)

If one day you saw a Torvosaurus looking through your second-story window, would it be able to live on the vegetation it found? Dinosaurs, paleontologist Sampson stresses throughout this book, were part of a complex ecosystem, and to understand these beasts, we must also understand the plants and other animals they shared it with, along with factors such as the position of the continents and climate change. Sampson's sprawling study is one of the most comprehensive surveys of dinosaurs and their worlds to date. The author discusses in detail plant life during different dinosaur eras (e.g., there were no flowering plants) and even what insects would have scurried beneath them. Who knew that fossilized fecal matter hid so many clues to a dinosaur's dinner millions of years ago? Sampson addresses the ever popular subject of dinosaur extinctions and develops a comprehensive theory encompassing various dinosaur generations. Highly recommended for all dinosaur fans, although the writing may prove a bit too scholarly for younger buffs. Color and b&w illus., b&w photos. (Nov.)

With unrestricted access to the queen mother's personal papers, letters and diaries, this respectful, mostly uncritical biography by veteran journalist Shawcross (Sideshow) focuses on the courtship of Elizabeth (1900–2002), the daughter of a Scottish earl, by the future King George VI; the shocking abdication of King Edward VIII in 1936 to marry Wallis Simpson; and WWII, when Elizabeth's narrow escape from a bomb that hit Buckingham Palace helped her commiserate with her subjects during the blitz. Throughout, the queen mother is depicted as vivacious, charming, devout and dutiful, a dedicated protector of the arts if not an intellectual, and socially conservative. Shawcross repeatedly pulls his punches when it comes to revealing the workings of Elizabeth's heart, particularly her anguish over her nemesis, Wallis Simpson, and over her role in aborting her daughter Princess Margaret's romance with the married courtier Peter Townsend. The dearth of information on the queen mother's relationship with the late Princess Diana is particularly egregious. Although readers sense some of the parade of people who crossed her path, the royal engagements that filled her calendar and the pivotal historical events that shaped her life, Shawcross delivers a disappointingly bland celebration of the queen mother. 32 pages of photos. (Oct.)