Nonfiction Reviews: Week of 10/22/2007

Merrill’s debut collection of essays—which details her many troubled relationships, struggles with bulimia and alcoholism, and sexual adventures—tries too hard to entertain the reader and ends up disappointing instead. Merrill sets the stage as she warns that these essays are “embarrassingly honest tales, some of which I have been reluctant to admit, even to myself, until now.” Her essay “First Born” explores her family background, providing some history to Merrill’s bulimia and alcoholism, which took over her life by the time she was 18. She excessively describes her binging, purging and bathroom obsession, and wanders into clichéd sentences (“Johnnie Walker was a devoted and attentive lover who followed me around like a shadow”). As she emerges from rehab with a clean slate, it is evident to Merrill that she has replaced her addiction to alcohol with an addiction to men; unfortunately, it proves to be equally unhealthy. Despite her intuition that most of the men she engages with are nothing but trouble, Merrill continues to date ones who take her money, cheat on her, string her along and stand her up. Merrill’s best essays are not about dating: in “Behind Bras,” she volunteers to play tennis with inmates at San Quentin prison, and in “Still Born,” she writes about growing up with her mother and her mother’s death when Merrill was 16. (Mar.)

British author Chambers (A Sheltered Life: The Unexpected History of the Tortoise) tells the colorful story of a magnificent animal. Captured in Africa in 1862, the young elephant, later called Jumbo, languished in Paris’s Jardin des Plantes until 1865, when he was bought by the London Zoo. Under the care of a devoted keeper, Matthew Scott, the ailing elephant became the world’s largest and the zoo’s greatest attraction. In 1882, American circus magnate Phineas T. Barnum bought Jumbo, who became the star of the “Greatest Show on Earth” but died tragically in 1885, when he was hit by a freight train while on tour with the circus in Canada. Chambers highlights the personalities of the major players in the tale: Scott, a reclusive, irascible man at ease with animals but not with people; Abraham Bartlett, the superintendent of the London Zoo, who longed to be rid of the irksome keeper and his often troublesome elephant; Barnum, the flamboyant showman; and Jumbo himself, moody and subject to displays of temper, but gentle with thousands of children who rode on his back. Chambers’s account of the legendary elephant—whose name has become synonymous with large objects—is touching and entertaining. Illus. (Mar. 4)

Reflecting on his long life with a calm, clear eye, novelist Rechy (The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens) probes his nascent self-identity as a Mexican-American and a homosexual. Growing up during the Depression in El Paso, Tex., the youngest son of a Mexican woman who spoke no English and a Scottish musician father, Rechy recalls his early fascination with beauty, especially in his older adored sister, Olga, who married early, and in the cool, glamorous regard of the notorious “kept woman” of Mexican politician Augusto de Leon, Marisa Guzman, whom the young narrator glimpsed briefly and memorably at his sister’s wedding. Moreover, amid a society that excoriated Mexicans, young Rechy grew into a beautiful, fair-skinned young man torn between feeling proud of his Mexican roots and shame because of them. Fleeing the restricted prospects of El Paso and the depressive rages of his father, Rechy, a budding writer, attended college, then joined the army during the Korean War and began traveling, to Paris, New York City and Los Angeles, where he found hustling for sex from anonymous men suited him. The memoir meanders through years of drifting among jobs and numerous sexual encounters, which became the fodder for his acclaimed City of Night (1963) and other works. Self-adulation aside, Rechy’s memoir possesses many fine stylistic vignettes. (Feb.)

Enjoying the security and comfort of his middle-class lifestyle in the suburbs of Ann Arbor, Mich., where he worked for a defense contractor, Oglesby was an unlikely candidate to move to the forefront of the countercultural antiwar movement. However, several momentous events, combined with his growing sense that the Vietnamese revolution had less to do with communism and more to do with national independence, led him to quit his job and follow his principles by becoming involved full-time in the radical organization Students for a Democratic Society. Oglesby traces his and the organization’s activities from its attempts to educate the public on Vietnam at “teach-ins” through the more violent antiwar activities of its splinter groups. His insider’s view introduces readers to the personalities and ideologies of some of the major players in SDS and the antiwar movement, and he uses recently released FBI, State Department and CIA files to show the magnitude of governmental infiltration of the organization. But what makes the book most compelling is Oglesby’s in-depth knowledge of this tumultuous era and his astute observations about the influence of key events of the period—such as the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy as well as military operations like the Tet offensive—on SDS and its evolving political ideology. (Feb.)

A poignant memoir by writer Sullivan palpates the wounds of growing up with an unstable, cocaine-abusing mother. The young narrator’s emotionally manipulative mother, Rosina, worked as a waitress at whatever Brooklyn diner hadn’t fired her yet for stealing from the cash box in order to feed the increasingly destructive cocaine habit she formed while living with her Israeli-born boyfriend, Avram. Sullivan grew up cringing in the shadow of her crass, chain-smoking mother, who moved from boyfriend to boyfriend, from Sunset Park, Brooklyn, to upscale Valley Stream, Long Island. Sullivan tried hard to distinguish herself in school, despite drinking heavily as a teenager to ease social pressure and shoplifting to strike back angrily at her mother. Later, she explains, she fell into similar patterns of self-anesthetizing with cocaine and alcohol while grasping after a lucrative career in finance in her early 20s. Sullivan’s memoir cuts predictably back and forth in time and features some memorable types, such as needy early girlfriends whose mothers were as wacky as her own; junkie Aunt Marisol who died of an overdose; and her mother’s battering boyfriend Eddie. Putting herself through Fordham, then Columbia’s M.F.A. program hardly eased Sullivan’s pain, but the act of writing purges her memory. (Feb.)

It was 1790, and Thomas Jefferson and one of his dinner guests, James Madison, were determined to work out a political compromise critical to the nation’s future with their third dinner companion (and political opponent), Alexander Hamilton. This gathering around Jefferson’s celebrated table involved nothing less than the creation of the young nation’s finances, foreign relations and the eventual location of its capital. The dinner’s results? An agreement that, Congress willing, the new government would assume the states’ war debts, issue bonds to fund the national debt and make the Potomac’s banks the capital’s permanent site. Congress agreed. Cerami (Jefferson’s Great Gamble) presents a fast-paced narrative of an event well-known but never told so brightly—nor at such unnecessary length. While Cerami puts the dinner-table agreement at his story’s center, it was but one of a number of seismic events, acts and decisions of the 1790s. Cerami slights many of those when he’s not giving us too much detail about other minor ones, such as Jefferson’s cooking recipes and a short disquisition (and a long document) on Hamilton’s role in the Coast Guard’s founding. Compression would have made this inherently fascinating story pack the punch it should. (Feb.)

Type 1 diabetes, Crohn’s disease, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis—all these increasingly common illnesses are autoimmune diseases in which the immune system attacks the body’s own tissues or nervous system. Equally alarming, as journalist Nakazawa tells us, is researchers’ growing suspicion that autism may be an autoimmune disease, brought on in part by genetic predisposition, exposure of young bodies to man-made chemicals and perhaps viral triggers. Nakazawa (Does Anybody Else Look like Me?), who herself has been diagnosed with the autoimmune Guillain-Barré syndrome, tells of a lower-income Buffalo, N.Y., neighborhood where the growing number of relatively young residents with lupus led one persistent woman to discover that a lot where children played had been a dumping ground for industrial chemicals. She also chronicles the work of researchers at Johns Hopkins and other medical centers who have been able to regrow nerves using embryonic stem cells and destroy errant T cells of the immune system that have run amok. Included are suggestions for foods that may promote healthy immune response and consumer body care products to avoid. Everyone with a friend or family member with an autoimmune disease will find this a must read. (Feb. 5)

Hundreds of Native American tribes are classified as sovereign governments, a murky legal status that this study (part of the Penguin Library of American Indian History) struggles to clarify. Duthu, a law professor and member of the Houma tribe, reviews statute and case law on tribal sovereignty, especially recent Supreme Court decisions that are at odds with Congress’s modern friendliness toward tribal “self-determination.” His dense, dry survey explores such topics as tribal jurisdiction over non-Indians living on reservations, tribal natural resources and environmental policy, adoption law for Indian children and the perennial wrangling between tribal and state governments over taxes, regulation and gambling. Roiling these issues are two conflicts: the clash between tribal sovereignty and congressional power to legislate on Indian affairs, and the tension between tribal group rights and individual rights. Duthu’s sympathies are clear: he dismisses critics of special tribal rights as ignorant and castigates infringements of tribal sovereignty as motivated by neocolonialist views of Indians as a “dying race”; but his focus on legal precedent and convention regarding tribal sovereignty rather than its concrete benefits fails to make a compelling case for the necessity of such sovereignty. (Feb. 4)

Kelsey calls this “the story of the most famous family in America that nobody ever heard of,” the Washburns of 19th-century Livermore, Maine. A descendant of the Washburn family, Kelsey followed his publishing and banking careers with a Harvard master’s degree in history at age 70. He surveys his great-great-grandfather Cadwallader Washburn and his nine siblings, who for Kelsey “embodied the best” of 19th-century America. The seven brothers (Cadwallader, Charles, Elihu, Israel Jr., Sam, Sid, William) and three sisters (Caroline, Martha, Mary) grew up in a rural “crucible of poverty,” where pigs had to be slopped and horses shod. Yet they went on to launch law firms, banks, railroads and sawmills. They spread across the continent to the Midwest and California and served the Union, both in uniform and out, during the Civil War. Some became senators, governors and diplomats; others went into business, including the flour-milling firm Washburn Crosby, which in 1928 became General Mills. Though hagiographic in tone, weighing repeatedly on the Washburns’ talent, energy and moral fiber, this chronicle presents a “narrative of big dreams” that reflects the physical and economic expansion of 19th-century America, and the Washburns’ achievements spring to life. 50 b&w photos. (Feb. 1)

McGinty (The Oatman Massacre: A Tale of Desert Captivity and Survival) offers a lucid review of the major Civil War Supreme Court cases. The Civil War, as McGinty explains, was a struggle over constitutional interpretation: did Lincoln have the constitutional authority to do whatever he thought necessary to compel seceding states back to the Union? He thought so, but Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney sometimes stood in his way. The first major clash was over Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, which Taney declared unconstitutional in the 1861 Merryman case. In 1862 came another battle, the Prize cases, regarding the constitutionality of Lincoln’s declaring a blockade of Confederate ports. The Court also heard cases about whether a Union citizen could criticize a president during wartime and whether the Treasury Department could regulate trade between a Union state and the Confederacy. McGinty says that the Court “could have struck down the president’s major war measures” but “chose not to do so.” The author covers some of the same territory as James Simon’s 2006 Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney, and at times one wishes for more rigorous, subtle analysis of the meaning of the Court’s role in the Civil War. Still, McGinty’s engaging account, which treats a topic with obvious parallels to the present, will delight history buffs. 16 b&w illus. (Feb.)

Over the past several years, numerous medical reports have confirmed the connection between a positive mental attitude and good physical health. In this splendid book, Harrington (The Placebo Effect), chair of Harvard’s history of science department, demonstrates that the belief in such a connection between mind and body is nothing new. She uses case studies and stories of healings to show how deeply embedded the idea of positive mental health is in the quest for physical health, as well as the ways that contemporary medicine has incorporated a focus on mind-body healing into its black bag. In her highly original analysis of this history from ancient times to the present, she discovers six different “narratives” about mind-body healing. These include “the power of suggestion,” “the power of positive thinking” and “broken by modern life.” In “the body that speaks” narrative, for instance, Harrington traces the idea that physical symptoms are the outward expression of the mind’s secrets, and that revealing those secrets can heal, whether the revelation takes place in the confession box or on the analyst’s couch. Harrington’s study offers a first-rate cultural history of an age-old but still much debated topic. (Jan.)

In this sometimes heavy-handed though brief (especially for Vollmann) memoir of hopping trains and riding the rails, Vollmann, National Book Award winner for Europe Central, explores a personal and national obsession. “From a certain open boxcar in a freight train heading the wrong way,” he writes, “I have enjoyed pouring rain, then birds and frogs, fresh yellow-green wetness of fields.” Taking to the rails out West, Vollmann sometimes travels with buddies pursuing the same thrill, the same freedom people have long associated with railroads. Other times, he meets up with grizzled hobos and degenerates, reflecting on himself and his reasons for risking life and limb to see America from a speeding freight train. “Whatever beauty our railroad travels bestow upon us comes partly from the frequent lovely surprises of reality itself,” he says, “often from the intersection of our fantasies with our potentialities.” While he never really gets around to fully explaining his own reasons for doing so—he makes long, curlicue allusions to his restless soul and search for deeper meanings of things—Vollmann pieces together a kind of patchwork portrait of the lusts and longings of a nation torn by social inequity and riven with anger about the current state of affairs, especially but not limited to the war in Iraq and the ongoing sadness of American overseas misadventures. Through the self-indulgent mist, though, a sharper picture emerges. Vollmann captures an ongoing romantic vision of America—a nation always on the move, nervous and jittery, and never really satisfied with itself. (Jan.)

Frost was a highly prolific if disorganized, writer of prose, penning pieces for newspapers, magazines and events that were never collected in book form during his life. Following The Notebooks of Robert Frost (2007), this volume brings together all the prose written for publication by America’s most famous poet—some previously unpublished, some long available in other editions—along with helpful notes by Richardson, professor of English at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. While many of these pieces are brief and of interest mostly to Frost scholars—such as a letter to the editor of Poetry praising a recent issue or multiple responses to magazines asking Frost to list his favorite books (“1—The Old Testament./ 2— 'The Odyssey,’ by Homer”)—there are many major pieces too, such as the well-known “The Figure a Poem Makes,” which includes Frost’s famous statement, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” Also included is “The Last Refinement of Subject Matter: Vocal Imagination,” a treatise on the sentence as musical notation: “The sentence must never leave the reader in doubt for a moment as to how the voice is to be placed in it.” Frost’s earthy voice and rigorous intellect are on full display in this essential book for poetry lovers. (Jan.)

In this “geographical tour” of the nervous system, readers will find an entertaining and enlightening history of neuroscience and a look at the anatomy of the brain. A clinical anatomist at Cambridge University, Bainbridge (The X in Sex) has had ample opportunity to examine the brain and ponder its origins and function—as well as the many strange and marvelous names of its parts, labeled long before anyone knew what they did. The Zonules of Zinn—“a name from an ancient map, from a souk, from another galaxy”—are small fibers attached to the lens of the eye that adjust it for seeing at different distances. Bainbridge discusses the history and function of each name: in addition to hillocks and pyramids are the Almonds (amygdalae), part of the emotional response system, and the locus coeruleus, or “sky-blue place,” involved in alertness and stress. Your brain even has its own “Area 51,” thanks to a German neuroanatomist whose system of numbering different regions of the cerebral cortex is still used today. Bainbridge’s tour also includes short discussions of nervous system disorders like multiple sclerosis and epilepsy. The book’s relaxed pace, interesting tangents and broad coverage make this book eminently suitable for anyone curious about the brain. 30 b&w illus. (Jan.)

Crawford (Unwise Passions: A True Story of a Remarkable Woman) does a thorough if artless job of narrating Thomas Jefferson’s postpresidential years. Crawford’s narrative is a slave to chronology, which works against him. The first 50 pages are a highly condensed account of his life up through his presidency: information which, if it must be included, could have been more elegantly inserted into the main narrative. After this false start, Crawford’s story improves as he delivers an exhaustive account of Jefferson’s tangled dotage: the attempted murder of his much-loved grandson by another relative, his dealings with other descendants both white and black; his de facto bankruptcy; and his late relations with such fellow founders as Adams and Madison. Much of this has been recounted before, though interesting and surprising details abound. For example, a young Edgar Allan Poe was at Jefferson’s funeral. Despite all this diligence, however, Crawford’s narrative regularly stops dead in its tracks, especially when the author crawls inside Jefferson’s head, presuming to know his thoughts at a given moment. Crawford is quite sure, for example, that on the first day of February 1819, Jefferson dwelled upon “the planters’ financial plight, and his own... but this difficulty, Jefferson told himself, was surely temporary.” (Jan.)

Fortified with Eeyoreish fatalism—“I’m already unhappy. I have nothing to lose”—Weiner set out on a yearlong quest to find the world’s “unheralded happy places.” Having worked for years as an NPR foreign correspondent, he’d gone to many obscure spots, but usually to report bad news or terrible tragedies. Now he’d travel to countries like Iceland, Bhutan, Qatar, Holland, Switzerland, Thailand and India to try to figure out why residents tell “positive psychology” researchers that they’re actually quite happy. At his first stop, Rotterdam’s World Database of Happiness, Weiner is confronted with a few inconvenient truths. Contrary to expectations, neither greater social equality nor greater cultural diversity is associated with greater happiness. Iceland and Denmark are very homogeneous, but very happy; Qatar is extremely wealthy, but Weiner, at least, found it rather depressing. He wasn’t too fond of the Swiss, either, uncomfortable with their “quiet satisfaction, tinged with just a trace of smugness.” In the end, he realized happiness isn’t about economics or geography. Maybe it’s not even personal so much as “relational.” In the end, Weiner’s travel tales—eating rotten shark meat in Iceland, smoking hashish in Rotterdam, trying to meditate at an Indian ashram—provide great happiness for his readers. (Jan.)

The second-year Iranian college student in 2001 knew “that making that speech meant trouble,” but she “had no real expectation of being kidnapped in the heart of Tehran and hustled off” to the notorious Evin Prison. Eventually, the 20-year-old Ghahramani is sentenced to 30 days and a few days—and several beatings—later is dumped in a vacant countryside to make her way home. Scenes from a happy family life (crippled by the Iran-Iraq war) and a spirited adolescence (cut short by a repressive regime) alternate with the prison experiences in this multilayered account. Ghahramani, daughter of a Muslim father and Zoroastrian mother, both Kurdish, dips with brevity and grace into personal family history and public political history. Graphic and powerful as her treatment of torturous imprisonment is, Ghahramani retains an irrepressible lightness, perhaps born of knowing that “[a] sense of justice can always benefit from a complementary sense of the ridiculous.” Her painfully acquired knowledge of “how easy it is to reduce a human being to the level of animal” does not keep her from “wondering if I’ll ever be pretty again.” Nothing, however, dilutes the bare bones prison experience. Her straightforward style, elegant in its simplicity, has resonance and appeal beyond a mere record. (Jan.)

This colorful and heartfelt autobiography of Haney’s family life and English heritage focuses on food, both as sustenance and as a vehicle to examine issues of class and identity. The culinary descriptions make for a mouthwatering and occasionally cringe-worthy scene-stealer at the author’s boyhood home in Chipping Ongan, in the Essex, England, countryside, where “much was eaten... and surprisingly little said.” Now copy chief at Gourmet, Haney penned the book following the 2003 publication of a personal essay for the magazine on the same topic. He has successfully mined three generations of his family, threading together vignettes from his parents’ childhood experiences with his own, highlighting commonalities of financial struggles and alcoholism. Into these rather macabre topics, Haney’s writing breathes new life with poetic details (he paints an autumnal drizzle as “the color of unwashed sheep”). Reminiscent of Roald Dahl’s Boy, with a gastronomic bent, this memoir is insightful and evocative, expertly conveying the author’s emotional connection to food. Having inherited a legacy of “sausages and sadness,” Haney sees what he eats as representative of a choice between the working and upper classes, and family loyalties. One wishes for more action and fewer exhaustive culinary images, but to Haney, food is sometimes both the starring character and the action. Photos. (Jan.)

Newspaper columnist Corrigan was a happily married mother of two young daughters when she discovered a cancerous lump in her breast. She was still undergoing treatment when she learned that her beloved father, who’d already survived prostate cancer, now had bladder cancer. Corrigan’s story could have been unbearably depressing had she not made it clear from the start that she came from sturdy stock. Growing up, she loved hearing her father boom out his morning “HELLO WORLD” dialogue with the universe, so his kids would feel like the world wasn’t just a “safe place” but was “even rooting for you.” As Corrigan reports on her cancer treatment—the chemo, the surgery, the radiation—she weaves in the story of how it felt growing up in a big, suburban Philadelphia family with her larger-than-life father and her steady-loving mother and brothers. She tells how she met her husband, how she gave birth to her daughters. All these stories lead up to where she is now, in that “middle place,” being someone’s child, but also having children of her own. Those learning to accept their own adulthood might find strength—and humor—in Corrigan’s feisty memoir. (Jan.)

Through vivid first-person reporting and a thorough culling of court transcripts, newspaper clippings and corporate reports, Vanity Fair contributing editor Shnayerson (The Killers Within) has crafted an incriminating indictment of the Appalachian “King Coal” industry in West Virginia, and of the man he defines as its rapacious kingpin, Massey Energy’s CEO, Don Blankenship. The author’s sympathies lie clearly with opponents of mountaintop mining, most prominently young attorney Joe Lovett and citizen activist Judy Bonds. Both have fought against a form of mining that shears off the tops of hills and dumps rubble into valleys and streams—a process abetted by the collusion of the state’s often-lackadaisical Department of Environmental Protection, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ propensity to grant stream-destroying permits without oversight and the easing of environmental controls by the Bush administration. Shnayerson’s compelling take on toxic mining methods and their heartrending impact on Appalachian inhabitants and their culture, has a wider focus than Erik Reece’s 2006 title, Lost Mountain, which reported on one mountaintop’s destruction, and strong echoes of the stomach-churning legal machinations recounted in Jonathan Harr’s 1995 bestseller, A Civil Action. (Jan.)

Novelist and nonfiction author Rayner (The Devil’s Wind) provides a first-rate look at the little-known story behind the creation of America’s first continental railroad—the story of Collis Huntington, Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins and Leland Stanford, founder of the university that bears his name. The associates were unscrupulous, savvy profiteers, whose motives were driven solely by a lust for riches and whose success usually came at the expense of others. After usurping engineer Theodore Judah’s campaign to connect the Atlantic with the Pacific, the foursome capitalized on anti-Chinese sentiment, hiring desperate Chinese to do hazardous work in inhumane conditions for substandard wages. They later sanctioned murder yet successfully painted themselves as philanthropists thanks to the journalists and historians in their pockets. Amid a story of greed and ruthlessness, Rayner offers a fascinating glimpse into the growth of the U.S., illustrating how these determined if ruthless men revolutionized transportation and greatly influenced the expansion of California. The author claims their business acumen “defined the nature of the modern corporation,” and their legacies live on in a library, a university, art galleries and museums. Entertaining and well written, Rayner’s book will appeal to readers interested in history as well as business. (Jan.)

CEO Thomas Derale is the hero of Strelecky’s inspirational, fictional tale (after The Why Café) of a terminally ill beloved leader and the business, life and leadership advice he dispenses to his dedicated disciple, Joe, who narrates. The bulk of the story consists of Joe’s conversations with Thomas in his final weeks, flashbacks to dialogue over the course of their friendship, even television interviews the “famous” CEO gives in his last days, during which he imparts his words of wisdom. Thomas’s thousands of employees are called “travelers,” progressing on a journey together, and his utopian advice includes the mandate to identify both a personal and corporate “Purpose for Existing” (PFE)—which should always be aligned to promote productivity and fulfillment. The “big five” of the book’s title are “the five things that we want to do, see, or experience in our life before we die,” which Derale Enterprises’ employees have printed on the back of their business cards. Though the potential corniness of acronyms such as PFE is offset by Thomas’s benevolence, readers with a preference for stories of imperfect CEOs running real companies might find Thomas’s advice more suited to the realm of life coaching than running a business. (Jan.)

In his witty debut, marketing consultant Greene offers sound and entertaining advice to 20-somethings on the job market. Though his tips could apply equally to the arts and nonprofit worlds, Greene reassures indie types that they can find rewards in the corporate sphere without being a secretly dissatisfied, self-important “corporate tool” who “own[s] a lot of Dockers but [doesn’t] wear the pants.” Enlivening his wide-ranging advice with comical pop culture references from the ’80s to today, Greene organizes the guide in quick, attention-grabbing chapters that can be easily read during commercial breaks. He coaches job seekers on how to “pimp” their résumés (think of cover letters like DVD cases—both must immediately catch the reader’s eye); on how to score an interview by treating it like a first date (“both involve varying levels of anticipation, conversation, humiliation, and [if you get lucky] consummation”); and on the importance of solidifying one’s professional identity (like a great band that has defined its sound) rather than being afraid of “closing the door” on various interests. This refreshing take on the job search guide for recent grads supplies career-advancing tactics in a humorous, easy-to-digest format. (Jan.)

DeFelice (Leopards Kill) takes a fresh look at the disastrous 1942 Allied landing at German-occupied Dieppe, France, from the perspective of the 50 U.S. Army Rangers scattered among the British Commando units and the Canadian 2nd Division, which spearheaded the assault. With an eye on gaining experience in amphibious operations, the 50 Rangers were selected from the 1st Ranger Battalion, formed just months before Operation Jubilee, the code name for the raid at Dieppe. Beset by “poor planning, insufficient training, and inadequate support,” the assault—among a series of raids intended to harass the Germans and boost Allied morale—was a sanguinary disaster. The Canadians suffered 67% casualties and the Rangers 22%. Noting Dieppe’s lack of military importance, DeFelice rejects the notion that it was “a brutal but necessary rehearsal for D-Day,” concluding that it was “an unnecessary and foreseeable fiasco.” DeFelice honors the courage of the men on the ground, however, including Lt. Edwin Loustalot, Pvt. Owen Sweazey, Cpl. Franklin “Zip” Koons and Sgt. Alex Szima. Carefully researched and vividly told, this popular account of the blooding of the now iconic Rangers will appeal to fans of military history. (Jan.)

In the summer of 2001, Katrina Browne led nine distant family members on their own triangular passage as she made a documentary film (Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North) about their DeWolf ancestors, “the largest slave-trading dynasty in early America”—who transported 10,000 Africans to America and the Caribbean between 1769 and 1820. DeWolf, one of Browne’s cousins, traces the journey in this soul-searching memoir, beginning in Bristol, R.I., the hub of the late–18th-century trade, and continuing to Ghana, Cuba and back to New England. At each station of the trip, the “Family of Ten” visits historic sites, and distinguished historians address the group about aspects of the slave trade. DeWolf’s account gains immediacy as he reports these presentations and the ensuing group discussions, along with their personal struggles to come to terms with an ignominious family history and his own sharp learning curve. His narrative, however, bogs down toward its conclusion in an irrelevant account of allegations of sexual harassment made against him and a digressive though thought-provoking discussion of reparations for slavery. Nevertheless, DeWolf promotes conversation about “truth of the past and its impact on the present.” (Jan.)

Historian Sitkoff covers the major points in the time line of King’s life and the Civil Rights movement—from the Montgomery bus boycott to the March on Washington, his anti–Vietnam War activism and assassination in 1968—but this brief, rudimentary volume will enlighten only the most novice student of Civil Rights history. The author passes through major moments in an informal tone that borders on the flippant (“King the gentle Jesus had bested [Birmingham police commissioner Eugene “Bull”] Connor the sadistic Satan”). Sitkoff (The Enduring Vision, co-editor) attends to the civil rights leader’s flaws as well as his accomplishments, noting King’s early plagiarism and making frequent reference to his sexual dalliances (“King flitted from one thinker to another at almost the same rate as he wrecked young women”). Though Sitkoff includes excerpts from King’s books and speeches (jazzed up with audience responses, e.g., “All right, yessir!”), neophytes are better served by David J. Garrow’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Bearing the Cross, which Sitkoff acknowledges in his ample and gracious “Bibliographic Essay.” (Jan.)

If Auden (1907–1973) had never written a line of verse, we would still remember him as a superb, entertaining, prolific critic, author of essays, reviews, whole books and stand-alone witticisms on poetry, fiction, Christian belief and history, classical music and opera. This third volume of his complete prose is the best yet: it covers years when he felt almost at home in America, writing comfortably and frequently for the New York Times, Partisan Review and other venues both middle- and high-brow, and branching away from the inward concerns of theology toward reviews and analyses of music and imaginative literature. Here is the ambitious set of lectures published as The Enchaféd Flood, about the Romantic hero and the sea, in Melville, Baudelaire and (taken with entire seriousness) Edward Lear. Here are the influential reviews of Tolkien and the introductions to first books by Adrienne Rich and John Ashbery. Here, too, are effective boosts for European and British prose (George Macdonald, Giovanni Verga); venturesome (only occasionally repetitive) generalizations about writing and reading poetry; comments on America in general (“a nation of amateurs”); and even an enthusiastic plan for a Yorkshire holiday. No major writer’s complete works are more fun to read. (Dec.)

The First Amendment’s injunction that “Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” seems cut and dried, but its application has had a vexed history, according to this lucid legal history, Lewis’s first book in 15 years (after Make No Law and Gideon’s Trumpet). Some suppressions of free speech passed constitutional muster in their day: the 1798 Sedition Act criminalized criticism of the president, and the WWI-era Sedition Act sentenced a minister to 15 years in prison for telling his Bible class that “a Christian can take no part in the war.” Law professor and Pulitzer Prize–winning ex-New York Times columnist Lewis explores other First Amendment legal quagmires, including libel law, privacy issues, the press’s shielding of confidential sources, obscenity and hate speech. Not quite a free speech absolutist, he’s for punishing “speech that urges terrorist violence to an audience... whose members are ready to act.” Lewis’s story is about the advancement of freedom by the likes of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Louis Brandeis and others whose “bold judicial decisions have made the country what it is.” The result is an occasionally stirring account of America’s evolving idea of liberty. (Jan. 14)

When 28-year-old Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, his band of 50,000 soldiers and sailors was accompanied by 151 Parisian scientists and artists, who laid the groundwork for what became Egyptology. Ten of these remarkable men are the focus of Burleigh’s narrative. Among them, three of the most prominent were the lowborn, “pugnacious” mathematician Gaspard Monge, a dedicated revolutionary who invented descriptive geometry; the painfully shy chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet, who invented new ways to make gunpowder and steel; and the witty artist and diplomat Dominique-Vivant Denon, who produced 200 architecturally precise sketches of Egyptian ruins and a bestselling travelogue; later he became Napoleon’s first director of the Louvre Museum. The survivors of the team brought home a vast body of knowledge, but surrendered their greatest discovery, the Rosetta Stone, to conquering British troops. The result of the savants’ work was the 24-volume Description of Egypt, magnificently illustrated with engravings and maps, which helped launch Egyptomania and the “rape of the Nile,” though Burleigh’s discussion of this is scanty. Still, Burleigh (A Very Private Woman) offers an absorbing glimpse of Napoleon’s thwarted bid for a grand French empire and its intellectual fruits. 8 pages of b&w photos. (Dec.)

Until a few years ago scientists believed that habitable zones around stars were fairly narrow. Today, after the discovery of 250 planets around other stars, they have had to reconsider the basic requirements for life and even how to define life. Impey, a noted astronomer at the University of Arizona and observer with the Hubble telescope, takes readers on a journey from the emergence of life on a still bubbling Earth to possible scenarios for our descendants fleeing a dying sun. Impey pays more attention than many writers to the importance of star types and their location in the galactic neighborhood for producing and sustaining planets. He shows how resilient microbes may be able to survive light-year-long journeys huddled deep within meteors and comets, and that we now know that the moons in our solar system alone offer an amazing range of possibly favorable environments for life, from the ice oceans on Jupiter’s moons to the methane geology of Titan. Impey makes good use of his extensive teaching background in this carefully laid-out book. Readers with little formal science background will enjoy this wild ride through the ages and deep space as much as will dedicated SETI buffs. B&w illus. (Dec. 11)

Burton, a certified professional coach (What’s Really Holding You Back?), addresses the problem of rushed and overloaded lives in sympathetic, persuasive language, confessing that she, too, was once part of the “busyness epidemic.” She draws a firm distinction between being successful (reaping financial gain or status) and being fulfilled (living, working and loving in a way that brings you emotional and spiritual satisfaction). Above all, she believes busyness is often based in fear and interferes with the primary job of life: making authentic connections with others. Burton pushes the reader to make deep but simple shifts : taking all your vacation days every year and leaving the office for at least a half-hour during the day will allow you to set healthy boundaries. She outlines what she calls a “self-care lifestyle,” which promotes living well and in balance. Exercise, good health habits and pampering are crucial, she says. Each of the 28 short chapters ends with a challenge, a five-minute journal exercise and a one-minute meditation. Burton’s book is a wakeup call, an effective and inspiring plan for change. (Dec. 26)

Keep walking,” Jones, founder of Feed the Children, tells himself when he’s in an impossible situation—whether trying to find the money to drill wells for drinking water in Kenya or getting across Sarajevo alive. Jones grew up intending to be a minister, but after he was ordained and had his own church, he decided it was more important to go out and feed the needy, not just preach to people about being saved. He started by shipping surplus American wheat to Haiti, which led to developing a child-sponsorship program. For the last 28 years, Jones, his family and his staff have organized enormous relief efforts for some of the world’s worst crises—Ethiopian famines, the Bosnian war, the Murrah building bombing, 9/11 and Katrina. Although Jones structures this as a memoir, starting with his idyllic boyhood in Bowling Green, Ky., and his first experiences preaching, his real focus is on the development of his organization, Feed The Children. Even without its prominent endorsement from Rick Warren (The Purpose-Driven Life), this inspirational story should reach a wide audience. (Dec.)

Addressing Islamic terrorism and America’s response as a global leader, Catholic commentator Weigel (senior fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center, and author of Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II) argues that “[t]he great human questions, including the great questions of public life, are ultimately theological.” This short book, comprising 15 “lessons” in sections entitled “Understanding the Enemy,” “Rethinking Realism” and “Deserving Victory,” covers such topics as key strands of Islamic thought, the dangers of Western “appeasement” of terrorists and the case for regime change in Iran as well as the development of alternative transportation fuels and the elimination of nuclear weapons. Weigel asserts that jihadism arises not from poverty or the existence of the state of Israel but from Islamic fundamentalism’s “theological roots.” He presents a cogent case that winning the war against terrorism means winning the war of ideas: America must overcome its “self-contempt” because cultural confidence, he insists, is key. Unsurprisingly, Weigel rejects so-called postmodernist relativism and uncritical multiculturalism; his idea of what constitutes realism—such as President Bush’s post 9/11 foreign policy or the existence of objective moral truths—may not be shared by those with different political convictions, but this book contains thought-provoking analysis. (Dec. 26)

This painstakingly assembled collection gathers excerpts from the personal journals and photo albums of turn-of-the-century, middle-class American travelers to Europe, East Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. These tourists created their albums during an era when photographic visual information from foreign cultures was precious because it was rare. Many photos are intriguing as historical documents—they capture the experience of travelers who lived a century ago, and, in a few cases, they vividly illustrate daily life in exotic locales—Siam, Cambodia and Trinidad. Levine (Snapshot Chronicles) and Jensen (Picturing Arizona) assert that the experience of travel and how it is documented has been transformed with the quantum technological leaps in transportation and photography. But photo after photo resemble the holiday snapshots of a shutterbug relative: lineups of tourists posed in front of some exotic monument (e.g., the Sphinx or the Leaning Tower of Pisa). Even as the authors make an effective argument that the qualitative experience of travel has been altered, their book provides compelling visual evidence that tourist photography hasn’t changed much at all. Nonetheless, avid travelers who might enjoy placing their own photo albums in historical context will be charmed by this compilation. (Dec. 3)

There’s less heroism in Brokaw’s profiles of the baby boom cohort than there was in his salute to The Greatest Generation, but there’s still plenty of drama. Almost everyone the author interviews (famous boomers like Arlo Guthrie, Hillary Clinton and Karl Rove along with many unsung contemporaries) describes a personal journey through the upheavals of the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, women’s liberation, the counterculture, the rise of the New Left or the birth of the New Right. Callow students became radicalized, restless housewives forged careers, musicians spiraled into addiction, disgusted erstwhile liberals trekked rightward, everyone—except Dick Cheney, Brokaw mentions—questioned authority. Unlike Brokaw’s celebratory and elegiac previous book, this one is steeped in retrospective ambivalence; conservatives look back on the era with disdain, and even unreconstructed lefties feel misgivings about its excesses. As an NBC correspondent, Brokaw was a keen (if careful nonparticipant) observer of the ’60s and contributes his own neutral but engaging gloss on developments, along with personal recollections of everyone from Bobby Kennedy to Hunter S. Thompson. He may not always know what to make of it all, but Brokaw’s profiles do convey the decade’s diverse experiences, its roiling energies and its centrality in the making of modern America. Photos. (Nov. 6)

The reasons are almost as numerous as the Marine combat veterans quoted and profiled in this engaging collection of reminiscences. Many cite the training and discipline drilled into recruits and the determination not to let down one’s buddies. Others are motivated by vengeance after a friend is killed. Gen. Smedley Butler, after a career invading banana republics in the early 20th century, opines that he fought mainly as “a gangster for Capitalism.” Some fight for the thrill of it (“the heavy machine gun made you feel like no one could touch you”), and some fight out of the sheer cussedness personified by Sgt. Dan Daley, who shouted, “Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?” as he led his men against the Germans in France in 1918. Parade columnist Brady (The Coldest War), a Korean War Marine vet, sketches vivid thumbnails of his interlocutors and sets the right leatherneck vibe—sympathetic, irreverent, comradely—to draw them out. Some tales meander; this is very much a meeting of old (and a few young) soldiers catching up and telling war stories in a glow of nostalgia. Still, Brady assembles from them an unusually personal and revealing collage of the nation in arms. (Nov.)

Italian literary and cultural critic Eco opens this visually dazzling and intellectually provocative companion volume to his History of Beauty (2004) by arguing that ugliness has been defined through the ages only as the opposite of beauty. Eco attempts to go further in this analysis of ugliness—part history, part cultural criticism—which echoes premises from his previous survey: a correspondence between the public’s tastes and artists’ sensibilities must be assumed, and cultural and historical contexts determine how both beauty and ugliness are portrayed and received. Each chapter juxtaposes images with brief excerpts from texts through the centuries, and Eco’s choices are superb: a discussion of “industrial ugliness” includes excerpts from Baudelaire, DeLillo and the Eiffel Tower’s originally negative reception; the delightful chapter on kitsch includes Hermann Broch and Eco’s own hilarious description of California’s Madonna Inn. Eco’s thoughts on ugliness in contemporary culture are the most interesting: in an age of goth and cyborg aesthetics, the boundaries between beauty and ugliness are perhaps permanently blurred. This unusual and eclectic study will appeal to cultural and art historians as well as to the general reader with an interest in a rarely examined topic. 300 color illus. (Nov.)

In 1903, the artist and designer Koloman Moser, along with fellow artist Josef Hoffmann and industrialist Fritz Waerndorfer, founded the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop). There Moser produced some of the icons of 20th-century design. This heavily illustrated volume, edited by the museological director of Vienna’s Leopold Museum and an art historian at Vienna University with contributions by other scholars, traces Moser’s full career, beginning with his work as a young illustrator of art journals and children’s books and as a participant from 1897 to 1903 in the Vienna Secession. During his years with the Werkstätte he produced fabrics, furniture, book bindings, jewelry and toys before leaving in 1907 over various disputes. Later he gained his widest exposure by producing postage stamps and bank notes for the Austrian government as well as working in both theater design and church decoration. Although many of the stage efforts were unproduced and the religious projects often devolved into what he described as a “series of unpleasant situations,” the illustrations prove that he was creating breakthrough designs. On the other hand, 70 examples of his easel paintings offer thin support for the editors’ claim that he was an innovator and not a follower of established modernist trends. 350 color and b&w illus. (Nov.)