Nonfiction Reviews

Veteran journalist Sager (Revenge of the Donut Boys) presents an amalgam of celebrity portraits and cautionary tales in a collection as addictive as the drugs and violence that fuel much of the author’s reporting. The title story goes inside a pioneering program at Camp Lejeune, N.C., that helps wounded Marines—many suffering from traumatic brain injuries—return to society. In other pieces, Sager extends his war metaphor in portraits of the famous, the anonymous and the tragic: the “misunderstood” Kobe Bryant, Rev. Al Sharpton (“one of the most reviled men in America”) and nightclub bouncer and “smartest man in America,” Chris Langan. Some of the most compelling, and tragic, portraits are drawn from the darkest corners of American society: Generation H—“children of the nineties”—heroin addicts in New York City and teenage gang members in Venice, Calif. The author turns the spotlight on himself in “Hunting Marlon Brando,” a highly personal and quixotic odyssey to track down the elusive actor. Sager has made a career of finding the unexpected story and telling it with empathy and narrative skill—a talent that’s on display throughout this eclectic and consistently arresting collection. (Oct.)

For his first 31 years Sabar considered his father, Yona, an embarrassing anachronism. “Ours was a clash of civilizations, writ small. He was ancient Kurdistan. I was 1980s L.A.” Yona was a UCLA professor whose passion was his native language, Aramaic. Ariel was an aspiring rock-and-roll drummer. The birth of Sabar’s own son in 2002 was a turning point, prompting Sabar to try to understand his father on his own terms. Readers can only be grateful to him for unearthing the history of a family, a people and a very different image of Iraq. Sabar vividly depicts daily life in the remote village of Zahko, where Muslims, Jews and Christians banded together to ensure prosperity and survival, and in Israel (after the Jews’ 1951 expulsion from Iraq), where Kurdish Jews were stereotyped as backward and simple. Sabar’s career as an investigative reporter at the Baltimore Sun and elsewhere serves him well, particularly in his attempt to track down his father’s oldest sister, who was kidnapped as an infant. Sabar offers something rare and precious—a tale of hope and continuity that can be passed on for generations. Photos. (Sept. 16)

Greenberg, a columnist for London’s Times Literary Supplement, was living in Greenwich Village in 1996 when his 15-year-old daughter, Sally, suddenly became manic, importuning strangers and ranting in the streets about her newfound cosmic wisdom. She was a danger to herself and others, so her father and stepmother had her committed to a psychiatric facility. Greenberg was no stranger to mental illness; he’d been caring for his dysfunctional brother most of their adult lives. Still, Sally was so brilliant, so caring, he couldn’t bear the thought of her ending up like his brother. During the 24 long days Sally spent in the hospital, Greenberg learned to cope. He watched a Hasidic family visiting with their mentally ill young man. He pondered his ex-wife going to cuddle with Sally, as if she were still a little girl. He listened to his mother explain her troubled marriage and the subsequent mental illness of his brother. He wondered at his present wife’s resilience. After Sally’s discharge, questions of how they would adjust to their new lives were complicated in very different ways. In this well-written and sincere memoir, Greenberg proves to be a caring man trying to find his way through the minefield of a loved one’s madness. (Sept.)

With a relentlessly honest look at modern emergency medicine, Austin, a former firefighter now living in Durham, N.C., writes in his debut book of his transformation to a highly capable ER doctor struggling to stay one jump ahead of death in the crowded critical care ward. The book begins deftly with Austin, a sleep-deprived physician, trying to avoid mistakes stemming from fatigue by relying on his instincts, frequently both skill and luck, to treat patients with gunshot wounds, brain tumors, asthma, heart ailments and general problems. In a narrative blur of flashbacks, he tells of his career as a firefighter before landing in medical school, which was followed by an internship at a local hospital and marriage to a lovely nurse and having a family. What makes this inspiring medical memoir stand out is the courageous measure of Austin’s humanity in taking on the endless weight of suffering, and what he becomes to his co-workers, his patients, his family and his community. (Sept.)

Prolific author Frankel (most recently, I Take This Man) was only 11 when her mother put her on a diet. She went from 100 to 88 pounds in six weeks, making her mother ecstatic, although she gained back four pounds right away. Frankel learned a basic lesson: she could enjoy eating or “have approval,” but not both. Although she blamed her mother’s “fatphobia” for her unhappy childhood, from middle school on her peers were her cruelest tormenters. As she got older, her “bad body image” translated to “anorgasmia”; research shows that women who feel unattractive often develop sexual dysfunction. Later, working at Mademoiselle, where so many co-workers had eating disorders, she realized that an obsession with diet was one way of avoiding life’s thornier issues. In her 40s, Frankel decided to jettison all the emotional baggage she was carrying about her weight, to free herself, finally, from dieting. After hiring a photographer to shoot a portfolio of her nude, having a friend help her find her personal style in clothing and coming to terms with her husband and her mother over fat issues, Frankel finally got rid of her body-image negativity. (Sept.)

Hodgson (Good Food from a Small Kitchen)—a former restaurant critic for the New York Times and currently working at the New York Observer—has led a rich and colorful life, from sipping tea with Paul Bowles in Tangier to hanging out in the kitchen with Gordon Ramsay. Her memoir begins with childhood reminiscences of wartime rationing; a pared-down recipe for sponge cake is the first of several culinary sidebars that become progressively elaborate. Recalling her romance with W.S. Merwin, for example, she describes the quesadillas cooked by their neighbor in Mexico; when she has Diana Trilling and Virgil Thomson over to her apartment for dinner, she serves roast leg of lamb with anchovies. Take away all the famous names and her father’s constant travel required by his diplomatic career (which she would later discover was a cover for his real job as a British spy), and Hodgson’s emotional drama is straightforward and easily recognizable, from chafing against the restraints of boarding school to coping with the death of her parents. A highly charming raconteur, Hodgson’s combination of sparkling anecdotes and tempting recipes is likely to win over foodies. (Sept. 23)

The yearly battle between Ohio State and the University of Michigan is one of the most intensely fought rivalries in college football, and one of its greatest eras began in 1969, when Bo Schembechler arrived in Michigan as the team’s new head coach. Schembechler had been a former protégé of Woody Hayes, the legendary coach of Ohio State—who was so intimidating that one player used to be terrified that Hayes would kick him in the testicles during practice, despite never having seen him do it to another player. Rosenberg, a sportswriter for the Detroit Free Press, tracks how the two coaches pushed their players to greatness over the next nine years (until Hayes was fired after punching an opposing player in the middle of a game) while trying to adjust to the social upheavals of the 1970s. His attempts to bring the radical student underground into the story are an intermittent distraction—the most powerful drama is out on the football field and in the locker room when every year Schembechler and Hayes went head-to-head. The story has its strong moments, including one of history’s most notorious missed field goals, but it’s the dual portrait of the old-school coaching legends that’s the real attraction. (Sept. 10)

Lencioni (The Three Signs of a Miserable Job) makes an eloquent case for applying business tools to manage scattered and stressful home lives. He observes that even successful people who apply strategies and long-term thinking at work neglect to implement plans and goals for their own families, noting that “family chaos is just part of life and so we accept levels of confusion and disorganization and craziness at home that we would not tolerate at work.” Lencioni invites readers into the lives of a fictional family, describing how overwhelmed stay-at-home mom Theresa brings greater serenity into her home by integrating business pointers into a three-step plan in which her family identifies what makes them unique, their top priority or “rallying cry” (a big project that can be worked on in two to six months) and a regular time to discuss their progress, preferably 10 minutes a week. Although Lencioni admits that his own family’s experience using these tools has been limited, his book is a worthwhile if brief attempt to grapple with a particularly thorny problem facing overextended families. (Sept.)

In this mostly well-argued book, industrial design expert Brunner and corporate consultant Emery (Success Built to Last) put forth a design manifesto: building a successful company is not just about the shiny end product but about designing every aspect of the customer’s experience. By paying just as much attention to store design, Web sites and customer support as to the product or service being sold, a company can build an emotional relationship with its customers and so secure market share for life. They contend that design should influence every single business decision and—if done right—will lead consumers to become truly invested, and willing to pay extra. The authors return again and again to several well-known brand names as exemplars of their theory. Ikea, Samsung and Whole Foods are all given props, though highest praise is reserved for Brunner’s old employer, Apple, so much so that at times this book reads like an Apple promotional product. Combining their knowledge of design, organizational structure, branding and product placement, the authors have essentially repackaged a simple idea: the customer’s feelings matter. (Sept.)

With a passion that gives this exploration of colony collapse disorder real buzz, Jacobsen (A Geography of Oysters) investigates why 30 billion honeybees—one-quarter of the northern hemisphere’s population—vanished by the spring of 2007. He identifies the convergence of culprits—blood-sucking mites, pesticide buildup, viral infections, overused antibiotics, urbanization and climate change—that have led to habitat loss and the destruction of “the beautiful mathematics of the hive.” Honeybees are undergoing something akin to a nervous breakdown; they aren’t pollinating crops as effectively, and production of commercial American honey, already undercut by cheap Chinese imports, is dwindling, even as beekeepers truck stressed honeybees cross-country to pollinate the fields of desperate farmers. Jacobsen pessimistically predicts that “our breakfasts will become... a lot more expensive” as the supply of citrus fruits, berries and nuts will inevitably decrease, though he expresses faith that more resilient bees can eventually emerge, perhaps as North American honeybees are crossbred with sturdier Russian queen bees. The author, now tending his own hives, invests solid investigative journalism with a poet’s voice to craft a fact-heavy book that soars. (Sept.)

Horne (Cold War in a Hot Zone) shifts the more usual local focus in African-American history to a global one of unanticipated dimensions in this study of the spiritual, ideological and personal ties between Black America and India. The author contends that colonialism and anti-Asian bias made for common cause between African-Americans and Indians, and explores how Indian thought significantly influenced African-American culture—from the expected examination of Martin Luther King Jr.’s adoption of Gandhi’s techniques of nonviolent resistance to more surprising revelations on the South Asian influence on abolitionists and the Nation of Islam, and the close friendship between Paul Robeson and Jawaharlal Nehru. In arguing that the “momentum toward independence in India and equality for U. S. Negroes... became intertwined,” Horne presents a variety of examples of cultural cross-pollination—African-Americans reading Gandhi and writing on colonialism while Indians were writing on the race problem in the United States, and more. Readers interested in African-American history, race relations and anticolonialist movements will find Horne’s book overstuffed and somewhat rambling, but still an informative and useful exploration of fresh territory. (Sept.)

Hebrew University’s van Creveld remains unsurpassed as a scholar of war. In this provocative volume, he challenges perhaps the subject’s single greatest shibboleth—at least in Western culture. Since the Enlightenment, war has been described as a means to an end, serving essentially rational interests. Nothing, van Creveld asserts, could be further from the truth: “war exercises a powerful fascination in its own right.” To dismiss this is to overlook that war has generated a distinctive culture, from uniforms to war games to parades, that is despised and regularly denigrated as atavistic and irrational. Van Creveld demonstrates that war is an essential element of history, rooted in psychology. In a tour de force of scholarship and insight, he takes readers through the processes of preparing for, waging and commemorating war. That culture makes men face death willingly, even enthusiastically, because it is an end in itself. “[T]o be of any use, the culture of war must be useless.” Its traditions and rules are not constructions, but part of the fighter’s soul—and as such, for better and worse, part of the human condition. Illus. (Sept. 30)

This fast-paced book will be a revelation even to professional historians. Pulling together the latest scholarship with his own research, Williams (A People’s History of the Civil War), a professor of history at Valdosta State University, puts an end to any lingering claim that the Confederacy was united in favor of secession during the Civil War. His astonishing story details the deep, often murderous divisions in Southern society. Southerners took up arms against each other, engaged in massacres, guerrilla warfare, vigilante justice and lynchings, and deserted in droves from the Confederate army (300,000 men joined the Union forces). Unionist politicians never stopped battling secessionism. Some counties and regions even seceded from the secessionists. Poor whites resented the large slave owners, who had engineered the war but were exempt from the draft. Not surprisingly, slaves fought slaveholders for their freedom and aided the Union cause. So did women and Indians. Williams’s long overdue work makes indelibly clear that Southerners themselves played a major role in doing in the secessionist South. With this book, the history of the Civil War will never be the same again. Illus. (Sept.)

Wert (The Sword of Lincoln) adds to his status as a top-ranking Civil War scholar in this excellent biography of the Confederacy’s best-known cavalry general. Jeb Stuart’s reputation has faded somewhat in recent years, particularly for his alleged failures during the Gettysburg campaign. Wert integrates comprehensive archival and printed sources to describe a man shaped by a zest for life, religious faith and devotion to duty, who from his youth sought achievement and recognition. Soldiering promised both. The initial dominance of Confederate cavalry in the east during the Civil War was a product of Stuart’s skills as leader and organizer, trainer and tactician. Above all he was a master at reconnaissance and screening. His decision at Gettysburg to ride around the Union army instead of rejoining Robert E. Lee was a mistake. But its serious consequences were in good part due to Lee’s dependence on his now-absent source of reconnaissance, and the Union cavalry’s ability to learn from repeated defeat at Stuart’s hands. Wert’s biography goes far in restoring Stuart’s claim to be “the greatest cavalry officer ever foaled in America.” 8 pages of b&w photos; maps. (Sept.)

Fixed nitrogen (which is immediately usable to plants) is essential in agriculture. Its rarity, as science writer Hager (The Demon Under the Microscope) shows, dramatically shaped the world and its politics. But by 1905, as Hager details, German chemist Fritz Haber discovered a process for transforming abundant air-borne nitrogen into ammonia, and Carl Bosch’s ingenious engineering scaled Haber’s benchtop chemistry into industrial processes to make fertilizer. But Hager’s story is not only one of triumph, of how Haber and Bosch “invented a way to turn air into bread,” earning a Nobel Prize and saving millions from starvation. This is also a story of irony and tragedy. First, life-saving nitrogen is also the main ingredient in explosives, and Hager cogently summarizes the Haber-Bosch process’s critical role in both world wars. In addition, Hager illustrates Haber’s extreme German patriotism and desperate wish to assimilate; shattered by the rise of Hitler, he became an outcast, abandoned even by his onetime colleague Bosch. It’s unfortunate that Hager ends his fine book with only a brief look at the deleterious role of nitrogen on the environment. (Sept.)

During May of 1939, as the Nazis were burning books throughout Germany, the people of Bakersfield Calif., did exactly the same thing with John Steinbeck’s new bestseller, The Grapes of Wrath. As Wartzman (The King of California) shows in this intriguing account, the banning of Steinbeck’s masterpiece throughout California’s Kern County was orchestrated by rich local growers: men who were busy exploiting scores of Joad families, the very men Steinbeck exposed in his novel. As a pretext, the growers cited, among other things, Steinbeck’s use of “foul” language (“bastard,” “bitch”) and vivid scenes such as Rose of Sharon, having lost her baby, offering her milk-filled breast to a starving man. One lone librarian, Gretchen Knief, led the charge against the censors, but the book—by then a Pulitzer Prize winner—remained banned a year later. While all this was happening, Steinbeck was suffering the strains of his collapsing first marriage. In telling this unique tale, Wartzman artfully weaves the personal and the political in a book that readers will find engaging on more than one level. (Sept.)

There have been many books concerning FBI undercover agents on perilous assignments, but this one by a veteran FBI agent goes most of them one better with his full-tilt voyages into the darkest fringes of society. After his training and recruitment into the criminal netherworld, Hamer assumed several identities—such as drug dealer and contract killer—to penetrate the closed societies of the Chinese, Russian and Iraqi mobs. However, Hamer’s controlled theatrics are most compelling as he infiltrates the security-obsessed North American Man/Boy Love Association disguised as an aging pedophile, to crack the group and their extensive international network. The sneak peek into that dank society of “chicken hawks” is illuminating in its depiction of child sexual abuse. With his practiced lies and disciplined behavior, Hamer is a peerless undercover agent, although his book sometimes breaks its narrative focus and wanders into several cases at once. Still, this book possesses power and conviction without being pretentious or pious. (Sept. 12)

DiFonzo, a professor of psychology at the Rochester Institute of Technology whose work on rumors was featured in the New York Times Magazine’s 2006 “Year in Ideas” issue, uncovers some surprising facts about rumors: what they are and why we spread them, listen to them and believe them. Drawing on a host of studies, DiFonzo illustrates how rumors are “a fundamental phenomenon of social beings.” Rumors are created by people who are in unclear or confusing situations and want desperately to find an explanation. There are different varieties of rumors: they can express something much wished for (year-end bonuses), while others are a form of propaganda. Rumors can be a remarkably efficient way of spreading information: a study of military gossip during WWII found that the “grapevine” passed information just as accurately as—and more quickly than—official channels. But gossip drives wedges between people as often as it binds them. “Viral” rumors, spread repeatedly by e-mail, can gain credibility from repetition, and such repetition can turn a rumor into a self-fulfilling prophecy: banks fail, stocks tank. DiFonzo’s clear explanations and entertaining examples make for thoughtful reading. (Sept.)

This is a fine example of the deluxe albums produced for the Japanese armchair traveler of the 19th century, displaying the delights of a journey along the famous scenic route connecting Edo and Kyoto. As Japanese art scholar Izzard explains, the publishers of this album enlisted the services of Keisai Eisen (1790–1848), a known carouser who supported his family by writing salacious literature before turning to art. Beginning in 1835, Eisen completed 24 prints before Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), one of the great masters of lyrical landscapes, took over. The differing approaches of the two artists keep the album lively. Although each did both landscapes and more anecdotal scenes, only Eisen could have produced the brawl among beggars or the nightly parade of courtesans through a bustling post station. Hiroshige is best when depicting well-known beauty spots along the route, the specifics of seasons, rain storms and times of day ranging from sunrise to moonlit nights. This volume reproduces a recently discovered early edition of the album, containing details and colors that were dropped from later editions. Commentaries provide historical information for today’s armchair traveler along with technical information for the specialist and collector. (Sept.)

In 1862, Emily Dickinson wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a noted man of letters and radical activist for abolition and women’s rights, asking if he would look at her poems. He did and recognized immediately their strange power. As Wineapple points out in this brilliant study, Dickinson’s letter marked the blossoming of a complicated lifelong friendship. Although the two met face-to-face only twice, Higginson found Dickinson’s explosive poetry seductive. Drawing on 25 years’ worth of Dickinson’s letters (Higginson’s are lost), Wineapple contests the traditional portrait of her as isolated from the world and liking it that way. In her poems and her letters, Wineapple shows, Dickinson was the consummate flirt, a “sorceress, a prestidigitator in words.” Wineapple resurrects the reputation of Higginson, long viewed as stodgy in his literary tastes (he reviled Whitman) yet who recognized Dickinson’s genius and saw her work as an example of the “democratic art” he fervently believed in. As Wineapple did previously with Hawthorne (Hawthorne: A Life), she elegantly delves into a life and offers rich insights into a little-known relationship between two of the late–19th century’s most intriguing writers. 32 photos. (Aug. 13)

In clear, charming prose, novelist Bos-well delivers a satisfying exploration of the craft of writing fiction, drawing from an array of well-chosen examples. In one instance he offers a full-bodied analysis of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich to illustrate his argument about the use of social paradigm in fiction; in a chapter on politics in the novel, he helpfully streamlines a Noam Chomsky essay into an explanatory list of the political responsibilities of the intellectual. Boswell’s defense of his concept of the “half-known world”—the idea that there must be “a dimension to the fictional reality that escapes comprehension”—is spiritedly articulated and defended, and the book feels written for the serious writing student rather than the beginner. However, while addressing a sophisticated audience, he is direct—a chapter on omniscient narrators answers tough narrative questions in an easy-to-follow manner. Throughout, Boswell presents autobiographical moments and brief vignettes of his own devising to illustrate his concepts, reinforcing the fact that, like his great predecessor in craft writing John Gardner, he is a working fiction writer who knows his material. (Aug.)

The stupendous scale and breakneck pace of China’s modernization, compressing into a few decades changes that took the West centuries to complete, is one of the great stories of our time. Newsweek correspondent Hewitt, a China hand since the 1980s, surveys the social fallout of this economic boom from many angles: the “me generation” of pampered only children alarming parents with crazy hairstyles and pop-culture fads; the new sexual mores of casual hookups and premarital cohabitation; the avant-garde assault on traditional values (one Beijing performance artist caused a stir by grilling and eating a human embryo). Alternately promoting and punishing these developments, he observes, is an uneasy Communist Party, its socialist rhetoric belied by its corrupt collusion with landlords and factory bosses. The author’s sympathetic profiles of winners and losers comprise a panorama of the new China, from the nouveau riche craze for upscale home furnishings to the precarious “floating” existence of dispossessed migrant workers and the gnawing status anxieties of middle-class strivers. Hewitt’s broad experience, vivid reportage and canny insights make this one of the best of the many recent guides to China’s upheaval. Photos. (Aug.)

Noted science writer Singh and British professor of complementary medicine Ernst offer a reasoned examination of the research on acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic, herbal medicine and other alternative treatments. Singh (Fermat’s Last Theorem) and Ernst work hard to be objective, but their conclusion is that these therapies are largely worthless. As they examine the research on various alternative therapies, the authors explore the principles of evidence-based medicine on which their conclusions are based, including clinical trials and the placebo effect; they also explore related ethical issues. The authors report that many patients will improve with any alternative remedy—but no more than those given a placebo. Exceptions exist; some herbal remedies (e.g., St. John’s wort, echinacea) can be helpful though not always advisable, and chiropractors can relieve low back pain under certain circumstances. This is a stimulating and informative account that will be indispensable to anyone considering an alternative treatment, though it may not dissuade true believers. 16 illus. (Aug.)

Garwood, historian of science at the Open University in England, presents a thoroughly enjoyable first book. Examining the belief that the world is flat from a wide array of perspectives, she makes some important points. She demonstrates quite convincingly, for example, that, contrary to what most people believe, the ancients knew the world was not flat: “the earth has been widely believed to be a globe since the fifth century B.C.” Only in the 19th century did acceptance of a flat earth spread, promoted largely by biblical literalists. Garwood does an impressive job of comparing those flat-earthers with modern-day creationists. She also makes the case that it’s all but impossible to argue effectively with true believers. Modern believers assert that the space program is a hoax. In 1994, on the 25th anniversary of the first manned landing on the moon, a Washington Post poll estimated that approximately 20 million Americans thought the landing was staged on Earth, underscoring that some outrageous beliefs still hold sway. Garwood is respectful throughout, analyzing the philosophical underpinnings of those who have doubted, and continue to doubt, the Earth’s rotundity. (Aug.)

In the early 1990s, New York Times publishing reporter Lyall transferred to London “for love.” Now she produces the latest in a seemingly inexhaustible genre that dissects British quirks and remarks how peculiar are the inhabitants of that moist little isle. With George Orwell’s essay “England Your England” and Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island the best-known examples, Lyall’s is an appropriately humorous tale of the struggle to accommodate to her new British way of life and to make sense of the profound culture shock she experienced. But Lyall’s observations are neither overly perceptive nor interesting and much of her material is creakingly familiar: aristocrats, for example, pronounce some words differently than their working-class compatriots, Britons love animals (a special memorial honors animals who aided British troops in wartime) and the game of cricket is boring. This is a light, fluffy read that will be enjoyed by first-time visitors to Britain and even a few nostalgic British expatriates. But while Lyall’s writing is, as always, witty and tart, it will disappoint those seeking serious analysis or original insights. (Aug.)

Ripped from the headlines of the 2007 killing of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, Hollington’s informative primer on assassinations spells out the high cost around the world when governments, terrorists or maniacs take matters into their own hands. The London-based journalist details the motives for such eliminations as political beliefs, and the desire for power or notoriety; there are professionals who kill for profit (wolves and jackals) and the untrained amateurs (foxes). History buffs will revel in the vivid capsule descriptions of several successful and attempted assassinations, starting with the 1950 near-shooting of President Truman, the tag team effort of the Mafia and CIA to kill Castro in 1961, the infamous 1975 assassination of Saudi king Faisal by his nephew and the 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy slayings. The roll call of the politically and culturally prominent targets is lengthy, with a pope, a pornographer and two recent presidents among them. This book is a riveting glimpse of random and sanctioned killing. (Aug. 7)

In breezy, irreverent prose, Squire (The Slender Balance) catalogues the history and religious significance of the institution of marriage from Adam and Eve to the Renaissance and beyond. Writing as if gossiping with a girlfriend, Squire argues that marriage was developed to establish paternity by controlling the sex life of women. We learn that the men of Athens had hetaera (courtesans) to entertain them, concubines for their daily “need” and wives with whom to breed legitimate children; the women of Rome, on the other hand, learned how to use their power to threaten male rule of society. The New Testament offers equality to husband and wife, at least in the marriage bed; the association of lust with Eve’s original sin can be attributed to Augustine. Squire explores sixth-century penitentials on sexual sins, adultery in the Middle Ages and the intersection of wife and witch during the Renaissance inquisitions. Readers are left questioning whether our modern idea of love matches might end up as a chapter in a future book about the incarnations of marriage. “Love may not be the answer, but for now, it is the story.” (Aug.)

In 1996, a 9,000-year-old skull was excavated near Kennewick, Wash., and quickly became the focus of a charged debate between scientists and Native American groups who battled over the race of the skeleton and which group could claim “ownership.” The controversy over race, biology and genealogy is an ideal touchstone for this smart and sensible book that brilliantly encapsulates the incident, asking: “Who owns knowledge?” and why “antiracism has come to be defined in opposition to scientific rationality.” While race is increasingly regarded as a social construct, not “biological reality,” Malik (Man, Beast and Zombie) demonstrates how the contemporary “obsession with identity” has propelled a dangerous—and liberal—tendency to romanticize race. Commonalities are being downplayed, according to the author, as individuals are seeking “answers in terms of history and heritage.” Malik’s argument will likely stimulate further controversy—he wrestles with Enlightenment and Romantic philosophies, political correctness, identity politics and racism, not to mention the repatriation of cultural artifacts. A neat summary of the history of thinking behind race, the book projects not a milquetoast middle ground but rational approaches for moving forward in a racialized world. (Aug.)

In this sweeping survey of global geopolitics in flux, Cohen-Tanugi (An Alliance at Risk) announces the end of the “Atlantic Era,” prophesying that Western powers are in decline, soon to be overtaken by China, India and Brazil, the economic powerhouses “driving world growth.” According to the author, the U.S. has lost its credibility with the catastrophic bungling of the invasion of Iraq, and despite the euro getting stronger, Europe itself is not; national interests prevail, as is evident from the French and Dutch rejection of a constitutional treaty for the E.U. Cohen-Tanugi covers well-trod ground, and too often his analysis reads like a summary of the latest headlines. A competent primer for a seminar on contemporary international relations, the book does offer some predictions and suggestions for actors in the new world order. The author regards Asia and the Middle East as the 21st century’s potential battlegrounds and believes the U.S. and Europe still have a vital role to play in striving to preserve “democratic values and the stability of the world,” thereby influencing geopolitics even as their stature and alliances shift. (Aug.)

Kim chronicles his effort to lead North Korean refugees through the 6,000-mile underground railway through China in this exposé of the astonishing day-to-day realities of famine, religious oppression, torture and sexual abuse in the most secretive and impoverished member of the “axis of evil.” The author, a former missionary, spent four years at the China–North Korea border building shelters and orphanages, and his access to government officials, journalists, aid workers and hundreds of North Korean refugees provide him a unique vantage point from which to synthesize current research and policy on conditions in North Korea with affecting real-life testimonials. His intrepid effort to help four North Korean teenagers avoid arrest and repatriation on the journey from northern China to the British consulate in Shanghai is riveting, as is his insider knowledge of the perilous route refugees navigate across the borders of China, Laos and Thailand. The author’s compassion and astonishing ability to penetrate the “Hermit Kingdom” and lift its shroud of secrecy do much to ameliorate the book’s chief flaws, the clunky prose and occasionally amateurish conjecture and derivative political analysis. (Aug.)

This slim, scathing study of the right’s trajectory argues that conservatives co-opted the utopian radicalism of the left to brilliantly position themselves as political underdogs, while efficiently consolidating power. With a little cheekiness and ample research, Mattson (When America Was Great) contends that today’s conservatives, marked by their “aggressive, confrontational” style, their populism, “pizzazz and brashness,” are the true inheritors of the ’60s’ “rebel spirit.” The author skillfully links the invasion of Iraq with the new conservative utopianism (“a new city on the hill in the Middle East”) and identifies conservatism’s ideological family tree, detecting the echoes of Bill Buckley in Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh. He enriches his familiar analysis of the birth of the “neocons” by reviewing how conservatives learned to define themselves more sharply, using the radical style of their liberal counterparts, and demonstrates how populism was fused with neoconservatism to sire the politics of “uncivil debate.” Passionately, unapologetically partisan, the author’s incendiary argument only cools when he champions liberalism as the “middle of the political spectrum,” perhaps proving that he—like the conservatives he so effectively skewers—is best on the offensive. (Aug.)

For a man who forswore vices of all kinds, Reverend Jerry Falwell was a man of huge appetites—not least for profit—and Smillie’s business biography examines how the son of Virginia bootleggers transformed himself from a smalltown preacher into a multimedia oracle. Armed with a siege mentality, dogged work ethic and surprising openness to the best idea, Falwell pioneered a direct-mail empire with a sophisticated electronic database and a fundamentalist interpretation of Christianity that appealed to Americans turned off by mainline Protestantism’s reforms in the 1960s. Smillie’s Falwell is an indomitable risk taker, constantly weathering cycles of prosperity and crushing debt as he raises up his empire, founds Liberty University with sweepstakes, starts a wildly lucrative online school, exploits his opponents (like Larry Flynt) and generally raises hell. The author’s access to the Falwell estate and family perhaps explains the paucity of more stringent critical (or political) analysis as Smillie focuses primarily upon the Gospel Hour’s balance sheets. The book suffers when Falwell drops out of the book midway and it loses its controversial protagonist and most of its steam; unsurprisingly, the real heat is generated by the visionary huckster. (Aug.)

Using a hefty helping of neurobiology, corporate moguls Gurian and Annis illustrate how brain chemistry influences gender and how gender in turn powerfully affects every aspect of workplace behavior. The authors contend that corporations attentive to gender and behavior can enhance their performance, competitive edge and bottom line. The authors discuss how men and women wield leadership, bond, regard and execute authority and approach management and conflict resolution skills—applying their findings on male/female brain differences to account for the variations in behavior. Though they tackle the big questions—for instance, do women have to become men to get ahead?—they are at their best when at their most practical, using step-by-step instructions, exercises and simply worded “GenderTools” to teach men and women to understand each other in meetings and on the golf course. Though a front-loaded density of neuroscience may deter the casual browser, readers with a genuine interest and a desire to improve workplace gender relations will do well with this pragmatic and well-intentioned guide. (Aug.)

Winter, managing director at Goldman Sachs, delivers an admirably clear and encouraging guide to informed investing that is refreshingly free of jargon, theory or scare tactics intended to propel individual investors into his firm’s advisers’ waiting arms or related mutual funds. Winter also shies away from the standard introduction to broad concepts that leave readers ready for a pop quiz, but unclear as to how they will make any money. Instead, his direct approach hones in on the four cardinal rules to navigate through the “noise machine” that is the investment industry and to prevent investors from falling prey to “clever sales pitches or... hubris.” He champions simple and pragmatic binary thinking (“the developed world versus the developing world,” “Tokyo or Shanghai,” “fad versus trend”) to decide which investment possibilities to pursue. Even more usefully, he explains how investors have been making money recently and points readers in the direction he believes future profits will most likely be found. Novices and seasoned investors alike will find much to relish in this crash course in making sound investment choices. (Aug.)

Murray, coauthor of The Bell Curve, believes our educational system’s failures stem from the fundamental lie “that every child can be anything he or she wants” and that such “educational romanticism” prevents progress. Four “simple truths,” he asserts, would prove better: children have different abilities, “half of the children are below average,” too many children go to college, and America’s future depends on the gifted. Murray takes care with his first point, discussing various types of abilities instead of the oft-maligned I.Q. measure; however, he does believe that test scores reflect ability. He argues that there are only a limited number of academically gifted people and these are America’s future leaders, that only this “elite” can enjoy college productively and that the nongifted shouldn’t be channeled by their high school counselors into training for that “college chimera,” which wouldn’t make them happy anyway. Further, he argues, if the Educational Testing Service created “certification tests” covering what employers want applicants to know, these would become the “gold standard” for applicants, rather than college degrees. This book is likely to stir controversy even if it appears that Murray is dressing up an old elitist argument—test scores reflect ability, so high-scorers should be offered a challenging education, while the below-average should be herded into vocational training. (Aug.)