Nonfiction Reviews

Ol’ Dirty Bastard was one of the founding members of hip-hop’s Wu-Tang Clan, “the heart and soul of the group” in its early years, although he had embarked on a solo career before he died of an accidental drug overdose. A collaboration with Mariah Carey on the hit song “Fantasy” led to stardom, but ODB was primarily known during his “short, tumultuous, but somehow inspired life” (1968–2004) for his run-ins with the law and his erratic behavior; in one memorable incident, he disrupted the Grammys to explain why he thought Wu-Tang should have won. Lowe, who wrote about ODB for the Village Voice after his death, has gathered what information she can on his life and career, but that really isn’t enough to fill a book. Instead, she writes about her efforts to understand ODB, stretching out each interview, no matter how tangential, and circling around her main themes—such as the notion that the drug-addled rapper was, in his final years, “a curio put onstage” for the amusement of white hipsters. There are occasional flashes of insight, especially when she writes on the subject of ODB’s probable mental illness, but the structural weaknesses make for an unsatisfying biography. (Dec. 2)

The enduring relevance of the New York Times op-ed illustrations are explicated with literary flair by Kraus, a former art director of the page, who contends that the groundbreaking pictures “changed the very purpose and potential of illustrations... to stir the political and cultural pot.” Episodic essays accompanied by illustrations re-create the battles between art directors and editors that have raged since the Times created the world’s first op-ed page in 1970. The works of famous Times illustrators like Brad Holland and Roland Topor, are enriched by Kraus’s presentation of the controversies associated with their publication or rejection. The book serves as a chronicle of late 20th-century history, replete with sardonic images of tyrants and visual commentaries on the fall of communism; the works of Eastern Europeans who fled totalitarian regimes are some of the most challenging and resonant. In this overflowing treasure chest of ideas, politics and cultural critiques, Kraus proves that “art is dangerous” and sometimes necessarily so. 306 illus. (Nov.)

Shore (Breeding Bin Ladens), a professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, explains why smart people do dumb things in this glib guidebook that is more pop psychology than serious inquiry. According to the author, people blunder because they fall into “inflexible mind-sets formed from faulty reasoning”—or “cognition traps.” Using examples drawn from history, wars, medicine, business and literature, Shore identifies seven common cognition traps such as “causefusion” (“confusing the causes of complex events”), “flatview” (black and white thinking) and “static cling” (an inability to accept change). Shore cites examples of various actors (individuals, corporations and even nations) stumbling into one trap or another with unfortunate results (e.g., a person will compound a blunder through different kinds of faulty reasoning). Shore points to “America’s Iraq debacle” as a kind of perfect storm where “all of the cognition traps... combined to sabotage America’s success.” But Shore remains optimistic that society can learn to avoid cognition traps and inevitable blunders by following his prescription of cultivating mental flexibility, empathy, imagination, contrarianism and an open mind. Despite the clever wordplay, neat categories and accessible examples, Shore mostly recycles common sense in a fancy package. (Nov.)

In this investigation of lucha libre wrestling, Levi’s immersion in the Mexican professional wrestling world and her training as a luchadora (female wrestler) give her an insider’s perspective well-placed to analyze the rich symbolic vocabulary the sport has conferred on political and cultural life. The author, an anthropologist, delves into the significance of masks, theatrics and familial training, capably recreating the action in the ring to demonstrate how técnicos (technical wrestlers), rudos (rule-breakers), referees and spectators interact to create the spectacle. Levi examines how luchadoras and exoticos (feminine male wrestlers) support and subvert Mexican gender roles, why masked luchadores moonlight as political activists and how lucha libre has recently re-emerged as pop culture kitsch on this side of the border in the movie Nacho Libre and the Cartoon Network’s Mucha Lucha. While the book is too academic to be an entertaining piece of reportage, it is a good primer. Its sophisticated analysis links lucha libre with Mexican political theater in which the heroes and villains work for the same team, masks alternately hide and reveal the truth, and the outcomes are determined before the matches even begin. (Nov.)

In this nihilistic memoir, the author, creator of the Philadelphia Lawyer blog, addresses both the bankruptcy of the American legal system and his own predilection for substance abuse. His pseudonym, he says, refers both to the city where the author practiced and to a disparaging term for an unscrupulous lawyer. A former frat boy, the author entered law school for lack of better ideas only to find that the material bored him and his studies interfered with getting drunk. Still, he persisted, and his quest for big money led him through criminal law, civil litigation and personal injury law. Although he never gets rich, he is able to ingest large quantities of drugs in the company of equally debauched friends. The author writes with intermittent brio, and his critiques of his profession are pointed and astute. However, the endless tales of sleazy sex and drunken escapades might go over well with bar-stool buddies, but on the page they make a depressing blur. Other people barely seem to exist for him: of his future wife we learn little more than that she has a “dancer’s ass” and “amazing nipples.” With a lot more empathy and self-awareness, the author might have created a devastating portrayal of the current debasement of the American professional classes. (Oct.)

The journey white Southerners travel in this riveting memoir, from virulent racism to acceptance of blacks’ civil rights, is as momentous as any in American history. Zellner moved a shorter distance—son of a progressive, integrationist minister from Alabama, he had his family’s support when he joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1961. A frontline participant in many civil rights battles, he was jailed, beaten, slashed, shot at by police and taken on a terrifying night ride by Klansmen as they debated whether to lynch him. He’s also a canny observer of major figures in the struggle, from SNCC legend Robert Moses to segregationist stalwart George Wallace. Zellner comes off as confident, even cocky—especially in his many arguments with racist antagonists, of which he has an implausible verbatim recall—but the constant menace of howling white mobs, vicious cops and Klan terrorists takes its toll. The result is a testament both to the courage of civil rights activists and to the hatred they overcame; when Zellner survives to see white and black workers come together for a wildcat strike, it seems almost miraculous. Photos. (Oct.)

Greenburg, an attorney and former editor of the Pepperdine Law Review, recalls a forgotten scandal in an exciting era. In 1926, Edward “Daddy” Browning, a 51-year-old New York City millionaire, fell for a 15-year-old “de facto high school dropout” named Frances Heenan, known as “Peaches.” They were married a month later, and within a year they were battling in the courtroom. Both Heenan, a “buxom girl” who had worked in various Manhattan department stores, and her millionaire “Daddy” were publicity hounds, and the newly popular tabloids were thrilled to bait readers with the lurid escapades of the “elderly vulgarian and his bride.” Months after Heenan (who was said to have spent $1,000 dollars a day shopping) left Browning, a sensational separation trial ensued, concluding in March 1927 in Browning’s favor, at least financially. Peaches turned to a career in vaudeville, but the media frenzy continued until Browning’s death in 1934. Greenburg offers an entertaining history of a scandal, coupled with a serious look at the infancy of tabloid journalism. 40 b&w photos. (Oct.)

Bishop and Lowell were two of the major poets of postwar America. From the time they met in 1947 at a party thrown by their mutual friend and poet, Randall Jarrell, through the end of Lowell’s life in 1977, the pair—who saw each other rarely but considered themselves intimate friends—maintained a steady correspondence about literature and their turbulent lives and their own complicated, at times flirtatious friendship. Lowell was manic-depressive and embroiled in two volatile marriages, while Bishop also suffered depression and more than her share of loss, including the suicide of her longtime lover. Many of their now famous letters, previously available in separate volumes, appear here in one volume, their exchanges preserved in the order they were sent and received. Throughout this momentous volume, transcendence comes to these two often troubled writers through the shared experience of art that brought them together and sustained them: “If only one could see everything that way all the time!,” writes Bishop in 1957, “that rare feeling of control, illumination—life is all right, for the time being.” 13 b&w photos. (Oct.)

Wilder and Bryer provide considerable insight into a protean American novelist and playwright. As a man of the theater, Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) is not typically counted among experimentalists. Yet Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth are works of high modernism. This essential gathering of letters, carefully edited and abundantly annotated by independent historian Wilder (the writer’s niece by marriage) and Bryer (editor of Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill), indicates a man of sophistication, immense energy yet with a curious detachment. He was at home with classical, Far Eastern and 20th-century literature as well as popular culture. In this generous selection, Wilder’s abiding friendships from the worlds of literature and the arts count, among many others, Hemingway, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Max Reinhardt, Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, and Mia Farrow. Like the best collections of correspondence in the hands of sensitive editors, this one peels away the quotidian to reveal the underlying personality of its subject. 38 b&w photos. (Oct. 7)

In 1354, the Roman governor Cola di Rienzo revealed to Giannino di Guccio, a wealthy merchant in Siena, a document revealing that Giannino had been switched at birth and that he was no merchant but Prince Jean I, heir to the French throne. Setting out to convince the world that he was the rightful king, he was thrown in prison, lost his fortune and died destitute. In this mostly elegant, sometimes workmanlike, study—part detective story and part history—University of Urbino medievalist Falconieri raises significant questions about the tale. Was Giannino a historical figure or a literary invention? Was he really the royal child switched at birth by a wet nurse intent on saving her marriage? Through an examination of other similar medieval tales and contemporary works that discuss such stories (e.g., Dante’s Commedia), Falconieri answers these questions while offering fascinating glimpses into the intrigues of the medieval French and Italian courts and the weaving of classical Greek and biblical tales into medieval stories about the revelation of royal identity. 2 line drawings, 1 map. (Oct.)

Novelist, philosopher, salonnière and a woman whose political genius was “worthy of the wiliest D.C. lobbyist”: Germaine de Staël (1766–1817) lived many lives during the chaotic years of French history from the Revolution through the machinations of Napoleon. NBCC Award–winning author Gray (Them: A Memoir of Parents) chronicles her subject’s combination of charisma and historical circumstance, manifest in de Staël’s celebrated salons, impassioned literary tracts and iconoclastic personality. More than the quintessential cosmopolitan, de Staël saved lives during the Terror and launched careers. Yet before marrying her inept husband, she said, “I regret that I have not joined my fate to that of a great man; it is the only possible glory for a woman.” Despite repeated exile from Napoleon’s France, de Staël was as linked to the political workings of Parisian society as any of her male contemporaries. Faithful to de Staël’s incessant energy, Gray follows her movements at a forceful pace, masterfully commanding a wide cast of characters while streamlining the frantic narrative of her subject’s life. The reader trusts Gray completely, but wants more of the peerless de Staël. (Oct.)

Venice, Paris and other cities where Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) restlessly traveled are brought to vivid life by food and travel writer Kelly (Cooking for Kings). Remembered today primarily for his sex life, Casanova was a polymath who trained to be a priest, worked as a violinist, soldier, faith healer and librarian, made and lost fortunes and wrote 42 books plus plays and opera libretti. He was born to an actress in Venice who thought the sickly boy was an imbecile and sent him away, aged nine, to be educated in Padua, where he flourished. The 17-year-old had his first sexual affair with two sisters, a scenario repeated throughout his life with other sisters, mothers and daughters, and even nuns. This life of sexual adventures produced eight illegitimate children and included falling in love with an apparent castrato who turned out to be a woman en travestie; he also enjoyed a life of wealth and social status in Venice after saving the life of a senator. Imprisoned there by the Inquisition, he escaped to Paris, becoming a fixture on the city's social scene. Kelly presents a colorful, sprightly biography of a singular man. Illus. (Oct.)

Since its construction 4,500 years ago for Pharaoh Khufu, the Great Pyramid of Giza has remained an engineering mystery. According to Egyptologist Brier (The Murder of Tutankhamen) and architect Houdin, the monument was designed by Khufu’s brother Hemienu, an architectural genius, and built in two decades by 25,000 paid Egyptian construction workers. Having studied the structure minutely and using computer graphics to visualize every aspect of the pyramid and its construction, Houdin offers a radical proposal of how the huge limestone and granite blocks were raised: the pyramid was built from the inside out around a mile-long ramp corkscrewed up to the top, which remains in the pyramid’s walls. The authors’ prose is lucid, aided by drawings and photos, and the theories are intriguing but inconclusive until permission can be obtained from Egyptian authorities to thermally photograph the pyramid and determine its internal structure. The highly technical nature of some of the architectural and engineering material makes this book more suitable for experts in archeology and architecture than for buffs. (Oct.)

British historian Spawforth animates the palace that was home to “the most charismatic monarchy in Europe” for a century, until the French Revolution. The glamour and pageantry of the palace hid a multitude of sins. The clothes-conscious Louis XIV, for instance, created a new office, grand master of the wardrobe, and appointed a duke whom the memoirist Saint-Simon likened to a slave. A handsome aristocratic page to Marie-Antoinette, Alexandre de Tilly, recounted his sexual intrigues at age 16 with a 36-year-old widowed countess, conducted in various palace locations. At Versailles the royals ate publicly, a display that was supposed to humanize them as spectators raced around to watch each member of the royal family dine; the crowd horrified a Russian princess in 1768. Chamber pots on the palace’s the upper stories were frequently emptied into the interior courts below; Marie-Antoinette was hit—intentionally, she believed—as she passed under the windows of Madame du Barry, her father-in-law the king’s mistress. This well-researched and highly engrossing account conjures a bygone era with all its opulence, deference and perilous insularity. 8 pages of color photos. (Oct.)

Carr (All Brave Sailors), former director of Mystic Seaport, believes the seeds of the American Revolution were first sown in the mid-17th century, when Britain began to exert control over colonies that had mostly been left to tend and fend for themselves. In 1651 the first of the anti–free trade Navigation Acts was introduced, and England began suspending representative legislatures. These and a multitude of slights (real and imagined) bred long-simmering resentments and periodic revolts; a failed rebellion in 1689 was sparked after Massachusetts’s charter was revoked. Carr focuses most of his account on the wars between Britain and France, and Britain’s postvictory surrender to the French of Louisbourg, on Nova Scotia—which had been taken at great cost in American lives. A century of “British disrespect, mismanagement, and exploitation,” Carr summarizes, “prepared the minds of the colonists for revolution.” Carr’s exploration of this background to the War of Independence is fascinating, but leaves an important question unanswered: if Britain was so oppressive, then why did a third of Americans remain loyalto the Crown? 25 b&w illus., 3 maps. (Oct.)

Beginning in 1954, Phillips spent almost 10 years doing undercover and pacification work for the CIA and the U.S. Agency for International Development in South Vietnam. In the high-level power struggle over America’s Vietnam policy. Phillips, then a government adviser, was a strong proponent of helping build a stable democratic government that the South Vietnamese would willingly fight to preserve from the Communist North—and a vocal opponent of sending in American combat troops. In this sober and informed memoir, Phillips provides a fascinating look at the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ refusal to give more than lip service to pacification, with revealing portraits of such figures as the “singular” Maj. Gen. Edward Lansdale, South Vietnamese Premier Ngo Dinh Diem, President Kennedy and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and other prominent officials. Phillips states firmly that those “best and brightest,” especially McNamara, exhibited “poor judgment, bureaucratic prejudice, and personal hubris” as they steered Vietnam War policy on a disastrous course. Phillips’s short chapter on lessons the U.S. should have learned from the Vietnam War should be mandatory reading in Washington, D.C. Maps. (Oct. 15)

Rutgers historian Gardner (Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam) makes a convincing case for the parallel between the Vietnam and Iraq wars. The cold war American policy of containment, rather than military force, to discourage Soviet aggression seemed cowardly to early neoconservatives convinced that America should actively seek to defeat communism and replace it with free-market democracy. Gardner names Walt Rostow, Lyndon Johnson’s national security adviser, as father of this theory of “creative destruction,” which he believed justified America’s war against Communist forces in Vietnam. Rostow’s eloquent exhortations to persist in a failing war foreshadow those of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on “staying the course” in Iraq. When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, neocons turned to the Middle East, although Iran was initially the major villain. The first President Bush refused to occupy Iraq after the Gulf War, but Gardner points out that by demonizing Saddam Hussein as a Hitlerian monster secretly building nuclear weapons, he provided justification for the second President Bush’s 2003 invasion. This well-argued study gives a sharp historical and intellectual framework for understanding the current Iraq war. (Oct.)

This is a disturbing collection of experiences of a judge advocate general officer, a lawyer for an army brigade fighting the insurgency from 2003 to 2004. Undergoing modest risks—the occasional mortar attack, ambush danger in traveling the roads—Capt. Vivian Gembara endured as much physical discomfort as the fighting men plus long working hours because of chronic understaffing. The pace never flags as Gembara describes struggling to solve soldiers’ personal problems; dealing with the cliques, rivalries, and petty politics of rear area service; and trying (often in vain) to ensure troops observed the official Rules of Engagement and Geneva Conventions. When soldiers were accused of deserting, officers leaned over backward to see justice done. When other soldiers murdered several innocent Iraqis, she discovered that the soldiers, who said they were “following orders,” were terrified of a sadistic sergeant. The author succeeded only partially in prosecuting the murders, and the extensive coverup occupies the second half of the book. “I will always be disappointed by my chain-of-command’s cowardly handling of the murders,” Gembara writes in this straightforward, honest account, and many readers will share her outrage. Maps. (Oct. 15)

Galbraith (The End of Iraq) surveys the occupation in its fifthyear with a withering eye and strong words for optimists who regard the “surge” as a road to victory (“Less violence is not the same as winning”). The author efficiently retraces the strategic failures and what he views as the perilous arrogance of the Bush administration, arguing that the war has achieved the opposite of many of its stated objectives: Israel is not safer and Middle Eastern regimes seem still to be moving in an antidemocratic direction. Galbraith admits that his mind has been changed on one or two tactical points—he previously advocated for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops; now, given the change in circumstances on the ground, “Baghdad is one of the last places from which the U.S. should withdraw.” The author flexes his intellectual muscle in a provocative discussion of a possible Iraqi “three-state-solution,” whereby the country would be divided by ethnic group—an extreme measure that he believes might stabilize the region. (Oct.)

Riedel, senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and senior adviser on the Middle East to three past presidents, reviews how al-Qaeda has flourished since the September 11 attacks with “franchises” mushrooming around the world. The author surveys al-Qaeda’s origins, workings and key members and introduces fresh information about the organization’s ideology and future plans. Riedel warns against conflating the war against al-Qaeda with the current war in Iraq (“the president chose to declare war not on al Qaeda, but on 'terrorism,’ a concept that he and Vice President Dick Cheney arrived at by confusing 9/11 with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq”) and demonstrates how U.S. actions compound “the public’s ignorance and vulnerability.” He argues that concentrating forces in Iraq has diverted attention and presence from Afghanistan and Pakistan, the hotbeds of jihadist organization, and suggests redirecting the military back to the “badlands” of the Afghan-Pakistan border while offering economic aid to forestall the extremism that thrives in destitute areas. Riedel’s argument in favor of greater U.S. involvement in the Arab-Israeli peace process is persuasive, and his prescriptions are well-evidenced, unfailingly sound and refreshingly sensible. (Oct.)

Brooklynites of varying ethnic and religious backgrounds tell their stories in this oral history of the newly hip New York borough of Brooklyn. Boxer Peter Spanakos, son of Greek immigrants, tells how his brother caught Peter’s Olympic teammate Muhammad Ali drinking out of a bidet in their Rome hotel room. Newspaper columnist Pete Hamill talks about the optimism that defined working-class Brooklyn after WWII. Dave Radens’s Muslim mother never spoke to him again after he married a Jew, and when the eminent black scholar John Hope Franklin became head of Brooklyn College’s history department in 1956. he faced white hostility while looking for a house near campus. Golenbock wrote Bums, an oral history of the Dodgers, and several of his interviewees rhapsodize over the team and Jackie Robinson. Locals will notice that Golenbock lets politicians and developers cheerlead for the controversial Atlantic Yards development while giving short shrift to the opposition. Many of these stories are engrossing and authentic, but also unfocused and rambling. The dearth of female interviewees and younger Brooklynites may limit the book’s appeal. Photos. (Oct.)

Law professor and historian Lombardo does a superb job of revealing, for the first time, all the facts in the infamous Buck v. Bell case of the 1920s, the Supreme Court decision ratifying Virginia’s compulsory sterilization of “feebleminded” people. In the majority decision, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. called the plaintiffs “manifestly unfit” both mentally and morally, and insisted that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” This decision—which has never been overturned—led to tens of thousands of involuntary sterilizations. Lombardo interviewed the last survivor of the three Buck women who were plaintiffs; turned up indisputable evidence that there was no feeblemindedness in that family; unearthed previously unknown correspondence of Carrie Buck’s attorney, who, believing the law to be necessary, mounted a deliberately insufficient defense; and documented the private family tragedy (an incestuous rape and resulting pregnancy) that lay behind the Bucks’ encounter with doctors bent on exploring eugenics. His book is a testament to injustice and to ignorance—not that of the Buck women, but rather of powerful doctors, attorneys and Supreme Court justices. 17 b&w photos. (Oct.)

Drawing on John Rock’s (1890–1984) personal papers, Marsh and Ronner (coauthors of Empty Cradle), trace Rock’s groundbreaking research on human fertility. As an obstetrician and gynecologist in Boston, Rock had become sympathetic to the opposing plights of weary mothers who wanted no more pregnancies and infertile women desperate to conceive. In 1938 he teamed with two other researchers, Miriam Menkin and Arthur Hertig, to understand fertilization and embryo implantation by examining the uteruses of women who underwent hysterectomies. This research led in the late 1950s to the birth control pill. A second research project led in 1944 to the first fertilization of human eggs outside the womb. Although a practicing Catholic, Rock defied both the Church and the state of Massachusetts, home to a harsh anti-abortion law and little tolerance for birth control. His 1963 pro–birth control book, The Time Has Come, challenged the Church, but was praised by many liberal Catholic priests. The authors bring a man and a century to life as they recount two primary discoveries underlying women’s still controversial reproductive rights. 20 b&w photos.(Oct.)

The explicit intent of this confrontational book is to intellectually engage prominent “enemies of Israel” in “the open marketplace of ideas.” Harvard law professor Dershowitz (The Case for Israel) begins with a vehement denunciation of his onetime friend Jimmy Carter, and he concludes with an appendix that systematically refutes many claims advanced in Carter’s book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. Though the former president receives Dershowitz’s most thorough criticism, the author also identifies and scrutinizes many other “enemies,” from Noam Chomsky and Patrick Buchanan to Hezbollah and the Iranian government. Dershowitz assumes the posture of a litigator, but his deep convictions and previous history with many of the book’s subjects lend a more personal tone to his critiques, as Dershowitz himself admits. Chapters on terrorism and Iran, which are less targeted at specific individuals, take a more effective philosophical and historical approach. Despite its stated goal of eliciting further debate on the Israel-Palestine conflict, this provocative book will likely appeal to sympathizers and alienate readers less disposed to its author’s positions. (Oct.)

Time’s Africa bureau chief, Perry belongs to a cadre of journalists who thrive in the thick of a war zone; he admits that his editor once commented that “someone had died in the opening paragraph of every story I had written.” Because he’s seen so much, the book would have hit the mark had he fully probed the stories of his subjects, among them Indonesian pirates, Bombay’s vacuous elite and a Muslim Indian terrorist who “predicts a future of relentless violence.” Unfortunately, his book is poorly organized and dizzyingly disjointed; he dissects the prodigious growth of Asian cities, jets north to comment on the reign of the Nepali king and flies south to interview a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber. The stories don’t build to any concrete conclusion, individually or collectively. Perry is sincere but his analysis is simplistic; he dismisses the opinions of academics who haven’t first traveled extensively in Asia and Africa and concludes China will “make it” because China’s central government “gets it” while India “looks a lot shakier.” Perry’s firsthand experience provides one necessary piece but not enough of the puzzle to construct an accurate picture of the consequences of globalization. (Oct.)

In this captivating look at humanitarian intervention in the 20th century, Orbinski, former head of the NGO Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), uses stories from his decades of service with the group to examine “how to be in relation with the suffering of others.” The author describes his time on the front lines of suffering in Russia, Somalia and Afghanistan. When Orbinski recounts his second term in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, the book reaches an emotional peak: it was his “undoing,” and struggling with the horror he has seen, he drifts into a “netherworld of confusion,” fighting to regain his “footing as a man, as a doctor and as a putative humanitarian.” His ensuing reflections on humanitarianism are as riveting as his personal thoughts, which include diary entries, recollections and correspondence with friends in the humanitarian and diplomatic corps. The book manages to be both personal enough to construe the human toll of political and social disasters without falling into the trap of maudlin, patronizing depictions of human suffering. Orbinski, who accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for Médecins Sans Frontières in 1999 does credit to his organization and his humanitarian credo. (Oct.)

Novelist and screenwriter Dooling (White Man’s Grave) contemplates the “Era of Singularity,” the coming day when computers will be able to outthink humans, in this uneven take on the future of machine intelligence. Dooling is at his best when he profiles technology’s most captivating futurists: Ray Kurzweil, inventor of scanning and text-to-speech technologies, beguiles with his vision of human minds embedded in silicon chips; physicist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge portrays a bleaker future where humanity serves its hyperintelligent computer overlords. Dooling veers back and forth between celebrating the speed with which technology is evolving and ruing its hidden perils (“our fatal flaw... is Promethean fire-stealing, the instinct to always and everywhere overreach”), along the way touching upon the computer research, various philosophies of mind and intelligence, and the historical tensions between man and machine. While an engaging writer, Dooling tends to indulge in sarcasm and snarky humor, which trivializes the deeper import of his message: that whether machines ever become self-aware, “living” minds, we are losing something of what makes us human when we lose control of our own creations and their meaning. (Oct.)

Brodsky and Burlingham, both Inc. magazine columnists, offer a host of advice to budding businesspeople in this thoughtful guide. Having seen businesses fail and succeed, the authors have served as mentors to a wide variety of self-starters and use their experiences as object lessons. The book focuses mainly on big-picture practicalities—the protection of startup capital and the necessity of focusing on high–profit-margin sales—but also expounds on overcoming the sales mindset in favor of the entrepreneurial mentality and facing mistakes with grace and an eye to learning. With a clear, conversational style, the authors give advice on raising capital, maintaining relationships with banks and lenders, customer relations, dealing with unexpected roadblocks and hiring good management. But in the end, they contend that entrepreneurship is not only a passion but a way to achieve a happier, richer, fuller life for ourselves and for our children and grandchildren—and with the right mental habits and skills, anyone can achieve entrepreneurial success. Encouraging, succinct and informative, this is an excellent guide for anyone looking to dive into a new business or expand an existing one. (Oct.)

In this witty essay collection, Baxter (We’ll Always Have Paris) chronicles his years of learning to prepare elaborate Christmas dinners for his French in-laws. After leaving his Los Angeles home to follow a woman (who would later become his wife) to Paris, Baxter was charged with the serious task of cooking the holiday meal for his relatives. Calling to mind other expatriate writers such as Diane Johnson and David Sedaris, Baxter gives readers insights into both French culture and his own expanding culinary range. In “Ninety Degrees of Christmas,” he muses on Christmases in his native Australia versus France, and details his mother’s preparation of her holiday pudding. Never condescending or obsequious toward his adopted home, Baxter shares insights with the wry perspective of an outsider permitted into a secret world and eager to share the rules with other visitors. Achieving a particularly sensitive balance of allowing readers glimpses into the intimacies of family life while retaining a degree of journalistic distance, Baxter is autobiographical but never intrusive. (Oct.)

In these playfully written scientific anecdotes, Pincott (Success) argues that desire is strongly rooted in evolutionary biases and consults a variety of studies—some familiar, others cutting-edge—to reveal the extent to which hormones dictate human behavior. Even idle ogling is a serious endeavor: humans constantly rate each other for levels of attractiveness, a signifier of male and female hormones. When women are ovulating, estrogen rebuilds the female face, making lips fuller and skin smoother; Pincott cites studies showing that strippers earned twice as much during the fertile phase of their cycles as when they had their periods, while those taking birth control earned significantly less money throughout. The book also has the scoop about whether penis size matters (it does), how the post-orgasm rush of oxytocin promotes bonding and why women are tempted to cheat during certain times of the month. It ends with a look at the neuroscience of love, which despite all the jostling and jousting of dating and mating, appears to be very much alive when measured by MRI studies of passionate couples. (Oct.)

Should anyone besides libertarian hackers or record companies care about copyright in the online world? In this incisive treatise, Stanford law prof and Wired columnist Lessig (Free Culture) argues that we should. He frames the problem as a war between an old “read-only” culture, in which media megaliths sell copyrighted music and movies to passive consumers, and a dawning digital “read-write” culture, in which audiovisual products are freely downloaded and manipulated in an explosion of democratized creativity. Both cultures can thrive in a “hybrid” economy, he contends, pioneered by Web entities like YouTube. Lessig’s critique of draconian copyright laws—highlighted by horror stories of entertainment conglomerates threatening tweens for putting up Harry Potter fan sites—is trenchant. (Why, he asks, should sampling music and movies be illegal when quoting texts is fine?) Lessig worries that too stringent copyright laws could stifle such “remix” masterpieces as a “powerful” doctored video showing George Bush and Tony Blair lip-synching the song “Endless Love,” or making scofflaws of America’s youth by criminalizing their irrepressible downloading. We leave this (copyrighted) book feeling the stakes are pretty low, except for media corporations. (Oct. 20)

An expert who has consulted on investigations ranging from JFK’s assassination to the murder of Laci Peterson, forensic pathologist Wecht dissects five recent high-profile cases. The opening chapters cover the deaths of former Playboy centerfold Anna Nicole Smith and her 20-year-old son, Daniel. Rumors abounded, and Wecht—called in by Smith’s lawyer and friend Howard K. Stern to perform a second autopsy—determined that Daniel and Smith both died of accidental drug overdoses. In the murders of 12-year-old Stephanie Crowe in 1998 and seven-year-old Danielle van Dam in 2002 in their San Diego homes, Wecht agreed with prosecutors who argued that Crowe had been stabbed by a mentally unstable transient, but in the van Dam case, he concluded that the girl was kidnapped and later killed by a neighbor. In the most compelling section, Wecht explores the case of a doctor accused of administering fatal doses of morphine to nine hospital patients during Hurricane Katrina. But fascinating as the cases are, and though Wecht’s breadth of forensic knowledge and experience is undeniable, these stories lack cohesion and too often veer into unnecessary minutiae. (Oct.)

Malcolm, New Yorker writer, critic and the author of insightful biographies The Silent Women and Two Lives, launches into a different discipline with this collection of botanical photographs. Instead of multidimensional human characters, her subjects are page after page of burdock leaves, the “rank weed... [that] writers have used to denote ruin and desolation.” Malcolm writes that she has tried to photograph the leaves “as if they were people,” taking inspiration from Richard Avedon’s unflinching celebrity portraits and the work of botanical illustrators. Accordingly, many of her chosen leaves are imperfect, marred by blight, insects and the ravages of the environment. These are Malcolm’s favorite specimens, as she hopes that the camera’s “transformative capacities” confer “aesthetic value on the apparently plain and worthless.” That transformation doesn’t happen all on its own, though; it requires a measure of technical skill and visual flair, and the evidence in this book is that Malcolm doesn’t have the chops for the job. While there is an austere splendor in these simple, plainly lit, head-on shots, too often the images seem flatter than they should. Interesting variations in color, shape and texture are lost to an apparently overly shallow depth of field. (Sept.)

Liaigre’s spare, Zen-meets-luxury aesthetic is instantly recognizable in these six sumptuously designed locations. The first spreads are of a house in Orense, Spain: cue lots of dark wood, deep reds and rich leathers, with such Iberian flourishes as a sofa embroidered with motifs drawn from toreadors’ costumes. The rest of the book takes a romp through five similarly lush interiors, including a 184-foot yacht, an island sanctuary in Bora Bora and homes in Geneva, Toronto and the Côte d’Azur. Part of the pleasure of the book lies in the material voyeurism it provides; it’s always fun to see how the other half lives. The risk of having such a distinctive style as Liaigre, however, is that after a while it starts to look a little dated, and for all the clean lines and pleasing textures, these interiors look like they were created as sets for lifestyle magazines—something ultimately antihuman and contrived lingers. No matter: the designer has plenty of fans, and for those who want just a touch of “Liaigrism,” there will no doubt soon be plenty of mainstream knockoff versions of his oft-imitated look. (Sept.)

In editing these two volumes, George Packer reminds us that the author of the novel 1984 wrote brilliant essays.

Best known for his late-career classics Animal Farm and 1984, George Orwell—who used his given name, Eric Blair, in the earliest pieces of this collection aimed at the aficionado as well as the general reader—was above all a polemicist of the first rank. Organized chronologically, from 1931 through the late 1940s, these in-your-face writings showcase the power of this literary form. The range of subjects is considerable, from “Shooting an Elephant” to remembrances of working in a bookshop (“The combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of existence...”); from recollections of fighting in the Spanish Civil War to culinary oddities such as a “Defence of English Cooking” and “A Nice Cup of Tea”; to the broad-stroke masterwork of boarding-school irony, “Such, Such Were the Joys.” New Yorker contributor Packer (The Assassins’ Gate) keenly assembles and introduces this selection, bringing into high relief Orwell’s range of experience and committed humanism, showing how, as Orwell put it, “to make political writing into an art.” (Oct. 13)

Before he was a renowned novelist, George Orwell was a masterful essayist. Spanning the 1940s, this companion to Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays showcases Orwell in an often unexpected cavalcade of observations on diverse subjects—in the literary field alone as varied as T. S. Eliot, Charles Dickens, Henry Miller, Graham Greene and Kipling. But since this is Orwell, the book takes on a range of subjects with gusto: power and bully worship and the deleterious influence of Catholicism on literature. Orwell’s withering observations on professional academic criticism (“Politics and the English Language”) are tempered by his sly “Confessions of a Book Reviewer” (“constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatever”) and “Good Bad Books” (the “supreme example” being Uncle Tom’s Cabin). Not to be overlooked is a freewheeling take on the naughty postcards of Donald McGill. Overall, this collection highlights the work of a writer who always put his money where his mouth was, reiterating frequently the importance of clarity of expression in enabling independent thought. (Oct. 13)