Nonfiction Reviews

Mar 08, 2010

Welcome to Utopia: Notes from a Small Town Karen Valby. Random/Spiegel & Grau, $25 (256p) ISBN 978-0-385-52286-1

Valby, a senior writer at Entertainment Weekly, profiles Utopia, Tex., in a lackluster account of life in contemporary smalltown America. The author discovered Utopia in 2006 and, hoping “to get past the mythology of the small town and understand it as a real place where actual people live,” repeatedly returned to the unincorporated ranching community in the scenic Texas Hill Country for the next two years. The Census counts 241 Utopians, and while many of them appear in Valby's narrative, she focuses on four to tell her story: Ralph Boyce, “the quintessential old-timer” and the dean of the early-morning coffee drinkers at the General Store; Kathy Wiekamp, a popular waitress and mother of four boys; Colter Padgett, “the town misfit”; and Kelli Rhodes, the only black student at Utopia School. While the four are a diverse lot, in Valby's hands, they only sporadically rise above the level of stereotype and fall short of demythologizing small towns. The author also provides too little context for her observations, and her conclusions—e.g., Utopians are provincial; racism still exists in rural Texas; and small towns see rapid change as a threat—are neither surprising nor original. (June)

Mom: A Celebration of Mothers from the StoryCorps Project Dave Isay. Penguin Press, $21.95 (208p) ISBN 978-1-59420-261-2

In time for Mother's Day, Isay brings a satisfying second collection of StoryCorps selections after the bestselling Listening Is an Act of Love. Throughout 30,000 recorded interviews by everyday Americans are numerous memories of parents, and among the many mothers who share their stories in this collection are mothers of every variety—single, working, stay-at-home, with one child or a dozen. A couple describe an unexpected camaraderie between their mothers: one American, the other Ethiopian: “My mom would speak in English, and your mom would speak in Amharic, and then they'd laugh and throw their hands up.” A mother of 12 tells her youngest, age 12, about her oldest, a soldier killed in Iraq. Reunited at age 60 with the son she reluctantly gave away, Hilory Boucher tells him what happened as she rode away from a Boston home for unwed mothers: “You were handed off to a social worker at a stop on the Merritt Parkway, with your pink bunny and your layette.” Readers will encounter an emotional range from heart-wrenching to inspirational in these compelling maternal accounts. Photos. (May)

On Whitman C.K. Williams. Princeton Univ., $19.95 (208p) ISBN 978-0-691-14472-6

This jewel of a book, by one poet on another in the Writers on Writers series, does nothing less than show that Walt Whitman is the very unconscious and Paraclete of all American poets working today. With generous quotes from Williams's hero, we see how Whitman's oracular largesse most certainly extended to the continental-inspired Pound and Eliot. Williams returns to the pure, original edition (out of nine) of Leaves of Grass for inspiration, finding the so-called deathbed edition along with all the Leaves in between lacking the first flush of musical and formal elements. Williams likewise always returns to Leaves to explore what inspires—beyond Dante, Shakespeare, and others who attract him. In “Song of Myself,” the “I” and “you,” author and experiencer, are conflated to the point where the writer is one more of his own readers; “Song of Myself” tellingly ends with the word “you.” As Williams observes, Whitman “wants us not to be afraid of ourselves, even of our dark, darkest, most doubting selves.” As a personal introduction to the visionary free-verse wellspring of the American poetic spirit, this book is one that no poetry lover should miss. (May)

Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry's Greatest Generation Daisy Hay. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.50 (400p) ISBN 978-0-374-12375-8

Long before the lost generation or '60s rock poets, there was a 19th-century movable feast of interlinked English poets and thinkers that was even more fascinating and combustible. Cambridge Ph.D. Hay, in her first book, delves with scholarly relish into the unorthodox lifestyles and fluid (including quasi-incestuous and incestuous) households of several key figures: vegetarians Percy and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley; Mary Shelley's stepsister Jane, aka Claire Clairmont; Lord Byron; John Keats; and the little-read today but central revolutionary, Leigh Hunt. The key years are 1813 to 1822, effectively terminating with Shelley's drowning at sea not long after Keats's death from tuberculosis. New here is Claire's autobiographical fragment—archived in the New York Public Library—in which she rakes the libertarians Shelley and Byron, whose daughter she bore, over her emotional coals. Well handled is the so-called summer of Frankenstein, and how, over the nine years Hay chronicles, the boundaries of monogamy were pushed to the breaking point. Although Hay is passionate about her subject, her writing is unexceptional and monotone: she sticks to the descriptive rather than the analytic. 16 pages of b&w illus. (May 4)

Murder in the Métro: Laetitia Toureaux and the Cagoule in 1930s France Gayle K. Brunelle and Annette Finley-Croswhite. Louisiana State Univ., $39.95 (304p) ISBN 978-0-8071-3616-4

On May 16, 1937, Laetitia Toureaux, a 29-year-old Italian-born factory worker, was murdered in an otherwise empty first-class compartment on a Paris métro train. The case has never been solved, and the case files were ordered sealed for 101 years. In this fascinating book, historians Brunelle (California State, Fullerton) and Finley-Croswhite (Old Dominion) reveal that Toureaux was no mere factory worker. Ambitious but naïve, she was involved, both personally and politically, with a secret, extremist fascist group known as the Cagoule; she also worked for a detective agency and was an informer for both the French police and the Italian secret service. The authors look at the bitterly fractious world of 1930s French politics and explore in depth both Toureaux's enigmatic life and the press's portrayal of her as a loose woman and “social climber.” The authors also delve into the violent history of the Cagoule, which broke away from the better-known Action Française. Finally, they provide a “speculative” but “strong plausible case” for who murdered Toureaux and why. Brunelle and Finley-Croswhite have produced an exceptionally fine work that is well-researched and documented and consistently compelling. (May)

Satan's Playground: Mobsters and Movie Stars at America's Greatest Gaming Resort Paul J. Vanderwood. Duke Univ., $24.95 (392p) ISBN 978-0-8223-4702-6

The allure of booze and betting south of the border is the focus of San Diego State professor Vanderwood's (Juan Soldado) muddled history of a famed Tijuana gaming resort that flourished during Prohibition. Conceived and launched by three American “Border Barons”—Wirt Bowman, James Crofton, and Baron Long—Agua Caliente became the premiere destination of Hollywood royalty, foreign dignitaries, and regular citizens who wanted to drink, gamble, and visit the myriad brothels. The bootleggers and mobsters who sprang up in neighboring San Diego after the 18th Amendment outlawed liquor in the U.S. were also drawn to the oasis of sin, and Vanderwood spends considerable time detailing the botched 1929 robbery of a car delivering the resort's cash haul to the States, ending in a double murder. The hunt for the killers and their sensational trial drags on with little suspense, and readers soon long for more stories involving Agua Caliente's glitzy clientele, like the young Rita Hayworth. Meandering from topic to topic, often with long excursions into the personal histories of even minor players, this reads like a patched-together outline for a potentially fascinating book. 82 b&w illus. (May)

Last Words of the Executed Robert K. Elder, foreword by Studs Terkel. Univ. of Chicago, $20 (264p) ISBN 978-0-226-20268-6

From colonial era public hangings to the last moments before a lethal injection, Northwestern journalism teacher Elder revisits the final words of the condemned, both famous and forgotten. They expressed contrition or angry denial, often accompanied by an argument against capital punishment. Elder calls his book “an oral history of the overlooked, the infamous and the forgotten,” who “speak to a common humanity with their last act on earth.” Some considered their words carefully: William Robinson, a Quaker executed in 1659 for protesting Massachusetts's banishment of his co-religionists, said, “I suffer not as an evil doer.... I suffer for Christ, in whom I live and in whom I die.” Others offer bizarre non sequiturs: in 2002, serial killer Aileen Wuornos proclaimed, “I'm sailing with the Rock and I'll be back like 'Independence Day'... big mother ship and all.” Elder culled his material from newspaper accounts, prison archives, and religious counselors who transcribed for posterity the final utterances of the roughly 16,000 men and women who've been executed in the United States. The late Studs Terkel contributed an eloquent foreword. (May)

Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute Silence George Michelsen Foy. Scribner, $22 (208p) ISBN 978-1-4165-9959-3

Overwhelmed by the savage but routine overdose of noise in New York City, NYU creative writing instructor Foy zealously sought out silence in its various incarnations. But absolute silence eluded him: underwater in his bathtub the roaring metropolis was amplified by the denser medium of water; in Paris's catacombs a distant hum persisted among the stacked skulls and bones; and in his family home on Cape Cod the absence of excessive sound, rather than soothing him, made him conscious of the absence of his recently deceased mother. Yet in a Minneapolis anechoic chamber, he felt rested, relaxed, and triumphant, becoming the first person to stay in the dark and silent chamber alone for 45 minutes. Along the way, Foy met a man with cochlear implants who actually hears something when the implants are disabled even though his cochlea were destroyed by meningitis; and Foy recounts how in 1996 a Greek islander shot to death a neighbor who blasted music on her radio every evening. The author's quixotic quest is quirky, inventive, and alluring, and readers everywhere whose auditory nerves are rattled by the shriek of car horns or babies will readily identify. (May)

The Evolution of Everything: How Selection Shapes Culture, Commerce, and Nature Mark Sumner. PoliPoint (Ingram, dist.), $15.95 paper (288p) ISBN 978-0-9824171-6-4

Despite its impressive title, Sumner's book is merely assorted musings linked to a review of Darwin's theory of evolution. The strange project that science fiction writer (Devil's Tower) and Daily Kos contributing editor Sumner sets for himself is to take evolution “out of the box and see what it can do.” Hasn't plenty been done with it already? Not for Sumner, who says it applies “to everything around us, from our cars and computers to our phones and food.” He surveys Herbert Spencer's economic application in Social Darwinism, Haeckel's Aryanism, and Francis Galton's eugenics, and finds them misbegotten and dangerous. Nothing new there. But Sumner's own applications of the evolutionary concept of selection to economics and culture are amateurish and not well argued. He says that phyletic gradualism can explain how a local Sears evolved to survive against a new Wal-Mart; similarly, he says gadget designers match form to function just like nature does, and genetic diversity in crops like bananas and corn is as important as genetic diversity in humans. But Sumner's main purpose appears to be a defense of Darwin from those who misinterpret him—a project carried out many times by far more qualified writers. (May)

A City So Grand: The Rise of an American Metropolis, Boston 1850—1900 Stephen Puleo. Beacon, $27.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-8070-5043-9

“No period in Boston's history was more dynamic” than the second half of the 19th century, writes Puleo (The Boston Italians) in this smoothly narrated account of that time and place. Through the determination of the abolitionists, the empire-building of the city's merchants, the dogged endurance of the impoverished Irish immigrants, the city was propelled into ever greater significance. All segments of Boston society rallied to the Union during the Civil War, and the story of the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment and the defense of Washington, D.C., is particularly dramatic. Boston became the hub of the nation's railway system, turned the stagnant waters of the Back Bay into a prosperous residential center, and built the first American subway. After the Civil War, thousands of new immigrants, most especially the Italians, arrived to become a vibrant part of the urban community, and despite tensions and disasters, Boston emerged as one of the world's leading cities. In such a thorough history, however, there is little description of the role played by African-Americans beyond the 1860s. 12 b&w photos. (May)

The Enemy in Our Hands: America's Treatment of Prisoners of War from the Revolution to the War on Terror Robert C. Doyle, foreword by Arnold Kranmer. Univ. Press of Kentucky, $34.95 (496p) ISBN 978-0-8131-2589-3

Casting a wide net, this book delivers a scholarly, lucid overview of America's handling of POWs of all stripes: military, civilian, and irregular. Historian Doyle (A Prisoner's Duty) emphasizes that uniformed foreign soldiers received humane treatment from the Revolution through the Iraq invasion, peaking during WWII when hundreds of thousands of German troops brought to the U.S. received “relatively benign” treatment. Prisoners fared worse when Americans fought Americans. Loyalists during the Revolution were abused and often killed. Both sides during the Civil War neglected prisoners disgracefully. Historically, irregular fighters enjoyed no protection, but while soldiers rarely objected to mistreating opponents who didn't play fair, civilians were often outraged. In Korea, the screening of prisoners to separate combatants from noncombatants, and their future repatriation, led to prisoner uprisings. No ideologue, Doyle explains that sometimes abuse is unavoidable; at other times it's ineffective, infuriates world opinion, and puts American soldiers at risk for reprisals. Doyle delves deeply, and military buffs will consider it the definitive treatment. 63 photos. (May)

Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character Claude S. Fischer. Univ. of Chicago, $35 (528p) ISBN 978-0-226-25143-1

The more America changes, the more it stays the same, according to this engrossing historical survey. Drawing on everything from economic data and mortality statistics to studies of colonial portraiture, University of California—Berkeley sociologist Fischer assesses broad trends across four centuries of American life. His measured but upbeat view of the evolving American experience will disappoint the hell-in-a-handbasket crowd: he finds that Americans have grown more religious and charitable over time, and markedly less violent and nomadic, while remaining roughly unchanged in their propensity toward greed and consumerism. Through it all, he discerns a benignly Tocquevillian trait that he calls “voluntarism,” an individualism softened by unforced solidarity that fulfills itself by freely building communities, be they frontier villages, dissenting churches, egalitarian families, or Internet chat groups. While vast gains in health, wealth, and political freedoms have transformed our lives, they have, he contends, made Americans more voluntaristic and thus “more characteristically 'American'... insistently independent but still sociable, striving, and sentimental.” Fischer's lively prose argues these propositions with a wealth of hard evidence and illustrates them with piquant vignettes of people of all eras muddling through. The result is a shrewd, generous, convincing interpretation of American life. (May)

American Dreams: The United States Since 1945 H.W. Brands. Penguin Press, $35 (?p) ISBN 978-1-59420-262-9.

Though this crisp, informal narrative overview of the last half-century of American history is long on story and short on analysis, it does its job well. Bringing his trademark clarity to the tales he tells, bestselling historian Brands (The First American) opens in post-Hiroshima days and closes in our own. He covers everything important, from politics and war to culture and society—civil rights, music, the baby boom, and the middle class. But it's hard to swallow the sappy conceit of Americans as “dreamers” with which Brands tries to thread the book together. “[T]he heart of America's dreams was the act of dreaming itself... it was encoded in the country's DNA from the beginning.” But what has dreaming to do with the cold war or the embarrassments of the Nixon and Clinton administrations or with the Great Recession? Americans' collective dramas may be on hold for the moment, Brands concludes, but individually, they are as ambitious as ever. Despite its thematic weakness, Brands's book is a fast-moving, reasonably comprehensive history of more than half a century of American history. (May)

Digging Up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials Michael Kammen. Univ. of Chicago, $25 (288p) ISBN 978-0-226-42329-6

Who is buried in Grant's Tomb? The answer to this old joke—and the story behind it—can be found in this well-written in-depth account of high-profile Americans whose remains were reburied for a number of surprising reasons. Generally, says Pulitzer Prize—winning historian Kammen (People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization), reburial is “a figurative form of resurrection—primarily... of reputation.” Reburial can also symbolize reconciliation, whether familiar or national. Kammen explores the politics, mythology, and commercialization of the American practice of reburial. In some cases, long-forgotten remains became rare relics, most vividly in the case of Rhode Island founder Roger Williams, whose body slowly nourished the apple tree roots that grew around it taking the skeleton's shape while the bones themselves disappeared. The stealth reclamation of what Native Americans believed to be the remains of Sitting Bull contrasts with the more public, emotional restoration provided to the late Jefferson Davis. While situating the ritual of reburial within the American psyche, Kammen effectively captures the eternal dual fascination with greatness and with the dead, and the power of their conjunction in the burial of heroes. Photos. (May)

The Other Wes Moore: One Name and Two Fates—A Story of Tragedy and Hope Wes Moore. Random/Spiegel & Grau, $25 (274p) ISBN 978-0-385-52819-1

Two hauntingly similar boys take starkly different paths in this searing tale of the ghetto. Moore, an investment banker, Rhodes scholar, and former aide to Condoleezza Rice, was intrigued when he learned that another Wes Moore, his age and from the same area of Greater Baltimore, was wanted for killing a cop. Meeting his double and delving into his life reveals deeper likenesses: raised in fatherless families and poor black neighborhoods, both felt the lure of the money and status to be gained from dealing drugs. That the author resisted the criminal underworld while the other Wes drifted into it is chalked up less to character than to the influence of relatives, mentors, and expectations that pushed against his own delinquent impulses, to the point of exiling him to military school. Moore writes with subtlety and insight about the plight of ghetto youth, viewing it from inside and out; he probes beneath the pathologies to reveal the pressures—poverty, a lack of prospects, the need to respond to violence with greater violence—that propelled the other Wes to his doom. The result is a moving exploration of roads not taken. (May 4)

And the Heart Says Whatever Emily Gould. Free Press, $16 paper (256p) ISBN 978-1-4391-2389-8

On the strength of an exposé she wrote for the New York Times Magazine two years ago about her experience working at Gawker.com, Gould, hailing from Silver Spring, Md., and now in her late 20s, delivers a series of 11 insipid essays about her uninspired youth and general lack of motivation or talent for various jobs she took after moving to New York City. The writing seems intentionally bland, as if Gould is attempting to be blasé. At age 17, as she describes in “Flower,” she and her suburban friends listened to Liz Phair because the singer “gave us permission to do stupid things and consider them adventures”; in Gould's case, she “deflowered” a 14-year-old boy from the swim team, knowing her boyfriend would hear about it. She doesn't get into “the artsiest Ivy” as per plan (“I was neither smart nor exceptional”), but attends her “safe” (unvisited) choice, Kenyon, from which she drops out and moves to New York. Among other gigs, she works as a waitress for a sad-sack music bar and as a receptionist for a large, commercial publishing house (“I felt silly for being shocked by the quality of what made it through”). At Gawker, she became practiced at “scanning a room or a page and isolating the appropriate things to hate.” Desultory anecdotes of breakup and dating ensue, leaving the reader more confounded than moved. (May)

The Referral Engine: Teaching Your Business to Market Itself John Jantsch. Portfolio, $25.95 (256p) ISBN 978-1-59184-311-5

As lean times force businesses to reduce advertising and marketing budgets, more and more companies are trying to develop new clients through word-of-mouth referrals. Jantsch (Duct Tape Marketing) champions such an approach, asserting that “many widely referred businesses do very little when it comes to traditional advertising” and that “happy customers and actively engaged partners account for a great deal of their efforts.” According to Jantsch, referral behavior is a primal activity rooted in our survival instinct and satisfying our need to connect with other people and mint social currency. Jantsch offers practical solutions on how to build a powerful “referral engine” by developing a systematic, consistent, and replicable approach and exploiting content, using social networking, and building strategic partnerships. He illustrates his points with examples from such companies as work clothing manufacturer Carhartt with its Tough Jobs blog; Southwest Airlines, which relies heavily on hiring the right people to be the champions of the brand; and TerraCycle, a recycling company whose nontraditional business practices generated word-of-mouth attention. A swift, appealing read and a thorough primer on the power of letting your products and customers speak for themselves. (May)

Quest for Equality: The Failed Promise of Black-Brown Solidarity Neil Foley. Harvard Univ., $24.95 (240p) ISBN 978-0-674-05023-5

Historian Foley focuses on three aspects of African-American and Mexican-American civil rights activity in Texas and California—the domestic impact of Franklin Roosevelt's WWII “Good Neighbor” policy of mutual obligation toward Latin America; the fight for fair employment practices; and the legal challenges to public school segregation. While Foley ably explores American efforts to end discriminatory practices, he is at his best reviewing the Mexican-American experience, and how “Mexican and African Americans pursued their struggles for equality... in largely parallel universes.” When Mexico's foreign minister banned Texas from receiving Mexican contract workers under the 1943 bracero program due to the state's “extreme and intolerable racial discrimination against Mexicans,” the legislature attempted several times to pass an antidiscrimination bill that could embrace Mexicans as Caucasians. Its failure rested in the fear that “to enact laws to end discrimination against Mexicans might also strike a blow against Jim Crow laws and customs segregating black Texans.” While revealing little common ground except the experience of racial or ethnic discrimination, Foley's accessible history shines fresh light upon the regional issues that make American conceptions of racial and national identity so tangled. (May)

How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth's Climate Jeff Goodell. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26 (272p) ISBN 978-0-618-99061-0

Goodell (Big Coal) investigates the viability of geoengineering: ambitious, mostly unproven strategies to “deliberately engineer the earth's climate to counteract global warming.” Despite his promise to avoid the “wacky ideas proposed by wannabe geoengineers,” Goodell has trouble avoiding eccentric characters like Edward Teller's protégé, flamboyant Lowell Wood, nicknamed “Dr. Evil,” and such grandiose and questionable schemes as ocean fertilization, that raise the question: “at what point does the urgent and heroic goal of fixing the planet become just another excuse to make a quick buck?” Even a down-to-earth scientist like David Keith, whose machine extracts carbon dioxide from the air, estimates that an optimized system would still require thousands of these “scrubbers,” with costs around $150 per ton of CO2. In a genre dominated by doomsday scenarios, Goodell's treatment is refreshingly lighthearted, but two questions haunt him: “what kind of person dreams of engineering the entire planet? And can we trust him?” He warns, “[T]echnology has taken us farther away from nature, not drawn us closer to it,” and his provocative account achieves a fine balance between the inventor's enthusiasm and the scientist's skepticism. (May)

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? Ian Bremmer. Portfolio, $27 (232p) ISBN 978-1-59184-301-6

“The power of the state is back,” announces Bremmer (The Fat Tail), president of the Eurasia Group, in this sobering examination of the threat the emerging powers of China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia pose to the free market. The book presents a whirlwind history of capitalism from mercantilism through the end of the cold war to the ascendancy of “state capitalism,” a political and economic arrangement in which states exert their influence over markets and big business to serve their own interests. Bremmer provides informative case studies of economies with varying degrees of state control: Algeria's authoritarian regime, Mexico's relatively open and democratic system, and China, the “leading practitioner of state capitalism,” in which Beijing has assumed only more economic power in the wake of the financial crisis. He weighs how free market economies can compete and concludes on a hopeful note, laying out a powerful case for the superiority of regulated free markets above state capitalism and a clear prescription for how the U.S. can defend its competitive advantage in the future. (May)

Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success Matthew Syed. Harper, $25.99 (320p) ISBN 978-0-06-172375-9

Syed, sportswriter and columnist for the London Times, takes a hard look at performance psychology, heavily influenced by his own ego-damaging but fruitful epiphany. At the age of 24, Syed became the #1 British table tennis player, an achievement he initially attributed to his superior speed and agility. But in retrospect, he realizes that a combination of advantages—a mentor, good facilities nearby, and lots of time to hone his skills—set him up perfectly to become a star performer. He admits his argument owes a debt to Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, but he aims to move one step beyond it, drawing on cognitive neuroscience research to explain how the body and mind are transformed by specialized practice. He takes on the myth of the child prodigy, emphasizing that Mozart, the Williams sisters, Tiger Woods, and Susan Polgar, the first female grandmaster, all had live-in coaches in the form of supportive parents who put them through a ton of early practice. Cogent discussions of the neuroscience of competition, including the placebo effect of irrational optimism, self-doubt, and superstitions, all lend credence to a compelling narrative; readers who gobbled up Freakonomics and Predictably Irrational will flock to this one. (May)

Bonobo Handshake: A Memoir of Love and Adventure in the Congo Vanessa Woods. Gotham, $26 (256p) ISBN 978-1-592-40546-6

Devoted to learning more about bonobos, a smaller, more peaceable species of primate than chimpanzees, and lesser known, Australian journalist Woods and her fiancé, scientist Brian Hare, conducted research in the bonobos' only known habitat—civil war—torn Congo. Woods's plainspoken, unadorned account traces the couple's work at Lola Ya Bonobo Sanctuary, located outside Kinshasa in the 75-acre forested grounds of what was once Congo dictator Mobutu Sese Seko's weekend retreat. The sanctuary, founded in 1994 and run by French activist Claudine André, served as an orphanage for baby bonobos, left for dead after their parents had been hunted for bush meat; the sanctuary healed and nurtured them (assigning each a human caretaker called a mama), with the aim of reintroducing the animals to the wild. Hare had only previously conducted research on the more warlike, male-dominated chimpanzee, and needed Woods because she spoke French and won the animals' trust; through their daily work, the couple witnessed with astonishment how the matriarchal bonobo society cooperated nicely using frequent sex, and could even inspire human behavior. When Woods describes her daily interaction with the bonobos, her account takes on a warm charm. Woods's personable, accessible work about bonobos elucidates the marvelous intelligence and tolerance of this gentle cousin to humans. (Apr.)

This Is Not the Story You Think It Is: A Season of Unlikely Happiness Laura Munson. Putnam/Amy Einhorn, $24.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-399-15665-6

A kind of colloquial diary composed during the rocky summer her husband was suffering a midlife crisis, debut author Munson aims to convince the reader, in her chatty, self-absorbed narrative, that her hard-won serenity helped conquer her husband's shakiness at committing himself to their future together. When her husband (who remains nameless) announced his uncertainty that he loved her, then embarked on bizarrely atypical behavior, leaving her and their two children, eight and 12, wondering where he was, Munson had her own notions about what was ailing him, reinforced by mountains of self-help books and therapists: his job was failing, he was drowning in debt, and he was worried about losing their fabulous 20-acre horse-and-ski farm in rural Montana. Munson hoped he could regain a sense of “gratitude” for what they had, namely 15 years of a loving family. Munson urged her husband to take a trip, as she had just returned from a month-long rejuvenating stint to Italy, or even helicopter lessons, yet his resentment of her ran deeper than she cared to confront. She concentrated on what she could control, namely creating a nice home and throwing herself into community activism, then witnessed with joy her husband's gradual coming around. Unfortunately, Munson's journey doesn't ring entirely convincing or forthright, and if the title truly reflected her marital crisis, the reader might run the other way. (Apr.)

Not My Boy!: A Father, a Son, and One Family's Journey with Autism Rodney Peete. Hyperion, $24.99 (272p) ISBN 978-1-4013-2361-5

Former NFL star quarterback Peete sheds his macho gridiron side and pours his heart out in his no-holds-barred family memoir, recounting the stresses of having a child with severe autism and the daunting challenge of realigning parental expectations. Recollecting golden memories of a supportive father's role in his successful life, he imagines a similar time with his son, R.J., but everything changes for the worse when R.J. is diagnosed with autism at age three. His marriage almost collapses under the weight of the diagnosis while his valiant wife, Holly Robinson Peete, emerges as the child's advocate amid Rodney's overwhelming anger and denial, ultimately triumphant in getting R.J. the proper attention. This invaluable parental primer on guiding an autistic child through the medical and therapeutic maze along with strengthening a besieged marriage will give renewed hope to all those in the same situation. A portion of this book's proceeds will go to autism charities. (Apr.)

The Last Putt: 2 Teams, One Dream, and a Freshman Named Tiger Neil Hayes and Brian Murphy. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26 (362p) ISBN 978-0-618-84004-5

Tiger Woods's extraordinary abilities on the golf course—and more recently, his personal life—have been documented exhaustively since he joined the professional golf ranks, but 15 years ago, he was simply a wide-eyed but confident freshman for the Stanford University team. Woods is far from the only compelling figure in Hayes and Murphy's gripping look at the 1995 NCAA golf championship, which featured Woods and his Stanford teammates up against their arch-nemesis, Oklahoma State. The two schools were a contrast, with Stanford, led by a coach with a “modest style,” putting together a team made to win a championship. Much like their star player's multiethnic background, the Stanford Cardinals were extremely diverse; Oklahoma State, meanwhile, had players who were mostly from well-to-do families that golfed frequently. The two teams' frequent battles throughout the year culminated in a sudden-death playoff at what many called the greatest match in NCAA golf championship history. Hayes and Murphy delve into not just the crucial strokes leading up to the game's thrilling conclusion but the iron-clad bonds that formed between teammates and their coaches. The authors craft a dramatic, detailed account of a relatively unknown event, and a look at Woods, before he became the world's most famous athlete. (Apr.)

The Farthest Home Is an Empire of Fire: A Tejano Elegy John Phillip Santos. Viking, $25.95 (304p) ISBN 978-0-670-02156-7

Family history—and the lack thereof—sparks this vaporous meditation on time, memory, and Chicano heritage. Having traced his father's Mexican-Indian and mestizo roots in Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation, Santos here investigates the Lopez and Vela clans on his mother's side, descended from aristocratic Spanish immigrants who settled the Rio Grande territory in the 18th century. Unfortunately, the Lopez-Vela branches lack the thick culture of his father's side; they are more genteel and assimilated into Anglo society and have few recollections of a past, which the author must reconstruct at a distance. Santos delves into their genealogy, peruses Spanish imperial archives, has his DNA analyzed, and unearths evidence of ancestors from Spain and perhaps even the Holy Land. But with little grounding in lived experience, the story spins away into abstraction and fantasy. The author often lapses into a turgid mysticism—“As mind is to body, so time is to world”—and intersperses a science fiction narrative about a time traveler called Cenote Seven, who pontificates on everything from conquistador arrogance to planetary magnetic fields. Santos gives his forebears no flesh-and-blood presence; they seem like figments of an overactive imagination. Photos. (Apr. 5)

Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison Piper Kerman. Random/Spiegel & Grau, $25 (320p) ISBN 978-0-385-52338-7

Relying on the kindness of strangers during her year's stint at the minimum security correctional facility in Danbury, Conn., Kerman, now a nonprofit communications executive, found that federal prison wasn't all that bad. In fact, she made good friends doing her time among the other women, many street-hardened drug users with little education and facing much longer sentences than Kerman's original 15 months. Convicted of drug smuggling and money laundering in 2003 for a scheme she got tangled up in 10 years earlier when she had just graduated from Smith College, Kerman, at 34, was a “self-surrender” at the prison: quickly she had to learn the endless rules, like frequent humiliating strip searches and head counts; navigate relationships with the other “campers” and unnerving guards; and concoct ways to fill the endless days by working as an electrician and running on the track. She was not a typical prisoner, as she was white, blue-eyed, and blonde (nicknamed “the All-American Girl”), well educated, and the lucky recipient of literature daily from her fiancé, Larry, and family and friends. Kerman's account radiates warmly from her skillful depiction of the personalities she befriended in prison, such as the Russian gangster's wife who ruled the kitchen; Pop, the Spanish mami; lovelorn lesbians like Crazy Eyes; and the aged pacifist, Sister Platte. Kerman's ordeal indeed proved life altering. (Apr.)

Confessions of a Rebel Debutante: A Memoir Anna Fields. Putnam, $24.95 (304p) ISBN 978-0-399-15631-1

Although Fields, a standup comedian and writer for As the World Turns, bemoans non-Southerners who “prefer to believe I grew up with Jim Bakker—style televangelists hoarding Confederate silver,” she dishes out plenty of stereotypes when recounting her own missteps up North—New Yorkers, for example, are “crammed into tiny little apartments... like sardines” and they all dress in black, and the subways are just awful. Fields's memoir skips from one set of anecdotes—boarding school in North Carolina, college at Brown, misadventures in Hollywood, living as a struggling writer in New York—to another, with occasional digressions intended to reflect a down-home common sense leavened by a rebellious streak. (As she remarks early on, she was groomed to be a debutante, but never did get to have her coming-out party.) Most of her stories are, however, unremarkable, and neither her experiences nor her insights stand out. Things pick up when she begins taking gratuitous swipes at celebrities she's encountered, from Julia Stiles (arrogant) to Diana Ross (“crazy-ass”); a later misadventure working for one of Bravo's Real Housewives reads like a Nanny Diariesknockoff. The overall effect is occasionally entertaining but ultimately ephemeral. (Apr.)

Enchanted Evening Barbie and the Second Coming: A Memoir Rheta Grimsley Johnson. C&M Online Media/New South, $23.95 (200p) ISBN 978-1-58838-250-4

Longtime syndicated columnist and author Johnson (Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz) fashions a series of subtly toned, mildly humorous essays that move chronologically through her upbringing as a Southern Baptist and career as a dogged reporter. Christmas provided her cherished early memories growing up in the 1950s and '60s, and several of the essays revolve around the holiday spent either in Montgomery, Ala.; Pensacola, Fla.; and southwest Ga., where her family had roots: in “Rapture on Hold,” she learned that Santa Claus was a fraud, and thus she “gave up most beliefs in the supernatural,” while in “Building the Cross Fence,” she finally got the horse of her dreams, but realized “the real deal scared the hell out of me.” Her first love was a romantic born-again proselytizer at Robert E. Lee High School (“Brad had this way of multiplying his women like loaves and fishes”), though she married fellow newspaperman Jimmy Johnson at the Auburn (Ala.) Plainsman. Together they toiled at their own weekly newspaper on St. Simon's Island, Ga., before taking work at different newspapers across the South and eventually divorcing. Travels with her late love and husband, academic and duck-hunter Don Grierson (now deceased), occupy the later essays, forming a poignant conclusion to the notable story of this devoted journalist. (Apr.)

More Money than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite Sebastian Mallaby. Penguin Press, $29.95 (504p) ISBN 978-1-59420-255-1

Journalist Mallaby (The World's Banker) gives unusually lucid explanations of hedge funds and their balancing of long and short positions with complex derivatives, but what really entrances him is their freedom from regulation, high leverage, and outsized performance incentives. In his telling, they empower a heroic breed of fund managers whose inspired stock picking, currency trading, and futures contracting outsmart the efficient market. In engrossing accounts of epic trades like George Soros's 1993 shorting of the pound sterling and John Paulson's shorting of subprime mortgages, the author celebrates hedge titans' charisma, contrarianism, and market insights. Mallaby contends that hedge funds benefit the economy by correcting market anomalies; because they put managers' money on the line and are small enough to fail, they are more prudent and less disruptive than heavily regulated banks. Mallaby's enthusiasm for an old-school capitalism of unfettered risk taking isn't always persuasive, but he does offer a penetrating look into a shadowy corner of high finance. (June)

Religion

I Am Hutterite: The Fascinating True Story of a Young Woman's Journey to Reclaim her Heritage Mary-Ann Kirkby. Thomas Nelson, $19.99 (176p) ISBN 978-0-8499-4810-7

This sweeping prairie memoir, self-published in Canada in 2007, rapidly garnered both commercial and literary applause. Recounting the author's journey from a Hutterite girlhood to an adolescence of desperate striving to catch up with fashions of the time, the book manages to pack information about Hutterite life into a coming-of-age narrative without slowing it down. Kirkby's family moved away from their Manitoba colony when she was 10 years old, after what she calls a “near idyllic childhood” in the cradle of a communal society. Once a reader commits the many characters and their relationships to each other to memory, the book becomes as riveting and well-paced as a novel. Kirkby captures the complex cadences of Hutterite life—the bawdy humor and knack for storytelling that stands beside austere ritual, the poverty of personal possession and freedom that exists beside the security of community life—with pitch-perfect writing. She also manages to avoid either vilifying or romanticizing a culture that has been subjected to both. Readers will find themselves hoping that Kirkby follows the popular trend in memoir writing: producing a sequel. (May)

Marketplace of the Gods: How Economics Explains Religion Larry Witham. Oxford Univ., $29.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-19-539475-7

A former religion reporter for the Washington Times, Witham turns his attention to the contemporary rise of economic theories to explain religion. Drawing on the works of Rodney Stark, Roger Finke, and Laurence R. Iannaccone, among others, he explores how these academics use economic models of costs and benefits to explain the persistence of religious faith in an age of growing secularization. While Witham gets off to a slow start, his concluding chapters offer insight into the way economic theories try to explain some of modernity's most perplexing issues: why is the United States more religious than Europe? What are the cost-benefits of extreme faith, such as that of religiously inspired terrorists? Economic answers such as the widely embraced theory that religions thrive on competition and are stifled by state regulation are ultimately reductionist; Witham quotes influential religion sociologist Robert Wuthnow, who has said that an economic analysis “fails to illuminate about 90 percent of what I find interesting about religion.” Many readers may agree. Yet in a world dominated by the marketplace, books such as this one are an important part of the conversation. (May)

A House for Hope: The Promise of Progressive Religion for the Twenty-first Century John A. Buehrens and Rebecca Ann Parker. Beacon, $24.95 (208p) ISBN 978-0-8070-7738-2

Coauthors Buehrens (A Chosen Faith) and Parker (Saving Paradise), both progressive clergy, engage in conversation with each other and with theologians ancient and modern (Origen, Barth, Buber, J.L. Adams). Using the metaphors of garden, walls, roof, foundation, threshold, they construct a theological “framework” that faith communities can apply to stimulate reflection and reform, which will develop communal hope, discipline, and activism. To educate contemporary faithful about progressive theology's deep roots, the authors offer complementary chapters within thematic sections, reviewing historical ecumenical and universalist movements and illustrating their arguments with personal anecdotes. Exploring such religious themes as eschatology, salvation, and sin, the authors provide credible alternatives to traditional biblical interpretations, arguing, for example, that apocalyptic scriptures don't predict Earth's ultimate destruction but a future when God's will is done on Earth, and that humanity needs salvation not from God's wrath, but from the consequences of sin. Closing chapters introduce “process theology,” which argues that God both abides and changes. This accessible, engaging book may inspire religious progressives to claim their proud history and vital role in contemporary theological conversation. (May)

Hand Wash Cold: Care Instructions for an Ordinary Life Karen Maezen Miller. New World Library, $14.95 paper (200p) ISBN 978-1-57731-904-7

Miller (Momma Zen) uses daily household chores—laundry, kitchen, yard—to demonstrate timeless Buddhist principles. The skillful weaving of personal anecdotes, a few Zen terms, and acute insights—sometimes addressing the reader directly—distinguish this book from others in the genre. Miller, a Zen priest and student of the late Maezumi Roshi, argues for “the faultless wisdom of following instructions” when going about the mundane activities that form the substance of everyday life. Candid about some of the difficulties of her past, Miller stresses the importance of changing perceptions, which can lead to more beneficial outcomes for oneself and others: “All practice is the practice of making a turn in a different direction.” The book wears its Zen lightly; indeed, Miller skates over the years of study—as well as the decision to become a priest—that undoubtedly ground her current perspectives. By choosing to focus on the conclusions rather than the process of her Zen journey, Miller has tilted her writing more toward self-help/advice than spirituality/religion. This disarming book is full of deft and reassuring observations. (May 7)

Unlimiting Mind: The Radically Experiential Psychology of Buddhism Andrew Olendzki. Wisdom, $15.95 paper (160p) ISBN 978-0-86171-620-3

Olendzki, executive director of the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies and editor of a Buddhist journal, has written a dense book on Buddhist psychology. The book consists of short essays grouped by themes; many of the essays first appeared elsewhere. This gives the book a bit of a sound-bite feel; no one idea is developed for very long, so the reader, given the difficulty of the material, must, like a good Buddhist, pay attention. Olendzki is himself a close reader of Buddhist texts and clearly grounds his reasoning in those texts. His academic prose—use of passive voice, Latinate words—unfortunately compounds the difficulty of comprehension (“If there is no regarding of phenomena as 'mine' then the self who suffers from attachment to phenomena is not constructed”). This is not for the nightstand Buddhist; readers will require some knowledge of the Buddhist understanding of how the mind works, and they will also need some patience with highly abstract prose. (Apr.)

Judaism: Embracing the Seeker Harold Schulweis. KTAV, $18.95 paper (200p) ISBN 978-1-60280-141-7

Throughout history, the Jewish attitude toward conversion has been ambiguous and complex. Schulweis, an eminent California rabbi, brilliantly analyzes the ambivalence toward conversion, citing the continuing Israeli argument about the Law of Return with respect to converts. He clearly explores the positive and negative attitudes toward the convert. The book consists primarily of first-person stories told by 57 men and women who became “Jews by choice.” By and large, they are individuals whose decision to embrace Judaism resulted from a personal spiritual quest rather than marriage. Following the personal narratives, there are eight brief essays, primarily by rabbis, in which they describe their experiences in connection with conversion. The book also includes five poems by Schulweis, an afterword by editor Michael Halperin, and a glossary. For Jews, this is a helpful exploration of conversion and a useful guide to the attitude that should be embraced. For non-Jews, it is a valuable introduction to the elements in Judaism that cause some of their friends and even members of their own families to choose to become Jews. (Apr.)

Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam Fred M. Donner. Harvard/Belknap, $25.95 (304p) ISBN 978-0-674-05097-6

A University of Chicago professor in Near Eastern history, Donner (Narratives of Islamic Origins) presents the intriguing view that the early Islamic movement, as presided over by Muhammad, actively included Jews and Christians in the flock as part of a general monotheistic community. It was only later, after Muhammad's death, that a new generation of Muslims began ritualizing Islam with its own distinctive practices, such as the hajj (pilgrimage) and the five daily prayers. Though Donner isn't entirely persuasive (and surely many Muslims would be stunned by some of his assertions), he raises many original points, gleaning evidence from everything from coinage to original source documents. Questioning longstanding stereotypes, he argues (and proves) that Muslims are not, by nature, anti-Jewish and also that, based on archeological evidence, Muslims did not routinely tear down churches. The early Muslims, though brutal in war, created a sophisticated and organized civil system. For those curious about Islam's beginnings, no book is as original and as evenhanded as this succinct read. (May)

Plan B: What Do You Do When God Doesn't Show Up the Way You Thought He Would? Pete Wilson. Thomas Nelson, $14.99 paper (224p) ISBN 978-0-8499-4650-9

This new young voice in evangelical Christian circles, a pastor and church planter in Nashville, finds a distinctive way to weave Bible stories with his own and other life stories. People develop “Plan B,” Wilson argues, when life does not deliver what someone wants. It also entails a firm belief that God is there both in the failure of Plan A and in the redemption that comes in Plan B. Wilson draws on other Christian writers and thinkers as well as the Bible; the foundation for Plan B comes from such Bible texts as John 16:33, in which Jesus says, “ 'In this life you will have trouble, but take heart, I have overcome the world.' ” Wilson cautions that taking only one part of this teaching—either the trouble part or the overcoming part—leads to bad theology. Good theology comes from holding these two together in tension, balancing disappointment and suffering with faith in a loving God. While the teaching is sound, the way he delivers it needs tweaking; Wilson's writing lacks the kind of humility that draws the reader in. (May)

Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible Robert Alter. Princeton Univ., $19.95 (208p) ISBN 978-0-691-12881-8

Among the many English translations of the Bible, a single one is responsible for the shape of some of the most iconic works of American literature, argues Alter, a comparative literature professor at University of California, Berkeley. Focusing not on the application of specific content but rather on the more elusive matter of style, Alter, author of more than 20 books, shows how the King James Version (especially its Old Testament) informed the work of Melville, Faulkner, Hemingway, Bellow, Marilynne Robinson, and Cormac McCarthy. Alter's knowledge of Hebrew and its translation in the KJV combined with his sensitivity to the sound and form of the distinctly American Moby-Dick, Absalom, Absalom! and The Road, among others, yield rich insights. By his own admission, Alter may be accused of occasionally overreaching associations. However, even if readers are unconvinced by some of the author's claims, they will find in this book a compelling case for style. Alter masterfully demonstrates how style itself affects and even conveys the meaning and power of great literature. (Apr.)

Midrash on the Juanitos: A Didactic Novella Russell Rathbun. Cathedral Hill (Atlas Books, dist.), $17.50 paper (146p) ISBN 978-0-9742986-4-1

It begins with a lawyer and a pastor walking into a bar, almost like a self-conscious joke. But Rathbun's newest novella is no comedy. Immediately, the plot warps itself, like the undulating barstools of the first chapter, into part horror, part theologizing, and part Alice in Wonderland story about an obsessive and mentally ill pastor's search for a very particular answer in the Bible. The style of the novella is postmodern, recalling Thomas Pynchon's disjointed realities as the unnamed protagonist, an unreliable narrator, is speaking lucidly at one moment about early Christian history and experiencing terrifying hallucinations the next. Ultimately, Rathbun's narrator's project is to provide a Midrash, a rabbinic-style commentary and interpretation, of the “Juanitos,” the three Epistles of John. Instead of coming away with a grounded understanding of the author's biblical opinion, however, the novella elicits profound discomfort and fear, aided in no small measure by frighteningly deformed pencil-sketch illustrations accompanying the text. The search for absolute certainty and ultimate truth in scripture can be very taxing emotionally. But perhaps that is Rathbun's point after all. (Apr.)

The Power and the Pain: Transforming Spiritual Hardships into Joy Andrew Holecek. Snow Lion, $18.95 paper (296p) ISBN 978-1-55939-331-7

The first book from Bodhi magazine columnist Holecek is a demanding yet valuable take on the joys and challenges to be found on the Buddhist path. The author places particular emphasis on pain and strife, applying philosophy from Tibetan Buddhist practice to direct readers toward mastery of problematic emotions. Readers should have some understanding of the religion's basic practices because Holecek is concerned more with theory than mechanics. Discussions on meditation are lengthy, but with little instruction on actually how to meditate, newcomers may feel baffled. The challenges of this volume are due not only to the rigors of its content but also to the lengthy passages and poems from other authors that are included. The detours are long, indirectly related to the topic, and often muddy the waters. Some patience to plow through the extra sources should be enough for make apparent Holecek's keen understanding and frequent insights. Casual readers may find the author's emphasis on ego dissolution a bit unnerving. Others will enjoy the book for that very reason. (Apr.)

Unlearning Protestantism: Sustaining Christian Community in an Unstable Age Gerald W. Schlabach. Brazos, $28.99 paper (288p) ISBN 978-1-58743-111-1

A Catholic and former Mennonite, Schlabach makes clear from the outset that his book is not about persuading Protestants to convert to Catholicism. But the associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn., and director of the Bridgefolk Mennonite-Catholic movement proposes that Protestants have something important to learn from Catholics: the practice of stability that keeps them together despite their differences. Schlabach believes the very virtues that allowed Protestant reformers to take courageous stands centuries ago have morphed into vices that now undermine community life, keeping Protestants from the hard work of living together. Conversely, he says, Catholics stay together amid disputes by exercising stability, fidelity, and “loyal dissent.” Although Schlabach allows that some situations require “protest, dissent and perhaps even prophetic departure for a time,” he calls on all Christians to nurture virtues and practices that make it possible for them to pursue reform while sustaining their communal lives. This thoughtful and groundbreaking work will speak to Protestants and Catholics alike. (Apr.)

Green Like God: Unlocking the Divine Plan for Our Planet Jonathan Merritt. FaithWords, $16.99 paper (208p) ISBN 978-0-446-55725-2

Imagine God recycling bottles and planting trees. In this book by faith and culture writer Merritt, God is honored as the ultimate environmentalist who restores and loves His own creation. Evangelical Christians are less supportive of environmental causes than other groups, a statistic that Merritt attributes to misinformation and politics that hamper understanding. Through a compilation of scripture, statistics, and his own anecdotes, Merritt explains that creation care is a shared moral obligation—not a political viewpoint or a film by Al Gore. “The world is God's apologetic about Himself”; it is the Christian's job to maintain its beauty and complexity. Merritt arms the reader with Bible verses commanding care for creation; resources and suggestions for green living are given in the appendixes. Himself a convert to the idea of God as green, Merritt is sure to appeal to the hearts of even the most polarized Christians. His guide could be turned into relevant sermon material and should be mandatory reading for churchgoers. (Apr.)

A Positive Life: Living with HIV as a Pastor, Husband, and Father Shane Stanford. Zondervan, $19.99 (224p) ISBN 978-0-310-29292-0

“I have learned that when life breaks us, we can work to own it before it owns us.” Those words of the author, a United Methodist pastor, ring true in his account of a life spent battling hemophilia, HIV, and accompanying illnesses, as well as debilitating spiritual and emotional challenges. Stanford contracted the disease in the 1980s, when HIV/AIDS was a death sentence. Yet the period was also the start of research and new medicines that kept him alive. Stanford takes readers through his childhood, when he spent much time under the benign mentoring influence of his grandfather; his adolescence, when he was diagnosed and met his future wife; and his struggle to become a pastor despite his HIV-positive status. His story is more than just a battle against prejudice and HIV/AIDS; it's a love story, a tale of forgiveness, a picture of resilience, and a witness to God's grace. Included are a loving afterword by his wife, Pokey Stanford; Stanford's speech at the 2006 Global AIDS Summit; and a nine-lesson study guide. (Apr.)

Wisdom Chaser: Finding My Father at 14,000 Feet Nathan Foster. InterVarsity, $16 paper (180p) ISBN 978-0-8308-3630-7

In this deeply engaging, conspicuously unpolished chronicle of a decade of mountaineering adventures with his father, the son of a famous father explores not only the physical terrain of the Colorado Rockies but also the emotional and spiritual terrain of their evolving relationship as the two test themselves. An assistant professor of social work at Michigan's Spring Arbor University, the writer is the son of Richard Foster, a luminary among contemporary writers on Christian spirituality. “The little I knew about my father I didn't much like,” he writes near the book's beginning. An unsparing and even sometimes awkward narrative of the writer's deepening self-knowledge as he confronts the wounds of his childhood, the book also describes his deepening friendship with his father as they experience climbing success, failure, and some pretty terrifying close calls in unforgiving mountain passes. This gem of a book should appeal not only to Richard Foster fans but to a much wider pool of readers who will be grateful for its insights, humility, and tenderness. (Apr.)