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Deep Blue Home: An Intimate Ecology of Our Wild Ocean Julia Whitty. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24 (256p) ISBN 978-0-618-11981-3

Mingling mythology with science, Whitty pulls readers into the watery depths of the oceans, home to the birds, whales, and other mysterious creatures that have been her lifetime passion. She writes of Isla Rasa in the Gulf of California in Mexico during the short springtime breeding season, when “the island mushrooms into a jittery cloud visible for miles”; off the coast of Newfoundland, she encounters the “annual migration of the icebergs, a spectacle as grand as the exodus of wildebeest through the Serengeti,” and a leatherback sea turtle with “flippers the size of oars, and a head like a draft horse's, wearing a jellyfish mane.” Whitty's biology is colored by “the gods of rock and the goddesses of seawater,” such as Rasa, the Hindu “mythical river flowing around the world,” and the Elivágar, from the Viking creation story. This luminous prose is disturbed by accompanying reports of human-induced damage of oceanic ecosystems, where “market economics relentlessly drives commercially desirable species towards extinction” like a modern plague, exemplified by the collapse of the Newfoundland cod fishery, which caused a “trophic cascade” transforming all aspects of the ecosystem “from crab to zooplankton to phytoplankton to nitrates.” (July)

The African American Experience During World War II Neil A. Wynn. Rowman & Littlefield, $26.95 (153p) ISBN 978-1-44220-016-6

Wynn (The Afro-American and the Second World War) surveys the experience of African-Americans during WWII in this brief, readable history—the latest entry in the publisher's African-American history series. Drawing on primary sources and recent scholarship, the author explores the “contradictory experience” of African-Americans during the war—“a mixture of progress and resistance”—and concludes that “the war years were crucial in the development of the emerging civil rights movement.” Wynn's evenhanded analysis of the paradoxical nature of African-Americans' wartime experience yields a balance between the hard-won successes—including significant economic progress—and the inevitable setbacks: foremost among them, the heightened racial divisions that led to widespread violence and the lack of any real progress in the struggle for social equality. The author argues that African-Americans' wartime experience prompted postwar advances—e.g., President Harry Truman's 1948 executive order ending racial segregation in the armed forces—but notes that, despite the gains, African-Americans still had a long way to go. A diverse selection of correspondence, editorials, government documents, and memoirs enhance the survey's value for general readers. (July)

Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality Gail Dines. Beacon, $26.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-8070-4452-0

As pornography has become both more extreme and more commercial, antiporn activist Dines argues, it has dehumanized our sexual relationships. The radical objectification and often brutal denigration of women in porn, she holds, “leaks” into other aspects of our lives. Dines's argument rests on a compelling, close reading of the imagery and narrative content of magazines, videos, and marketing materials; what is missing, however, is a similarly compelling body of research on how these images are used by viewers, aside from Dines's own anecdotal evidence. The author's appropriation of addiction terminology—viewers are called “users,” habitual viewing is an “addiction,” and pornography featuring teenagers is called “Pseudo-Child Pornography” or “PCP”—is distracting and suggests that rhetorical tricks are needed because solid argumentation is lacking. Likewise, Dines's opponents are unlikely to be swayed by her speculation tying porn viewing to rape and child molestation, nor by the selective sources she draws on to support her point (convicted sex offenders). The book does raise important questions about the commoditization of sexual desires and the extent to which pornography has become part of our economy (with hotel chains and cable and satellite companies among the largest distributors). (July)

Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager, intro. by Keith Gessen. Harper Perennial, $14.99 paper (288p) ISBN 978-0-06-196530-2

Expanding on a 2007 interview in the literary magazine n+1, editor and interviewer Gessen draws together two years' worth of interviews with a despairing anonymous hedge fund manager. HFM, as Gessen calls him, didn't go to business school or major in economics, but has been working successfully in hedge funds for over a decade. With some context provided by Gessen, HFM schools readers in the stories behind the death of Bear Stearns, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the plunging dollar, the bailouts, the Madoff scandal, and, finally, the upswing. Though it's interesting to have a personal take on the tumultuous past two years—and HFM ends the interviews when the stress finally drives him to take a semisabbatical—the decision to tell this story in an interview format is tricky and ultimately unsuccessful; the choppy transcription format distances readers from the ideas at hand, and the points lose their punch. Fans of the original article will find this expansion compelling, but other readers curious about the factors behind the crash will do better elsewhere. (July)

Declaration: The Nine Tumultuous Weeks When America Became Independent, May 1—July 4, 1776 William Hogeland. Simon & Schuster, $26 (288p) ISBN 978-1-4165-8409-4

Hogeland (The Whiskey Rebellion) pre-sents the array of plots, counterplots, resolutions, and declarations out of which came the new American nation. The Declaration of Independence we know today is different from Jefferson's original version, which did not mention God, an idea inserted in the final days before passage by self-described rhetoricians who also eliminated his denunciation of the slave trade. Heroic men met in Philadelphia, and Hogeland concentrates on John and Samuel Adams, the cousins whose labors were decisive. British troops landed on Staten Island on July 3, and a British fleet was in New York Bay, but independence had in fact been declared by July 2 (though it would become unanimous only on July 19 with New York State's vote). Thomas Paine's celebratory words end the book. John Adams despised Paine, for Adams believed in property as the bulwark of democracy, Paine in untrammeled democracy. Their difference informs the dynamic tension attendant upon our country's birth. This brief, fair study provides a sound analysis of events and a revelatory portrayal of the men who made America free. 16 pages of b&w illus. (June)

Twilight at the World of Tomorrow: Genius, Madness, Murder, and the 1939 World's Fair on the Brink of War James Mauro. Ballantine, $28 (432p) ISBN 978-0-345-51214-7

Former Cosmopolitan executive editor Mauro tries to underscore the irony of the 1939—1940 New York World's Fair, with its theme of world unity, opening on the brink of world war. But Mauro has multiple narratives, moving erratically between the evolution of the fair, with its slogan “Building the World of Tomorrow”; war brewing in Europe; and Germany gobbling up territory (Hitler refused the invitation to have a pavilion at the fair). As, one by one, European nations closed their pavilions, due to the war, the fair's theme rang increasingly hollow. During the fair's run, Einstein famously wrote to President Roosevelt expressing concern over Germany's stockpiling of uranium, giving rise to the Manhattan Project. To this unwieldy narrative Mauro adds the story of two NYPD bomb squad detectives killed when a bomb detonated on the fairgrounds on July 4, 1940. Aiming for another Devil in the White City, Mauro fails to pull all his threads together coherently, falling short of the mark. Photos. (July)

The Great Task Remaining: The Third Year of Lincoln's War William Marvel. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $35 (480p) ISBN 978-0-618-99064-1

Civil War historian Marvel (Lincoln's Darkest Year), a winner of the Lincoln Prize, demonstrates his usual command of archival and published sources in this significantly revisionist account of the Civil War's third year from the Union perspective. He challenges conventional triumphalism, demonstrating comprehensively that despite Vicksburg and Gettysburg, by 1863 Northern citizens and soldiers were increasingly and openly wondering whether preserving the union and ending slavery were worth the cost of “Mr. Lincoln's war.” Disillusion and war-weariness had set in: the war's only fruits seemed to be moral and political degradation, dangerous constitutional precedents, tens of thousands dead and maimed. The Battle of Chickamauga appeared to have restored the stalemate. Marvel particularly conveys the looming crisis of the impending expiration of the three-year enlistments that were the Union army's norm. That, combined with the increasing reluctance of Northern men to volunteer or send their sons, could have ended the war by default. “Romance and adventure” or “misery and peril”—which emotions would prevail? As Marvel conclusively demonstrates, the coin remained in the air as 1863 came to an end. 32 b&w photos, 6 maps. (June 22)

The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris Peter Beinart. Harper, $27.99 (496p) ISBN 978-0-06-145646-6

A century of unwise American military adventures is probed in this perceptive study of foreign policy over-reach. Daily Beast and Time contributor Beinart (The Good Fight) highlights three examples of Washington's overconfidence: Woodrow Wilson's “hubris of reason”: the belief that reason, not force, could govern the world; the Kennedy-Johnson administrations' “hubris of toughness” during the Vietnam War; and George W. Bush's “hubris of dominance” in launching the Iraq War. In each case, Beinart finds a dangerous confluence of misleading experience and untethered ideology; the Iraq War, he contends, was fostered both by a 12-year string of easy military triumphs from Panama to Afghanistan, and a belief that America can impose democracy by force. (The book continues the author's ongoing apology for his early support of the Iraq War.) Beinart's analyses are consistently lucid and provocative—e.g., he calls Ronald Reagan “a dove in hawk's feathers,” and his final conclusion is that “Obama will need to... decouple American optimism from the project of American global mastery.” The book amounts to a brief for moderation, good sense, humility, and looking before leaping—virtues that merit Beinart's spirited, cogent defense. (June)

The Sultan's Shadow: One Family's Rule at the Crossroads of East and West Christiane Bird. Random, $28 (416p) ISBN 978-0-345-46940-3

Bird brilliantly tells of the 19th-century rise and fall of an Omani ruling family, its role in the enormous Indian Ocean slave trade and, unwittingly, through the Princess Salme, the Christianization and colonization of east Africa by Germany. Oman's Sultan Seyyid Said Al Busaidi was generous with his own people but cruel and ruthless with his enemies, He built alliances with the British as he built a lucrative slave trade in his capital of Zanzibar. After Said's death, his favorite daughter, Salme, “an independent woman who flatly refused to obey the mores of her day,” eloped with a German businessman who soon died in a fluke accident. Bismarck used Salme and her family to gain a foothold in the slave trade; by the time of Salme's death in 1924, her Omani ruling family's fortunes had declined, German power had risen, and the slave trade in Zanzibar had been abolished. Drawing on Salme's autobiography and letters, journalist Bird (Neither East nor West: One Woman's Journey Through the Islamic Republic of Iran) presents a first-rate cultural and political history that opens a window onto this little-known corner of modern history. Maps. (June)

Elsie and Mairi Go to War: Two Extraordinary Women on the Western Front Diane Atkinson. Pegasus (Norton, dist.), $26 (272p) ISBN 978-1-60598-094-2

In the heady days preceding WWI, two thrill-seeking motorcycle enthusiasts chucked their comfortable lives to join a small group of British women providing medical care on the Belgian front lines. Atkinson (Suffragettes in Pictures) utilizes wartime journals, interviews, family genealogies, and a sanctioned contemporary biography to give life to the pair of spirited friends who displayed extraordinary courage and plenty of attitude. Elsie Knocker, 30, was a divorced mother of one, and a trained midwife from a unconventionally broad-minded middle-class background; Mairi Gooden-Chisholm was an upper-class Scottish teenager. Together they found their calling in Pervyse, Belgium, as they drove packed frontline ambulances and nursed wounded soldiers in the midst of shelling and gravely unhygienic conditions. Elsie, unimpressed with visiting Marie Curie, who had created a mobile X-ray unit, effectively employed new, and potentially life-saving, methods of treating the soldiers for shock with simple rest, warmth, and comfort before shipping them to hospitals,. The startling end of the women's friendship remains the subject of speculation. And though the lack of footnotes is lamentable, , Atkinson details the gritty effects of trench warfare while fully celebrating the exploits of two intensely linked young women who benefited hundreds of lives. 14 pages of photos. (June)

Parasites: Tales of Humanity's Most Unwelcome Guests Rosemary Drisdelle. Univ. of California, $27.50 (276p) ISBN 978-0-520-25938-6

As Drisdelle, a clinical parasitologist, shows, human parasites come in many forms and use a panoply of strategies to make a living. As she writes, “[H]undreds of species live in human intestines, skin, lungs, muscle, brain, liver, blood, and everywhere else they can find a niche.” They can do remarkable damage to every physiological system, leading to death, blindness, and behavioral changes. Drisdelle discusses amoebae, roundworms, tapeworms, mites, and others, often in too much detail. She also examines the historical context in which some parasites have found their way to us and notes their effect on world events, such as the impact Plasmodium falciparum, a protozoa that causes malaria, had on the course of the Vietnam War. She notes that some scholars have even “credited malaria with bringing down the Roman Empire....” On the positive side, she demonstrates that, in some cases, with enough political will, dramatic improvements in public health can be made. This is definitely not a book for the squeamish, and readers who lack a special interest in parasites will find it tedious. 29 b&w photos, 2 maps. (June)

Dinosaurs Steve Brusatte. Quercus (IPG, dist.), $39.99 (224p) ISBN 978-1-84724-417-8

Dinosaurs continue to fascinate young and old alike, and this sumptuously produced oversize book is bound to be a huge hit. Brusatte, a paleontology researcher at Columbia and the American Museum of Natural History, gives a tour of the dino realm, enlisting computer-aided imaging to depict these masters of all they surveyed in almost frightening four-color detail. Measuring 17”×14”, the book is large enough to convey actual size on a few, such as the Microraptor. Brusatte (Field Guide to Dinosaurs) breaks up his survey into geologic periods and uses family trees, or “cladograms,” to illustrate how various dinosaurs are connected. The author's explanation of how the continents broke apart helps readers understand why T. Rex fossils tend to be found in the American West, and why new species are being found in China. Brusatte gives for each species its scientific classification, a map showing where fossils have been found, basic statistics (length, weight, posture, etc.), and a diagram showing its size compared to humans. The individual essays reflect the current state of knowledge about each species. These “terrifying lizards,” reproduced in all their majesty, will captivate all comers. (June)

Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century Sam Kashner, Nancy Schoenberger. Harper, $27.99 (512p) ISBN 978-0-06-156284-6

Life outdoes movie melodrama in this raucous, intimate, dual biography of Hollywood's ultimate “It Couple.” As told by journalist Kashner (Sinatraland) and biographer Schoenberger (Dangerous Muse: The Life of Caroline Blackwood), the romance between the glittering Tinseltown diva and the sonorous, self-loathing Shakespearean reprises their co-starring movie roles: it has the passion of Cleopatra (the Vatican condemned their on-set adultery as “erotic vagrancy”), the riotous merriment of The Taming of the Shrew, the poisonous marital fights of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and a cast of thousands of paparazzi and shrieking fans. The well-researched narrative—the authors make good use of Burton's engaging love letters and diary entries—offers juicy details of his epic alcoholism and her towering tantrums, and is fascinated with the jewelry pieces, like the Taj Mahal diamond that Taylor famously extracted from Burton as tribute or penance. But from the binges and bling emerges a revealing portrait of the magnetic qualities—her vulgar warmth, his soulful virility—that glued the couple together. Here is that rare love story that holds one's interest beyond the wedding—and a reminder, after the thin gruel of Brangelina, of what a feast celebrity can be. Photos. (June 1)

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives François Dosse. Columbia Univ., $37.50 (608p) ISBN 978-0-231-14560-2

An exhaustive and fascinating account of a remarkable collaboration between Guattari, a radical, militant psychiatrist, and Deleuze, one of the towering figures of contemporary French philosophy, whose work together produced Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, startlingly original blends of social psychology, philosophy, and capitalist critique that positioned itself in opposition to both socialism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Dosse, a French professor of history, traces these lines of influence, placing the pair's work firmly in the context of the May 1968 student uprising, and both authors' strained relationships with a megalomaniacal Lacan. The intellectual background of each writer is examined: Deleuze's texts on Bergson, Nietzsche, and Spinoza, and Guattari's work as director of a psychiatric unit outside of Paris where distinctions between patient and doctor were obliterated. The author strives to re-establish Guattari as an integral collaborator, one whose contribution was overshadowed in later years by Deleuze's celebrity. However, despite the wealth of research, the author too often resorts to paraphrases of their writings, and the book would have been well served by judicious editing. Nonetheless, as a glimpse into a remarkable period in French intellectual history where politics, philosophy, and literary brilliance coalesced, it is captivating. (June)

Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us—And How to Know When Not to Trust Them David H. Freedman. Little, Brown, $25.99 (304p) ISBN 978-0-316-12378-8

Freedman (coauthor of A Perfect Mess) makes the case that scientists, finance wizards, relationship gurus, health researchers, and other supposed authorities are as likely to be wrong as right. Drawing from personal interviews with experts on experts, he leads the reader on a merry chase down the road of skepticism, uncovering conflicting solutions to how to sleep better, lose weight, avoid heart attacks, build a financial nest egg, lower cholesterol, etc. In accessible language, Freedman explains the flaws that all too easily worm their way into research, including deliberate fudging of data and downright fraud. Fellow journalists, more interested in flashy copy than accuracy, come in for their share of the blame. Google and other Internet search engines add to the problem, sending unfounded “facts” to millions of computer users. Fortunately, after pulling the rug from under the reader's feet on every imaginable topic—from the relationship of body fat to dementia, the effect of Tylenol on dogs, and how to prevent inflation, Freedman provides 11 “never-fail” rules for not being misled—but of course, he admits, he could be wrong. (June)

Wild West 2.0: How to Protect and Restore Your Online Reputation on the Untamed Social Frontier Michael Fertik and David Thompson. Amacom, $24.95 (272p) ISBN 978-0-814-41509-2

Fertik and Thompson, respectively CEO and chief privacy officer at ReputationDefender, tackle online defamation, which can cause a company significant damage with only a few mouse clicks. The good news is that if you are prepared, you can defend your company and make sure that its online image is a true reflection of reality. Likening the Internet to the new frontier of the American Wild West, the authors explore the challenges of being in a world that is instant, permanent, and anonymous. They provide valuable insight into the quandary of “Google Truth,” why people attack each other online, and the different types of Internet attacks. Of particular usefulness are the chapters on how to measure this type of damage, including how to do an online reputation audit. They stress the benefits of a proactive defense and show how to recover after the damage has been done. Full of invaluable information that readers will be very grateful to have when they need it, this book explains the rules and provides the tools for overcoming online attacks and regaining a positive reputation. (June)

War at the Wall Street Journal: Inside the Struggle to Control an American Business Empire Sarah Ellison. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27 (304p) ISBN 978-0-547-15243-1

In her new book, Ellison, a former reporter for the business newspaper, describes how the clever, persistent Aussie media maven Rupert Murdoch wrested the crown jewel of American newspapers from an outgunned Bancroft family. Ellison celebrates the $5 billion deal cooked up by Murdoch and his partners, and gets in a few body blows against the stodgy New York Times, the financially crippled American media and business world, and the snobby British print world as well throughout this take-no-prisoners chronicle. Some of Ellison's sharpest barbs are reserved for the hapless, dysfunctional Bancroft clan, revealing dark family secrets involving curious sexual habits, shifting alliances, and addictions, but the controversial Murdoch emerges as the bold business maverick and conquering media mogul. In the end, Ellison offers a close look into a raw, aggressive power in international commerce. (May)

The Wire: Truth Be Told Rafael Alvarez, with an intro. by David Simon. Grove, $19.95 paper (608p) ISBN 978-0-8021-4499-7

After HBO launched its gritty, Baltimore-based series, The Wire, in 2002, it ran for five seasons and 60 episodes. The show was created by former Baltimore Sun crime reporter Simon, who pitched the drama series as an “anti—cop show” and as a “novel for television,” bolstering his writing staff with such novelists as Richard Price, Dennis Lehane, and George Pelecanos. Initially perceived as a crime show, Simon wanted to explore larger themes of politics, sociology, and economics while depicting all angles of life in Baltimore, from news media mediocrity to the life of addicts, dealers, whores, johns, and the homeless: “This is the world of The Wire, the America left behind.” Low ratings were followed by critical acclaim. In addition to detailed episode guides, total cast/character breakdowns, crew listings, 300+ b&w photos, and a glossary of the street slang employed in the show's dialogue, the book includes a dozen insightful, informative contributions by a variety of journalists, directors, screenwriters, and novelists, including Pelecanos, Laura Lippman, and Nick Hornby, who interviewed Simon. Other interviews include Little Melvin Williams, “one of the legendary kingpins in the annals of Baltimore narcotics,” who from prison went into the show's third-season cast. Weaving a sprawling tapestry of both the TV drama and the Baltimore cityscape, Alvarez, a Baltimore Sun reporter for 20 years and The Wire staff writer, has compiled engrossing, definitive coverage certain to lure HBO viewers into bookstores. (May)

Lifestyle

Food

Fast, Fresh & Green: More Than 90 Delicious Recipes for Veggie Lovers Susie Middleton, photos by Ben Fink. Chronicle, $24.95 (224p) ISBN 978-0-8118-6566-1

Not all these recipes are fast, nor do they all feature green veggies (nor are they consciously ecofocused). The subtitle explains it better: this rainbow of appealing recipes is for those who adore vegetable dishes and want more than an afterthought chapter dedicated to them. Middleton, a former editor-at-large for Fine Cooking magazine, divides recipes by cooking style, instructing readers in braising, hands-on sautéing, stir-frying, grilling, and more. She offers dishes—braised fingerlings with rosemary and mellow garlic; sautéed carrots with warm olive and mint dressing; stir-fried swiss chard with pine nuts and balsamic butter; and grill-roasted bell peppers with goat cheese and cherry tomato dressing—with layers of complexity that heighten but don't overwhelm the flavors of the intended stars, the vegetables. And she employs interesting contrasts—savory and sweet, for example—in recipes such as vanilla and cardamom glazed acorn squash rings; roasted turnips and pears with rosemary-honey drizzle; and gingery sweet potato and apple sauté with toasted almonds that are likely to tempt even the vegetable-averse. Fink's photos—mostly of green veggies, perhaps in a nod to the misnomer title—show lima beans and peas as mouth-watering, decadent treats. (June)

Skinny Italian: Eat It and Enjoy It—Live La Bella Vita and Look Great, Too! Teresa Giudice with Heather Maclean. Hyperion, $19.99 (256p) ISBN 978-1-401-31035-6

Giudice, famous for table flipping and gushing over her “juicy” husband, Joe, on Bravo's Real Housewives of New Jersey, offers a simple rundown of Italian standards like pesto and puttanesca sauces, veal piccata, steak pizzaiola, almond biscotti and the classic bellini in her authentic yet dishy look into food and family. Few recipes will surprise the seasoned Italian cook, though Giudice gets points for keeping dishes rather healthy while boosting flavor with fresh herbs, pungent garlic, and hot pepper. Coupled with family photos and sidebar comments about their friends and favorite dishes from Teresa and Joe, the book plays well to a younger, hipper home cook. With a focus on steering clear of reputation-ruining no-nos like jarred sauce and rinsing cooked pasta, Giudice dives into some deeper waters with coaching on making pizza dough and canning tomatoes. Though she tries a little too hard to make everything salacious, gorgeous, and fabulous, useful tips abound (the section on olive oil is titled “OO, VOO, EVOO, WTF?”). Take away the overblown catch phrases and effusive references to her mama, The Sopranos, and the motherland, and you're left with a solid mid-week Italian cookbook. Then again, perhaps it's the chatty Teresa and her feisty yet playful anecdotes that make this an irresistible, guilty pleasure. (May)

Stir-Frying to the Sky's Edge: The Ultimate Guide to Mastery, with Authentic Recipes and Stories Grace Young. Simon & Schuster, $35 (336p) ISBN 978-1-4165-8057-7

Stir-frying may have been pedestrianized by generations of vegetarian college students, but this beautiful, comprehensive cookbook restores it to its rightful place among the most elegant cookery techniques. The virtues of stir-frying, Young writes, are many: it makes bounty out of small amounts of meat and oil; it emphasizes healthful vegetables; and most importantly, it creates '”alchemic” flavor out of raw ingredients. Young (The Breath of a Wok), has a scholarly yet impassioned approach, and she fuses personal anecdotes, meticulously researched history, and stir-fry—related arcana to illuminate her subject. She covers types of woks and utensils and a recommended stir-fry pantry, including a photograph of sauces with tricky-to-decipher packaging. At the book's heart are the classic techniques and dishes of China's regional cuisines, such as Hunan-style cumin beef, Cantonese chicken with black bean sauce, and stir-fried Sichuan beans. Still, for Young, who always travels with her own wok, the story of stir-frying is also the story of the Chinese diaspora. By tracing the stir-fry around the world, she demonstrates all of the diversity it can contain: Jamaican stir-fried chicken with chayote, Cuban fried rice, and Peruvian stir-fried filet mignon. For the serious home cook, this informative, lyrical tome is an inspiration. Photos. (May)

Edible: A Celebration of Local Foods Tracey Ryder and Carole Topalian. Wiley, $29.95 (336p) ISBN 978-0-470-37108-4

Ryder and Topalian, cofounders of Edible Communities Publications, a network of 65 regional food magazines that honor place-based food, cull the best of the best Edible articles to create an inviting and rewarding collection celebrating local food and sustainable food systems around the U.S. and Canada. With 150 striking color photos, the book is a feast for the eyes, mind, and palate. Divided into geographic regions, it shares success stories and profiles of remarkable individuals and businesses in each, from Boston's Allandale Farm, the last working farm in the area, through Phoenix's gentle giant chef Greg LaPrad, to Seattle's Lummi Island Wild Preserves. We learn about Richmond, Va.'s Belmont Butchery and its Old Fashioned Charcuterie, Missoula, Mont.'s Le Petit Outre bakery, and southeastern Michigan's Calder Dairy. Each story provides a perfect balance of inspiration, delight, information, and gratitude that such operations and artisans still exist. The authors also include a tasty array of recipes, organized by season, including Aspen tri-tip roast; collard tops with parmigiano; and double corn spoon bread. With the recent growth of the slow food and locavore movements, this well-timed book is a welcome and vital contribution to the ongoing challenge of sustainability. (May)

In the Green Kitchen: Techniques to Learn by Heart Alice Waters. Clarkson Potter, $28 (160p) ISBN 978-0-307-33680-4

Waters, restaurateur and chef extraordinaire, showcases basic cooking techniques every cook can and should master along with recipes using each method in this slim and attractive book. Derived from a Slow Food Nation event she helped organize, where notable chefs and foodies provided demonstrations on foundational procedures, Waters highlights a set of techniques that are universal to all cuisines. She covers the most basic of the basics, from stocking the pantry and washing lettuce to boiling pasta and wilting greens. In typical Waters fashion, recipes showcase just a few simple ingredients, allowing the natural flavors of the food to shine. Since dishes were chosen to highlight process, the result is a somewhat eclectic grouping of recipes, including pesto; spaghettini with garlic, parsley, and olive oil; dirty rice; Irish soda bread; and apple galette. She also covers peeling tomatoes, skinning peppers, roasting vegetables, and roasting and carving chicken. Throughout are color photographs of demonstrators from the event including Lidia Bastianich, Traci Des Jardins, Dan Barber, and David Chang, among others. Ideal for the cooking novice, this gem of a book captures the expertise of world-class chefs in an accessible, straightforward manner. (May)

Will Farming Be the Death of Us?

The agricultural revolution won't just make us fat—it could make us extinct.

Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations Evan D.G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas. Free Press, $27 (304p) ISBN 978-1-4391-0189-6

The agricultural system that sustains modern society will eventually destroy it, argues this gloomy ecohistory. Leeds University agricultural researcher Fraser and Boston journalist Rimas survey a range of premodern civilizations, including Sumer, Han China, and medieval Europe, to distill the common features that allowed them to feed large urban populations: farming specialization, surpluses, trade, transportation, and food storage. Alas, the authors contend, these “food empires” bred soaring populations, exhausted soils, led to deforestation and erosion, which together with a turn in the climate, led to famine and collapse. They apply this neo-Malthusian lesson to our “cancerous” mega-agriculture, based on artificial fertilizer, fossil fuels, and mono-cropping. The authors' tour of food empires past, framed by an irrelevant narrative of a 16th-century Florentine merchant, is interesting but scattershot. Further, they fail to convince on why technological innovations in agriculture will fail, and lapse into a dubious brief for locavorism. (June 15)

Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization Spencer Wells. Random, $26 (256p) ISBN 978-1-4000-6215-7

More food but also disease, craziness, and anomie resulted from the agricultural revolution, according to this diffuse meditation on progress and its discontents. Wells (The Journey of Man), a geneticist, anthropologist, and National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence, voices misgivings about the breakthrough to farming 10,000 years ago, spurred by climate change. The food supply was more stable, but caused populations to explode; epidemics flourished because of overcrowding and proximity to farm animals; despotic governments emerged to organize agricultural production; and warfare erupted over farming settlements. Then came urbanism and modernity, which clashed even more intensely with our nomadic hunter-gatherer nature. Nowadays, Wells contends, we are both stultified and overstimulated, cut off from the land and alienated from one other, resulting in mental illness and violent fundamentalism. Wells gives readers an engaging rundown of the science that reconstructs the prehistoric past, but he loses focus in trying to connect that past to every contemporary issue from obesity to global warming, and his solution is unconvincingly simple: “Want less.” B&w photos. (June 8)

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