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Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky Nicholas von Hoffman. Nation, $26.95 (256p) ISBN 978-1-56858-439-3

Saul Alinsky, the fiery Chicago activist whose 1971 Rules for Radicals is regarded as the organizer's bible, has already been memorialized in a biography, a documentary, and a play, which is why von Hoffman (Citizen Cohn), who spent a decade working with Alinsky as an organizer, wisely offers “an homage,” as opposed to a “biography or an exegesis on [Alinsky's] thinking.” What follows is a scattering of anecdotes and stray talking points—some of them insightful, like his observation that Alinsky “won his reputation for cynicism by insisting that most of us are moved to action by self-interest first, moral principles second, if at all,” many of them hazily remembered and poorly structured. Von Hoffman writes in a loose style that has the beat and rhythm of Chicago street talk, but as the sparsely punctuated sentences twist and turn, confusion takes over and the folksy charm wears thin. Such missteps are easy enough to overlook, but they add up, and after a while readers might wish the author had taken a more conservative approach to grammar, if not to politics. (July)

Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds Lyndall Gordon. Viking, $27.95 (512p) ISBN 978-0-670-02193-2

This biography is informed by two revelations: first, a bombshell that is likely to be debated as long as there are inquiring readers of Emily Dickinson; and second, the effect of a family love affair on the poet's long and complex publishing history. When Dickinson writes “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” and punctuates her work in a spasmodic style, Gordon maintains we are privy to the neuronal misfiring of epilepsy. Gordon unearths compelling evidence: the glycerine Dickinson was prescribed, then a common treatment for epilepsy; her photosensitivity; and a family history of epilepsy. The stigma-packed condition, says Gordon, is at least one source of Dickinson's celebrated isolation. Gordon, biographer of Virginia Woolf and Mary Wollstonecraft, also recounts the fallout from the affair between the poet's straitlaced, married brother, Austin, and the far younger, also married Mabel Loomis Todd. In a literary land grab, descendants of the families of Dickinson and Todd (who edited many of Emily's papers) squared off in a fight to control the poet's work and myth. Although deciphering Emily Dickinson's mysterious personality is like trying to catch a ghost, this startling biography explains quite a lot. 16 pages of b&w photos; 2 maps. (June 14)

Original Gangster: The Real Life Story of One of America's Most Notorious Drug Lords Frank Lucas with Aliya S. King. St. Martin's, $25.99 (320p) ISBN 978-0-312-54489-8

From a sharecropper's shack in North Carolina to the top of Harlem's drug trade, Lucas recounts his eventful life in vivid detail. After witnessing his cousin's murder by the Klan in 1936, Lucas began stealing food for his family at age six, graduated to assault and robbery, and made his way to Harlem in 1944 at age 14. Smart and ruthless, he became the right-hand man of notorious gangster Bumpy Johnson, who controlled numbers rackets around the city. After Johnson's death in 1968, Lucas began his drug empire. He cut out the middleman (importing from Southeast Asia a heroin so pure it was nicknamed “Blue Magic”). Law enforcement finally caught up with him in 1975. Sentenced to 40 years, Lucas only served six after agreeing to identify some crooked cops. Lucas finally told his story to a journalist and in 2007 the movie American Gangster, based on his life, was released. With journalist King's aid, Lucas is a straightforward yet compelling narrator, never making excuses for his life of crime, though he has come to regret it. 8 pages of color photos. (June)

Captive: My Time as a Prisoner of the Taliban Jere Van Dyk. Times, $25 (288p) ISBN 978-0-8050-8827-4

An American journalist exploring the war zone on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border reports unwanted lessons in its perils in this harrowing memoir. Having traveled with the “freedom fighters” in the '80s, Van Dyk thought he had the connections and knowledge to navigate the tribal lands between Pakistan and Afghanistan, but he was captured by a fractious band of Taliban fighters in 2008. Van Dyk (In Afghanistan: An American Odyssey) and his Afghan guides spent 44 days in a dark cell. Well-fed but terrified, he felt a nightmare of helplessness and disorientation. Dependent on a jailer who mixed solicitude with jocular death threats and a ruthless Taliban commander who could free or kill him on a whim, the author performed Muslim prayers in an attempt to appease his captors; wary of murky conspiracies involving his cellmates, he “was afraid of everybody, including the children.” Van Dyk's claustrophobic narrative jettisons journalistic detachment and views his ordeal through the distorting emotions of fear, shame, and self-pity. But in telling his story this way, he brings us viscerally into the mental universe of the Taliban, where paranoia and fanaticism reign, and survival requires currying favor with powerful men. The result is a gripping tale of endurance and a vivid evocation of Afghanistan's grim realities. 1 map. (June 22)

Lincoln and McClellan: The Troubled Partnership Between a President and His General John C. Waugh. Palgrave Macmillan, $27 (272p) ISBN 978-0-230-61349-2

In this enjoyable study of Civil War leadership, Waugh (Reelecting Lincoln) has less to say about the oft-analyzed Lincoln than about Gen. George McClellan, the war's great military failure. Hailed as the Union's savior when he took command of the Army of the Potomac in 1861, McClellan was a brilliant organizer and strategist with just one flaw: he was afraid to fight. Desperate for excuses to avoid battle, he habitually overestimated Confederate numbers by a factor of three, issued incessant demands for reinforcements—his army always heavily outnumbered the rebels—and once refused to march for weeks because the horses were tired. Though the author's accounts of McClellan's battles are sketchy, he convincingly paints McClellan as a paranoid narcissist who considered Lincoln a “baboon.” Waugh's Lincoln is a long-suffering sage (lacking better generals, he could only prod McClellan to action while shielding him from critics) whose barbs are more penetrating: surveying the Union army's vast encampment, Lincoln called it “McClellan's body guard.” The dynamic between Lincoln and the toweringly neurotic McClellan makes for a revealing case study of the importance of personality and character in war. 8 pages of b&w photos. (June)

The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America Stefanie Syman. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27 (400p) ISBN 978-0-374-23676-2

Yoga conquers America—and is conquered in its turn—in this labyrinthine cultural history. Journalist Syman traces American enthusiasm for yoga back to Thoreau and follows it through cycles of waxing and waning popularity: it was decried by Victorians for its association with madness and tantric sex rituals, celebrated in the 1960s for its association with altered states of consciousness (and tantric sex rituals), and ubiquitously embraced in the 21st century as a wholesome, anodyne exercise program. The author argues that, even as the om-chanting adept became the embodiment of spirituality, yoga's mainstreaming risked the discipline losing its rich spiritual content, along with the more extreme contortions, regular enemas, and whatever else Americans considered off-putting. Unfortunately, the author's attempts to clarify yoga's spiritual content, which is multifarious and intractably murky, don't always succeed, and sometimes the narrative bogs down amid barnstorming swamis and their squabbling sects. When she pulls back to view the culture mashup yoga has become—“a cure for back pain, a beauty regime, and a route to God”—she gives a cogent, engrossing analysis of this Asian-born spiritual practice turned all-American panacea. 8 pages of b&w illus. (June)

The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman's Journey to Love and Islam G. Willow Wilson. Atlantic Monthly, $24 (272p) ISBN 978-0-8021-1887-5

In this satisfying, lyrical memoir of a potentially disastrous clash between East and West, a Boulder native and Boston University graduate found an unlikely fit living in Cairo, Egypt, and converting to Islam. Wilson embarked on a yearlong stint working at an English-language high school in Cairo right after her college graduation in 2003. She had already decided that of the three Abrahamic religions, Islam fulfilled her need for a monotheistic truth, even though her school did not include instruction in the Qur'an because “it angered students and put everybody at risk.” Once in Cairo, despite being exposed to the smoldering hostility Arab men held for Americans, especially for women, she found she was moved deeply by the daily plight of the people to scratch out a living in this dusty police state tottering on the edge of “moral and financial collapse”; she and her roommate, barely eating because they did not know how to buy food, were saved by Omar, an educated, English-speaking physics teacher at the school. Through her deepening relationship with Omar, she also learned Arabic and embraced the ways Islam was woven into the daily fabric of existence, such as the rituals of Ramadan and Friday prayers at the mosque. Arguably, Wilson's decision to take up the headscarf and champion the segregated, protected status of Arab women can be viewed as odd; however, her work proves a tremendously heartfelt, healing cross-cultural fusion. (June)

Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the American Woman Sam Wasson. Harper Studio, $19.99 (256p) ISBN 978-0-06-177415-7

Wasson, who wrote on the career of writer-director Blake Edwards in A Splurch in the Kisser, tightens his focus for a closeup of Edwards's memorable Breakfast at Tiffany's, which received five Oscar nominations (with two wins). Interviewing Edwards and others, he skillfully interweaves key events during the making of this cinema classic. He begins (and ends) with Truman Capote, whose novel was initially regarded as unadaptable by the producers, since they “hadn't the faintest idea how the hell they were going to take a novel with no second act, a nameless gay protagonist, a motiveless drama, and an unhappy ending and turn it into a Hollywood movie.” The flow of Wasson's words carries the reader from pre-production to on-set feuds and conflicts, while also noting Hepburn's impact on fashion (Givenchy's little black dress), Hollywood glamour, sexual politics, and the new morality. Always stingy with praise, Capote dismissed the finished film as a “mawkish valentine to New York City,” but one feels he would have been entranced by Wasson's prismatic approach as he walks “a perilous path between the analytic interpretation and the imaginative one.” The result deserves Capote's “nonfiction novel” label. Recapturing an era, this evocative “factual re-creation” reads like carefully crafted fiction. (June)

The Flying Carpet of Small Miracles: A Woman's Fight to Save Two Orphans Hala Jaber. Riverhead, $25.95 (288p) ISBN 978-1-59448-867-2

Lebanese journalist Jabber covered the U.S. invasion of Baghdad for the Sunday Telegraph along with her husband, British photographer Steve Bent. Western educated, Arabic speaking and Muslim, Jaber brings a special perspective to the Iraq War, focusing on the lives of ordinary citizens, especially women, and the story soars as she captures the mood of the city waiting for the inevitable bombs: “the joyous frequency of wedding celebrations... showed that Baghdadis sensed sorrow might not be far away.” In the midst of a city torn by sectarian violence, Jaber is instructed to find a poster child for a London charity campaign, specifically a wounded girl, between one and five, whose parents had died and whose face was unscathed. Going from hospital to hospital, she meets her destiny in a three and a half year old terribly burned girl, Zahra, who with her infant sister, Hawra, are the only survivors of a bomb that killed her entire family. Jaber uses the war and these children to frame her personal sadness at not being able to conceive her own children, and the essence is an unusual portrait of a successful professional woman who gets close enough to her subjects to question her life and her choices. (June)

Zilch: The Power of Zero in Business Nancy Lublin. Portfolio, $25.95 (256p) ISBN 978-1-591-84314-6

Lublin, CEO of the youth volunteering organization Do Something and founder of Dress for Success, shows organizations how to get more done with less of everything, especially money and personnel, while keeping innovation, passion, and creativity high. Sharing insightful stories and strategies from her own experiences and from stars in the not-for-profit world such as Billy Shore from Share Our Strength, Wendy Kopp from Teach for America, and John Lilly from Mozilla, she debunks the most prevalent myth in business today—that salary drives great performance and stellar productivity. She proposes that companies broaden their rewards and their understanding of compensation so that people become deeply motivated to excel and offers techniques for extracting the best from people including creating a stimulating workplace, offering skill development, and doling out titles liberally. She also shares advice on branding, doing more for customers, stretching finances, and more. Concluding each chapter with 11 questions to prompt creativity in specific areas, she propels readers on the road to positive change. Inspiring, wise, and eminently practical, this book distills the best practices that any company—private or public—can adopt, and that no leader should be without. (June)

The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa Sasha Polakow-Suransky. Pantheon, $27.95 (336p) ISBN 978-0-375-42546-2

During the mid-1950s, the young state of Israel built diplomatic ties to postcolonial African nations on their common histories of oppression. But by 1987, Israel's alliances on the continent had completely changed—despite international sanctions, Israel maintained a close and covert relationship with South Africa; their military trade kept the Israeli economy vital and buttressed the faltering apartheid government. With recently declassified documents, Polakow-Suransky, an editor at Foreign Affairs, offers an important, provocative, and occasionally disturbing analysis of this clandestine alliance. He identifies two wars as decisive turning points in Israeli—South African relations. The 1967 Six-Day War and Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories alienated former friends and won it new enemies; and the 1973 Yom Kippur War left the economy “in shambles,” and created a powerful incentive for Israel to export arms to and cultivate its relations with the South African government. The author concludes his smart and readable study with a charged epilogue in which he writes that, as evinced by its policies towards Palestinians, Israel itself “risks remaking itself in the image of the old apartheid state.” (June)

Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America's Future Stephen Kinzer. Times, $26 (272p) ISBN 978-0-8050-9127-4

Kinzer (Overthrow), columnist at the Guardian, takes an iconoclastic approach in this smart policy prescriptive that calls for elemental changes in America's relationships with Israel and Saudi Arabia, and even more remarkably, for the U.S. to find more sensible and natural allies in Turkey and Iran, “the only Muslim countries in the Middle East where democracy is deeply rooted.” This “radical break from diplomatic convention” has its roots deep in the cold war history that Kinzer spends most of the book attentively mining. When he's corralling Middle Eastern history, Kinzer does an excellent job at stitching essential facts into a coherent and telling whole, demonstrating why, for instance, Turkey's recent return to greater religiosity is a victory against “Islamist policies” and how Israel's willingness to do America's dirty work (e.g., selling arms to Guatemala's military regime) tied the U.S. to Israel and Saudi Arabia so powerfully in the past. He's less successful in analysis, though, and is prone to repetition; this astute book builds toward convincing new ideas, but doesn't provide the necessary scaffolding to hold them up. (June)

Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race Thomas Sugrue. Princeton Univ., $24.95 (176p) ISBN 978-0-691-13730-8

Distinguished civil rights historian and sociologist Sugrue (Sweet Land of Liberty) follows Barack Obama's intellectual journey and political education from his student years in the late 1970s through his first years as president, offering an insightful and fresh glimpse of Obama through three lenses—as intellectual, politician, and policy maker—and with three essays. While David Remnick's comprehensive The Bridge bears thematic similarities, Sugrue offers a pithy and readable survey of some of the same terrain—the path that “rooted the rootless Hawaiian in the history of the Southern freedom struggle” and the formation of his politics that favored “reconciliation over confrontation.” Sugrue addresses Obama's Chicago years and the evolution of his thinking on class. And the final essay assesses Obama as candidate and president. Particularly noteworthy is Sugrue's attention to Obama's post—Jeremiah Wright controversy speech in 2008 (“the most learned disquisition on race from a major political figure ever”) and a splendid illumination of the roles played by books (particularly the work of William Julius Wilson), by mentors (political and clerical), and by family (especially Michelle Obama's) in Obama's ascent. (June)

The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World David Kirkpatrick. Simon & Schuster, $26 (354p) ISBN 978-1-4391-0211-4

There's never been a Web site like Facebook: more than 350 million people have accounts, and if the growth rate continues, by 2013 every Internet user worldwide will have his or her own page. And no one's had more access to the inner workings of the phenomenon than Kirkpatrick, a senior tech writer at Fortune magazine. Written with the full cooperation of founder Mark Zuckerberg, the book follows the company from its genesis in a Harvard dorm room through its successes over Friendster and MySpace, the expansion of the user base, and Zuckerberg's refusal to sell. The author is at his best discussing the social implications of the site, from the changing notions of privacy to why and how people use Facebook—increasingly it's to come together around a common interest or cause (the eponymous “Facebook Effect”). Though significantly more informative, thoughtful, and credible than Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires, it may be hamstrung by its late entry; the furor over Facebook has more or less subsided, and potential readers are more likely to be using the site than to be reading about its origins. (June)

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose Tony Hsieh. Business Plus, $23.99 (272p) ISBN 978-0-446-56304-8

Zappos CEO Hsieh offers a compelling account of his transformation from callow Harvard student entrepreneur through his years as a dot-com wunderkind to the creator of a formidable brand. Interest might flag as Hsieh, fresh off selling his Internet company LinkExchange to Yahoo in 1999 for $265 million, kvetches about lacking fulfillment. But as the tech boom bursts, and Hsieh confronts his dwindling investments, his story comes alive. As the funding for his incubator companies dries up and one of his most promising startups, Zappos.com, a shoe retailer, seems doomed, Hsieh blossoms into a mature businessperson, slashing expenses and presciently making customer service the essence of the company's brand. The story becomes suspenseful as Hsieh recounts the stress of operating in survival mode, liquidating his assets to fund the company in its darkest days and seeking out an 11th-hour loan. By the time Zappos is acquired by Amazon for more than $1.2 billion in 2009, Hsieh and his team had built a unique corporate culture dedicated to employee empowerment and the promise of delivering happiness though satisfied customers and a valued workforce. An uplifting tale of entrepreneurial success, personal growth, and redemption. (June)

Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation Stuart Buck. Yale Univ., $27.50 (272p) ISBN 978-0-300-12391-3

Buck, Arkansas University doctoral fellow in education reform, enters the black-white achievement gap debate with a review of anti-academic attitudes among some black students, who dub school achievement as “acting white”; he finds its roots in “what was lost when schools were desegregated.” Buck fears misinterpretation (“no one should read this section as suggesting that we should go back to segregated schools”) as he delineates the costs of losing the schools as community centers, the concomitant loss of black teachers and principals as “academic role models,” and the detachment of black parents and students. “Desegregation,” he argues, then “set the stage for the 'acting white' criticism to emerge in the school setting,” as black students met hostile receptions from white students and teachers. Buck's proposed solutions are implausible—and almost risible: one, since “humans are tribal,” some students should be in “an all-black environment that includes black teachers and principals,” the other to replace individual grades with “regular interschool competitions, supplemented by small rewards for winners on a group basis.” Overstuffed with evidence showing he “examined literally thousands of sources over the past several years,” the result is a repetitive mélange of education philosophy and anecdotal history. (June)

Lifestyle

Food

Mayumi's Kitchen: Macrobiotic Cooking for Body and Soul Mayumi Nishimura, foreword by Madonna, photos by Akira Saito. Kodansha International, $29.95 (160p) ISBN 978-4-7700-3110-5

The concept of following a macrobiotic diet might sound daunting, but Nishimura—who worked as Madonna's private chef for seven years (and had her former boss write a foreword for this book)—breaks it down into simple, can-do steps and recipes. She suggests kicking things off with a 10-day detox diet, which includes such macrobiotic staples as soft-cooked brown rice, miso soup with shiitake mushrooms and herbs, and udon salad. She demystifies exotic ingredients like mochi and hijiki, and saves work for followers of the detox plan by precisely explaining how to use leftovers. After the detox diet, there are straightforward meal-planning tips and dozens more recipes, including wild arugula and artichoke heart salad; creamy potato and leek soup; sea bass with green lentils; pan-fried fish cakes with tofu tartar sauce; and almond jewel cookies. And Nishimura's menus for specific goals—beautiful skin, weight loss, and muscle building—guide readers to the foods that work best for their needs. (June)

Ribs, Chops, Steaks & Wings Ray Lampe. Chronicle, $19.95 (132p) ISBN 978-0-8118-6826-6

Lampe is nothing if not media savvy. Under his nom de flame, Dr. BBQ, he shows up regularly on the Food Network, runs his own Web site, judges cook-offs, serves as spokesman for the National Pork Board, and has now written his sixth cookbook. If his offerings do not quite get the salivary juices flowing, they are at least a straightforward affair, 44 handy recipes to turn to when wanting to stray a bit from traditional tailgate grill grub. Fruits and sweet sauces are the good doctor's two favorite prescriptions. Ribs are treated with apricot glaze or pineapple teriyaki. Pork chops are dosed with maple syrup or peach salsa. Steaks are marinated in citrus and soy sauce, and chicken wings are served with raspberry-honey mustard. Dry rubs are what the doctor orders for Memphis ribs, coffee-rubbed pork chops, chili-rubbed rib eyes, and dry-rubbed wings. And while his peanut butter and jelly chicken wings could use a second opinion, there's no doubting the benefits of a filet mignon stuffed with blue cheese or the curing powers of pork chops marinated overnight in bourbon. (June)

Farm to Fork Emeril Lagasse. Harper Studio, $24.99 (336p) ISBN 978-0-06-174295-8

Ignore the labored title and forgive his first sentence, “I have had a connection with the soil since I was a young boy.” This is simply another of Lagasse's highly competent creations, full of flavorful recipes presented with simplicity and minimal chitchat. The third in a 10-book series ordered up by Harper Studio back in 2008, the celebrity chef this time goes green, with a focus on using fresh, local ingredients. This collection focuses on fruits, vegetables, grains, dairy, and seafood, with just a little poultry and pork thrown in for good measure. Chapters are broken out as if dividing up a garden. Corn, beans, and squash over here; broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower over there. Leafy greens, root vegetables, and orchard fruits all get their due, with space left for winter fruits and nightshades. Among the 152 offerings, one can dish up lemon-scented blueberry pancakes for breakfast; Emeril's roasted beet salad, along with perhaps an eggplant relish crostini for lunch; and a dinner of, say, creamy turnip soup, braised broccoli rabe, and gumbo with smoked ham and wild rice. Dessert choices include pumpkin custard pie and apricot clafouti. Wash it all down with some watermelon limeade or enjoy a nightcap after the nightshades, like a pink lady apple martini. (June)

Planet Barbecue! Steven Raichlen. Workman, $20.95 paper (768p) ISBN 978-0-7611-4801-2

Barbecue cookbooks are often large; every Raichlen barbecue cookbook is large in its own way. Reaching beyond the scope of his BBQ USA (425 recipes in 784 pages) and the 10th edition of his Barbecue! Bible (500 recipes in 556 pages), this Tolstoy of Tabasco traveled the globe thrice, stopping everywhere he could think of in search of the next great dinner. Six continents, 53 countries, and 275 recipes later, there is grilled crocodile with garlic walnut lime sauce from Kenya, and Singaporean grilled pork belly. There is Kuwaiti chili shrimp, and kangaroo kebabs from you know where. Each country gets a two-page profile, which lists the types of grills and fuels most common to the region, dishes that are a must if you happen to be in the neighborhood, as well as what traditional condiments one might expect to find on one's beef, fish, pork, or vegetables. There are also profiles of various “Fire Starters,” grill masters he has met on his voyage such as Madam Djan and Miss Panin, the grilled fish divas of Laos. The chapters are arranged by meat rather than point of origin, so the Serbian bacon-grilled prunes are seated next to the jalapeño poppers, and Laotian grilled fish sits next to Canadian trout grilled on a log. (May)

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