Shoot-from-the-lip remarks abound as long-serving Mafia lawyer and former Las Vegas mayor Goodman delivers a fast-paced, entertaining account of his over-the-top life. The son of a Philadelphia attorney, Goodman entered the legal profession and spent 35 years defending some of organized crime's biggest names. As though that weren't enough excitement for one lifetime, in 1999 he was elected mayor of Las Vegas and served three terms (presently his wife holds the job). Stemming from his philosophy to "never back down," his courtroom antics were well known and his contention that many law enforcers shirk their duty created a contentious relationship with the FBI. Goodman defend-ed the infamous gangster Tony Spilotro numerous times, describing him as "fearless, honorable to a fault with me," and says Spilotro never complained about the hand he was dealt. As mayor Goodman worked tirelessly to revitalize the city center and here addresses his controversial support of regulated and legalized prostitution. Though Goodman's ego comes through on the page, the man brims with charm and humor. (June)

Reviewed on 05/24/2013 | Details & Permalink

In this charming ramble, Peacock (Grizzly Years) distills his decades as a "wandering naturalist" into tales of wilderness adventures, ruminations on the geological history, and conjecture regarding the emergence of homo sapiens in North America. Acknowledging the scarcity of available scientific data, he catalogues up-to-date archeological information and situates the various theories of human migra-tion from Eurasia. Peacock is most interested in contemplating the ways early North Americans coped with the dangerous megafauna of the era, and a childhood fascination with sifting for arrowheads dovetails nicely with sections dedicated to the development of the Clovis Point, a spear tip capable of piercing mammoth hides. Although well-studied, this is not an anthropology lecture. Instead, Peacock draws extensively on experiences as hunter and hunted in Montana and the Arctic, and takes us on an Inuit polar bear hunt and a trek through the waterless Sonoran desert. Interspersed with journal notes, memories of unmapped journeys, and an imagined day in the life of the first Americans, Peacock makes his case for preserving the land that reminds humans of our insignificance in the face of nature. (June)

Reviewed on 05/24/2013 | Details & Permalink

Hoyland, a longtime climber and BBC filmmaker, has spent much of his career sorting through details of the 1924 Mount Everest trek that took the lives of fellow Britons George Mallory and Sandy Irvine. In this adventure-filled volume, Hoyland sets out to convey "a personal story, a detective thriller, a biography and a history book." He recalls his own growing interest in mountaineering and early affini-ty for Everest, where "the extremes of human experience played out in the most dramatic surround-ings." Hoyland meticulously re-creates Mallory and Irvine's ill-fated climb, describing the work they did ahead of time, the equipment they used, and the clothes they wore. "His upper layers started with a silk wool vest next to the skin, then a beige silk shirt, a Shetland-wool pullover, then another silk shirt, green this time, then a flannel shirt." Readers will appreciate the background Hoyland provides on surveying techniques, British love for alpinism (a leisure activity for many beneficiaries of the Indus-trial Revolution), and the motivations behind many major ascents. This is a thorough investigation into Mallory and Irvine's 1924 climb and an engaging look at the psychology that draws us to our planet's highest peak. (June)

Reviewed on 05/24/2013 | Details & Permalink

Though difficult to believe, until now there has never been a single-volume collection of true-life narratives from Africa's great, historical figures. This fact could explain Wisner's apparent exuberance in trying to cram as many entries as possible into this remarkable book. Organized by geography, the wide variety of selections includes the world travels of 14th-century Moroccan Ibn Battuta, the court testimony of anti-Apartheid activist Steven Biko, the distant memories of a young Algerian boy's first encounter with a foreigner, and a Maasai warrior's initiation into manhood. The stories range from bit-tersweet to violent, wistful to seductive, leaving a deep emotional impression. Wisner (A Basket of Leaves) does not create any artificial hierarchies of relative importance between his entries, whether the "first biography of an Arab woman ever written" or the memoir of a South African Nobel Peace Prize winner. If there's a criticism to be leveled here, it is with the brevity of each selection due the wide net Wisner chose to cast. Nevertheless, this volume is full of memorable anecdotes and images right through the final entry. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 05/24/2013 | Details & Permalink

Hamblin (Poison in the Well) takes advantage of the Freedom of Information Act and thorough re-search to produce this chilling and cynical study of post-WWII collusion between scientists and the military to create alternative weapons of mass destruction: famine, plague, pestilence, drought, and earthquake. The Cold War paranoia that swept the world made the possibility of biological warfare a real fear: some governments believed that the virtue of using pathogens to decimate a country's popu-lation and economy was that "this could be done without declaring war." This obsession with prepar-ing for and protecting against total war led nations to join in global monitoring of the atmosphere, and Hamblin notes that in the International Geophysical Year of 1957 "humans were carrying out a major experiment on the earth." Among the plans considered was the melting of the polar ice cap to turn pen-insulas into islands. Hamblin reads Richard Nixon's support of a ban on biological weapons as an as-tute diversion from the efficacy of nuclear weapons and concludes that "when every problem is treated as a global crisis, real global crises are easily ignored." His dark review of recent history offers an un-settling theory of how close we have already come to total destruction. (May)

Reviewed on 05/24/2013 | Details & Permalink

For those who equate sustainability with "an LED light bulb, hybrid car or LEED certified green building," Ehrenfeld (Sustainability by Design) gives an earful. Alongside former student Hoffman, he tackles the notion of sustainability in three parts: what's wrong with current assumptions about it, what to do about it, and what the future holds. For Ehrenfeld, neither companies nor governments actually deliver sustainability and he goes so far as to reject the word itself in favor of "flourishing," defined as "not only to grow, but to grow well, to prosper, to thrive, to live to the fullest." He calls for a complete over-throw of how individuals consume and how the system we live in relates to the natural world: small steps like "greening" that pass for sustainability actually create a false sense of doing good when far more radical solutions are required. Brilliant as Ehrenfeld is, his disdain for any ecological baby-steps can leave readers frustrated; corporations must shrink their global footprint in a capitalistic mod-el that encourages them to increase it. Short of full global revolution, the consumer is left with little to hope for and far less to do. (May)

Reviewed on 05/24/2013 | Details & Permalink

Anthropology professor King (Being with Animals) shares facts, anecdotes, and thoughts about rela-tionships throughout the animal kingdom, from birds that return to each other year after year to a baby elephant that mourns its mother. King defines the conditions necessary for animal love to include ani-mals actively choosing to be together and the suffering of the animal when its partner is no longer pre-sent. When these conditions are met, "Grief blooms because two animals bond, they care, maybe they even love—because of a heart's certainty that another's presence is as necessary as air." King's thoughtful, warmhearted prose will raise awareness and amaze readers as they learn about a dog who rescued his canine companion from being buried alive; a baboon's stages of grief and apparent depres-sion following the loss of her adult daughter; and a dolphin that committed suicide, witnessed by her trainer. Though many observations support the concept of grief among animals, King also discusses situations that do not indicate grief and concludes that, though it may be an individual behavior, its significance is not diminished for those mournful individuals. As for humans, "We grieve with human words but animal bodies and animal gestures and animal movements." (May)

Reviewed on 05/24/2013 | Details & Permalink

Longtime Field & Stream contributor Heavey leads a delightful romp through the backwoods and front yards of the D.C. Beltway area as he tries to eat wild. He notes that his adventure "was anything but radical. For most of our history, eating wild was what people did." Heavey's no expert, and read-ing about his stumbles through harvesting a salad from his lawn or learning to gut perch ("It looked like the bedroom scene from Macbeth") is surprisingly both amusing and touching. Perhaps this is be-cause Heavey has a gift for capturing the people around him: his skeptical young daughter; his ex-tremely competent foodie girlfriend; and especially his friend Paula, a live-off-the-land expert and "about as eccentric as you could get and still be on the right side of crazy," who takes him to harvest sour cherries right in the middle of the nation's capital. Heavey doesn't shy away from the potentially off-putting extremes of locavore living: he hunts, fishes, and even catches frogs, and his book is en-gaging, thoughtful, and truly funny. (May)

Reviewed on 05/24/2013 | Details & Permalink

Mandler—whose volume The English National Character was a study of a nation from within—here examines Margaret Mead, who is notable for making a career of studying human culture from the out-side. Mead began exploring the natives of New Guinea with a mind towards child rearing, and at-tempted to use social anthropology to illuminate cultures for political and military use in WWII. As the war expanded she became convinced that anthropology could sit central to government actions. And from 1941-1950 it did. However, as WWII gave way to the Cold War, anthropology's insistence on no one culture being better than another was looked at as soft on Communism. Mandler attempts to rescue Mead's post-WWII period of study from failure and the author's premise, that Mead "won" WWII but "lost" the Cold War, is one that Mead herself believed and discussed openly. She managed to get her field into the central halls of U.S. policy, but found the constraints lacking. Balancing the real work of studying culture while pleasing politicians proved untenable and Mead settled on being a cultural critic in her home country, but Mandler concludes this may have been for the best. (May)

Reviewed on 05/24/2013 | Details & Permalink

Americans have been sold a bill of goods on the rationale for detaining "unlawful combatants" at the Guantanamo prison facility according to this probing study. Hickman, associate professor of govern-ment at Berry College, makes a bold case that official Washington keeps the majority of these men imprisoned as pawns in an ongoing propaganda war manufactured for domestic consumption. He con-tends that these prisoners are not terror-plot participants, but insignificant minnows swept up in the chaos of war. Hickman sees three "alternative explanations" for Guantanamo: using prisoner transfers as a way to declare victory in Afghanistan in order to focus on Iraq, to punish these prisoners as stand-ins for more senior al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives, and to telegraph the dawn of a neoconservative U.S. foreign policy that operates with little consideration for constitutional protections or international agreements like the Geneva Convention. Given these ferocious assessments, his critique of Barack Obama's continuation of Bush-era detainment policies is surprisingly muted. Confronted by the lack of public outrage from journalists, filmmakers, and others well-positioned to speak out on the issue, Hickman (Reopening the Space Frontier) concludes that future American presidents will have a firmer foundation from which to dupe the public into going along with dubious detention policies. (May)

Reviewed on 05/24/2013 | Details & Permalink