Book Review

Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art Out of Desperate Times
By Susan Quinn
Walker, 325 pages, $25.99

Imagine a country where the president uses the full faith and credit of the government to put people to work in hard times. Imagine a country where artists are not regarded as expendable froufrou, or as dangerous provocateurs, but as crucial contributors to a nation’s psychological and moral health.

Imagine, then, a country like the United States in 1935, when desperation impelled a government to do things that no American government would do today no matter how desperate.

Susan Quinn’s Furious Improvisation—a great title for an excellent book, a model of narrative history—tells the story of the Federal Theatre Project, an offshoot of F.  read more »

How Fiction Works
By James Wood
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 265 pages, $24

James Wood is in relax mode. That doesn’t mean he’s lost his edge, or that he can’t get excited—enthusiasm is still his best party trick: He gushes like Old Faithful. But these days he’s got nothing left to prove, no one to elbow out of the way. He’s the undisputed champ. If the poet laureate had a critic laureate to keep her company, James Wood would be he—why else would Harvard have appointed him professor of the practice of literary criticism? Why else would The New Yorker have poached him last year from The New Republic?

Of course, he still needs an audience—readers willing to read about reading and writing—and perhaps relax mode is Mr.  read more »

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes
By Jim Holt
W. W. Norton, 160 pages, $15.95

The eponymous shaggy-dog story is about a boy who enters his dog into a local "shaggy-dog contest." When the dog wins, the boy enters him into a larger regional contest, and then, when the dog wins that one, too, into still another, until finally, after a tortuously narrated series of trials and triumphs, the dog makes it into the quadrennial World Shaggy Dog contest—which he loses badly, prompting the boy to remark, "Well, maybe he wasn’t so shaggy."

Depending on how it’s delivered, a shaggy-dog joke can be either a cruel prank at the listener’s expense, or a sort of joyous exercise in silliness, in which the punch line, a joke’s nominal destination, serves only as a pretext for the journey.  read more »

Central Park in the Dark: More Mysteries of Urban Wildlife
By Marie Winn
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 295 pages, $25

Ten years ago, Wall Street Journal reporter Marie Winn told the story of her enchantment with a pair of red-tailed hawks nesting on the ledge of a tony Fifth Avenue co-op in clear view of the Central Park boat pond. Ecstatic birdwatchers kept vigil, generously offering use of their expensive-looking binoculars to all who passed. The story had legs (wings?) and her book, Red-Tails in Love, was a hit. Aside from making Pale Male and Lola (as they were dubbed) into posterbirds for the resurgence of New York’s long-depressed hawk population, Red-Tails did something akin to setting down an oral tradition for the first time.  read more »

Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction
By Lisa Chamberlain
Da Capo, 212 pages, $25

In Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction, Lisa Chamberlain examines the changing cultural and economic landscape that has defined—and been defined by—Generation X’s reluctant, late-onset adulthood. The elusive subtitle is the first hint of the economic vagueness to come. (After 188 pages I was still unsure of the precise meaning of "creative destruction," which—and I am frantically thumbing through my copy of the book here—was used by the economist Joseph Schumpeter to refer to the process by which a capitalist economy constantly destroys and reinvents itself.  read more »

Live from the Campaign Trail: The Greatest Presidential Campaign Speeches of the Twentieth Century and How they Shaped Modern America
By Michael A. Cohen
Walker & Company, 562 pages, $16.99

When Barack Obama accepts the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, he will deliver his speech the way John F. Kennedy did in 1960: in a stadium.

The image of a stadium full of people waiting to hear a speech—a political speech, no less—underscores a somewhat overlooked aspect of the American scene: Speeches matter. In a day when comments muttered into an open microphone, or a distasteful joke captured on YouTube (macaca!) can alter the course of a campaign, it’s still the vision and policies outlined in speeches that shape our political landscape.  read more »

OUTLAW JOURNALIST: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HUNTER S. THOMPSON
By William McKeen
W. W. Norton, 448 pages, $27.95

More than any other American writer in recent memory, Hunter S. Thompson demonstrated that, yes, sometimes the road of excess does lead to the palace of wisdom—just before it dead-ends at the cul-de-sac of regret. After a stunning, swift period of brilliance, his style, as the old joke goes, became substance abuse; it was seductive, it was fun, and for the type of person who confuses a drinking problem with literary talent, it was intoxicating. But as even the most casual observer knows, the persona soon eclipsed the writing.  read more »

THE DARK SIDE: THE INSIDE STORY OF HOW THE WAR ON TERROR TURNED INTO A WAR ON AMERICAN IDEALS
By Jane Mayer
Doubleday, 392 pages, $27.50

In the autumn of 2000, I was visiting the United States and watched the televised debates with keen interest. Of the four men—two presidential candidates and two running mates—the one I really took to was Dick Cheney. Maybe the competition wasn’t so strong, what with the inarticulate George W. Bush, the well-meaning but wooden Al Gore and the smirking Joe Lieberman. By contrast, Mr. Cheney seemed relaxed, bien dans sa peau, with a faraway smile playing on his lips as if to say, You mean you’ve just discovered that America is a plutocracy? Tell me about it!

What a long time eight years can seem: We have since been disabused of many illusions.  read more »

ELECTING FDR: THE NEW DEAL CAMPAIGN OF 1932
By Donald A. Ritchie
University Press of Kansas, 274 pages, $29.95

It’s a presidential election year. The Republican incumbent is intensely unpopular. The Democrats are waging a tough fight for the nomination pitting an experienced New York politician against a candidate perceived as not tough enough to be president. Americans are frightened about the economy, and a new communications medium is being aggressively used for the first time by a presidential candidate.

I’m talking about 1932, not 2008.

Don’t think of it as ancient history. In his new book, Electing FDR, Donald Ritchie provides a meaningful lesson that today’s candidates should heed.  read more »

DECEMBER
By Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop
Alfred A. Knopf, 239 pages, $23.95

A chamber-piece in a minor key, Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop’s literally muted new novel introduces 11-year-old Isabelle Carter, who hasn’t spoken in nine months—"280 days," she reminds herself, since "February 29, not a real day, anyway, a day not to get out of bed, to eat, to drink, to speak." Wilson and Ruth, her well-to-do father and mother, have appealed to countless therapists, consulted manuals on autism and quarreled with school officials; after meticulously assessing Isabelle’s classroom performance, the principal complains that she’s been patient "to the max," an expression that would rightly alarm legions of Manhattan private-school parents.  read more »

THE BOTTOM OF THE HARBOR
By Joseph Mitchell
Pantheon, 293 pages, $23

Since almost as far back as the last World War, magazine writers in New York have been trying to sound like Joseph Mitchell, who would have been 100 years old this year. In honor of his centennial, Pantheon is releasing a new edition of The Bottom of the Harbor, a collection of Mitchell’s New Yorker pieces from the 1940s and ’50s that are all, in the words of the book’s author’s note, "connected in one way or another with the waterfront of New York City."

Mr. Mitchell writes about a restaurant in the old Fulton Fish Market, and its encyclopedic menu of things like shad roe and herring roe and mackerel roe and cod cheeks, and its proprietor, Louis Morino, and Morino’s hometown of Recco, Italy, and Morino’s reluctance to enter the disused upper stories of his restaurant building.  read more »

ARK OF THE LIBERTIES: AMERICA AND THE WORLD
By Ted Widmer
Hill and Wang, 355 pages, $25

Ted Widmer has carved out the kind of heroically peripatetic career in entertainment, politics and scholarship that gives young men hope and older men heartburn. Widmer? If the name doesn’t yet ring a bell, that could be because he’s had more than the average 44-year-old’s share of names.

Connoisseurs of high-concept mid-’90s glam metal know him as Lord Rockingham, dandy guitarist of the Upper Crust, a Boston band known for performing AC/DC-style anthems in powdered wigs and associated ancien régime regalia. (Their tongue-in-jowl celebrations of aristocracy include "Let them Eat Rock" and "Friend of a Friend of the Working Class.  read more »

DIRTY WORDS: A LITERARY ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SEX
Edited by Ellen Sussman
Bloomsbury, 291 pages, $19.99

I wasn’t a fan of Charles Bowden’s boozy, frantic examination of American life in his part-essay, part-memoir Blues for Cannibals: The Notes From Underground (2002). But I marked this passage, which has stayed with me over the years: "[L]ove is essential even if I do not know the words that give it flesh and scent. That is why we find it so difficult to write about sex. Not because we are so inhibited and prudish but because when we write about sex, we get acts and organs, a breast, a vagina, a cock, juices, tongues and thrusts—and wind up with recipes but no food.  read more »

SAVE THE MALES: WHY MEN MATTER
AND WOMEN SHOULD CARE
By Kathleen Parker
Random House, 215 pages, $26

In Save the Males, syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker defends that least likely of underdogs: the American Man. Parodied in pop culture, disenfranchised by the family courts, emasculated by Lamaze class and forced to endure crazy, empowered women "rhapsodizing about their vaginas and swooning over their inner goddesses," men today are raised in a culture that has turned against them, claims Ms. Parker.

Of course, she’s not the first to ride to the rescue: Susan Faludi’s Stiffed (2000) covered much of the same terrain—men’s broken psyches—without blaming it all on feminism.  read more »

BREACH OF PEACE: POTRAITS OF THE 1961 MISSISSIPPI FREEDOM RIDERS
By Eric Etheridge
Atlas & Co., 239 pages, $45

The slog was slow and messy, but the Democratic primary season at least left us with a handy object lesson in the principles and perils of proportional response. One suspects that for the Clinton and Obama shock troops alike, the defining episode will be the May 31 meeting of the DNC Rules & Bylaws Committee, one of the few chapters of late capitalist civic life deserving of the old 20th-century catch-all epithet "Kafkaesque."

There, stammering and shaking on the dais, was Harold Ickes—veteran of 1964’s Freedom Summer and namesake of F.  read more »

LAW AND THE LONG WAR: THE FUTURE OF JUSTICE IN THE AGE OF TERROR
By Benjamin Wittes
The Penguin Press, 305 pages, $25.95

This book’s importance rides on the accuracy of its titular assumptions. Are we now fighting "the long war"? If not, then Benjamin Wittes merely charts a sensible course for mopping up messes of George Bush’s making.

If, on the other hand, we really are living through "the age of terror," the book delivers a blueprint for salvaging both our security and the Constitution’s integrity in the face of towering legal dilemmas.

A Brookings Institution fellow and former Washington Post editorial writer, Mr.  read more »

A TIME TO FIGHT: RECLAIMING A FAIR AND JUST AMERICA
By Jim Webb
Broadway, 255 pages, $24.95

Jim Webb is often mentioned as a possible running mate for Barack Obama. As a former Republican, his presence would lend substance to Mr. Obama’s talk of bipartisanship; as a senator from red-trending-purple Virginia, he might give Democrats a chance to take some electoral votes from the Republican column. He’s for an expedited withdrawal from Iraq, but he has the same—if not more impressive—military bona fides than those we all thought would save John Kerry, and without the taint of careerism.

But the strongest argument for a Webb vice presidency is the entertaining possibility that he’d eventually break off and start his own republic.  read more »

GRAND NEW PARTY: HOW REPUBLICANS CAN WIN THE WORKING CLASS AND SAVE THE AMERICAN DREAM
By Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam
Doubleday, 244 pages, $23.95

To their immense credit, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, two dynamic young conservative thinkers, freely admit the comprehensive failure of George W. Bush’s so-called "compassionate conservatism." They acknowledge that the blue-collar voters who were supposed to benefit from his policies are feeling more beleaguered now than at any time since the recessionary 1970s. In Grand New Party, their intriguing outline for Republican revitalization, they don’t even bother trying to say something good about our 42nd president. (Efforts in that direction are making many of their colleagues sound as desperate as senators caught poking their feet beneath a toilet stall divider.  read more »

A ROMANCE ON THREE LEGS: GLENN GOULD'S OBSSESSIVE QUEST FOR THE PERFECT PIANO
By Katie Hafner
Bloomsbury, 259 pages, $24.99

More than 25 years after his death, the most iconic and extensively documented pianist of the last century continues to generate enormous curiosity, and no wonder. Glenn Gould is a biographer’s dream, with a career path as extraordinary as his many eccentricities, from extreme hypochondria—resulting in an aversion to shaking hands, and wearing coat, gloves and hat in the full heat of summer—to traveling with his comparatively ancient and battered Steinway and a low stool (a pygmy chair) that in time lost its upholstery, leaving Gould seated just on the wooden crossbar.  read more »

GAMEBOYS: PROFESSIONAL VIDEOGAMING'S RISE FROM THE BASEMENT TO THE BIG TIME
By Michael Kane
Viking Books, 288 pages, $24.95

Having read Michael Kane's Gameboys, I now know almost all there is to know about professional videogaming, certainly more than the average American and definitely more than I ever cared to know. Example: College dropouts can make up to $40,000 a year playing video games. That fact, depending on your disposition, is either a sure sign of America’s imminent demise or the advent of a technological golden age. Mr. Kane warmly endorses the latter view, and lays out a fairly persuasive argument over nearly 300 pages.  read more »

AMERICA AMERICA
By Ethan Canin
Random House, 458 pages, $27

America America. Terrible title, right? Grandiose and sentimental. (And Elia Kazan got there first.) That’s what I thought, too—but it’s grown on me, and now I see that it’s suitably ambitious for a novel about ambition, suitably redundant for a novel that takes as its twinned themes American capitalism and American politics, and suitably ambiguous (is it a boast or a lament?) for a bittersweet success story about an epic failure. Ethan Canin could hardly wish for higher praise than this: His big, carefully crafted novel earns the right to its name.

On a local level, America America is the story of Corey Sifter, a 16-year-old boy who in the spring of 1971 is hired to work on the estate of the vastly rich and powerful Metarey family.  read more »

THE TREMENDOUS WORLD I HAVE INSIDE MY HEAD: FRANZ KAFKA: A BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
By Louis Begley
Atlas & Co., 208 pages, $22

This year marks the bicentenary of Faust, Ian Fleming’s 100th birthday and, somewhat less tidily, 86 years since Franz Kafka abandoned his final novel. As anniversaries go, it isn’t especially momentous, but it has occasioned a splendid new Kafka retrospective from Louis Begley, the lapidary novelist whose eight works of fiction, among them Wartime Lies (1991) and About Schmidt (1996), signal a keen eye for detail and an abiding empathy for the underdog. Novelists routinely fumble when they try their inky hands at criticism (see: Amis, Martin), but Mr. Begley evinces some unusual biographical parallels with his subject: Both men were born to Jewish families in Eastern Europe (Kafka in Prague, Mr. Begley in Poland); both trained as lawyers; both would produce fiction pitting besieged heroes against the implacable forces of fate. And now, with clarity and good humor, Mr. Begley has assessed an icon of forbidding stature and infinite, infamous neurotic heft, and teased out a study as lively, lucid and flat-out enjoyable as any literary biography this year. Given Kafka’s legacy as a chronicler of "tortuous bureaucracy, crushing self-doubt, and unbearable inadequacy in the face of higher powers," this is no mean feat.  read more »

ACCIDENTALLY ON PURPOSE: A ONE-NIGHT STAND, MY UNPLANNED PARENTHOOD, AND LOVING THE BEST MISTAKE I EVER MADE
By Mary F. Pols
Ecco, 272 pages, $24.95

A few years ago, Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s book Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children sparked a media firestorm by arguing that many women end up husband-less and childless—and by extension miserable—because they’re too focused on their careers during their 20s; they put off husband-finding and baby-bearing until it’s too late.

I was 26 when that book came out, and what didn’t sound right to me was the implication that women in their 20s were too caught up in their careers to think much about dating or relationships. For better or for worse, it seemed to me that most women I knew, myself included, were very interested in dating. The women I’m talking about, fellow journalists for the most part, were by no means boy-crazy slackers. We worked long hours; many of us moved to faraway cities to advance our careers. Yet when my cell phone flashed with the number of one of my girlfriends late at night, not once did I think the caller was wracked with worry over an article she was writing. No, it was bound to be about relationship trouble or its inverse, loneliness, which might as well be called lack-of-relationship trouble.  read more »

FAREWELL NAVIGATOR
By Leni Zumas
Open City Books, 168 pages, $14

Open City Released a new book of stories last month. It’s called Farewell Navigator. It’s written by Leni Zumas. They’re not really stories. They’re also not gargoyles, but they’re more like gargoyles. They’re delicate tone poems that, however, center most often on the cruel, the disgusting or the sad.

This reviewer wonders whether that’s inevitable, whether stories (which are not stories) that are driven by the small-scale interplay of language, rather than by narrative traditionally conceived or by their broader conceits, will drift as a matter of necessity toward the flashy and the shocking. Must 50 brilliant sentences, constructed only as sentences, add up to one grotesque? There are only so many ways for a single sentence to be arresting.  read more »

BROCCOLI AND OTHER TALES OF FOOD AND LOVE
By Lara Vapnyar
Pantheon, 148 pages, $20

Lara Vapnyar doesn't write about particularly naughty food in her latest collection of stories, Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love. She’s no stereotype of an Oprah-watching food addict, mooning over pints of Ben & Jerry’s or sleeves of Oreos. Her European immigrants—from a homesick carpenter to two women in an ESL class—are grappling with culture shock in New York City through life-sustaining, almost bland food. Sprigs of broccoli. White asparagus. Purple beets. Boiled potatoes. No artificial colors or flavors. Ms. Vapnyar’s prose is just as authentic; it’s simple, charming, even witty.  read more »

WHILE THEY SLEPT: AN INQUIRY INTO THE MURDER OF A FAMILY
By Kathryn Harrison
Random House, 304 pages, $25

A transcript of a 911 call begins Kathryn Harrison’s While They Slept: An Inquiry into the Murder of a Family. It’s 1984, and 16-year-old Jody Gilley reports that her older brother, Billy, has murdered their abusive parents and 11-year-old sister with a baseball bat in the small town of Medford, Ore. This opening, and Ms. Harrison’s self-confessed "addiction" to true-crime stories, seems to augur an understated book of cold, hard facts. Instead, what we get is a dutifully exhaustive, though overwrought, account of a crime, filtered through the prism of Ms. Harrison’s own incestuous affair with her father.  read more »

NUDGE: IMPROVING DECISIONS ABOUT HEALTH, WEALTH AND HAPPINESS
By Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
Yale University Press, 293 pages, $26

SWAY: THE IRRESISTIBLE PULL OF IRRATIONAL BEHAVIOR
By Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman
Doubleday, 206 pages, $21.95

THE DRUNKARD'S WALK: HOW RANDOMNESS RULES OUR LIVES
By Leonard Mlodinow
Pantheon, 252 pages, $24.95

ABOUT 30 YEARS AGO, THE WORLD of economics took a zinging slap. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two Israeli psychologists, published a paper about how we actually make decisions, rather than how we should. If standard economic theory assumes that we’re perfect judges of our own best interests—that more choice leads to better choices, and the market corrects for flaws—these two academics found otherwise. After a series of experiments, they discovered that we’re bumblingly irrational actors: We hate losing more than we enjoy winning; emotion often trumps reason; and our decisions depend on how the options are framed. Essentially, at times we’re a little dumb.  read more »

WAR JOURNAL: MY FIVE YEARS IN IRAQ
By Richard Engel
Simon & Schuster, 377 pages, $28

For all its indictment of a foreign policy gone very, very wrong, Richard Engel’s memoir of the five years he spent reporting for NBC News in Iraq is surprisingly devoid of blame.

"Many of the mistakes in Iraq were made simply because people could get away with them scot-free," he writes, although he’s referring to the contractors and gangs and aspiring rulers on the ground in Iraq, not the Bush administration.  read more »

PERSONAL DAYS
By Ed Park
Random House, 241 pages, $13

I VOLUNTEERED TO REVIEW THIS novel by my former Village Voice co-worker Ed Park because I assumed the conflicts of interest would be so blatant they’d implode—a roman à clef, in which I myself might play a minor role, about the alt-weekly where I got fired the same day young Ed did. But it wasn’t that simple. If this is indeed a roman à clef, nobody gave me the key. Even when I was editing a section there, I never kept up with Voice gossip, and what little I know suggests that aside from a few management butts, who are rendered with admirable sympathy, these young characters are heavily fictionalized, imported from elsewhere or altogether invented.  read more »

ME OF LITTLE FAITH
By Lewis Black
Riverhead, 240 pages, $24.95

LEWIS BLACK IS AN INDIGNANT Paddy Chayefsky character come to screaming, sputtering life, but he has a sneaking admiration for a truly audacious con artist. Jimmy Swaggart won Mr. Black’s heart when the evangelist leaned against his own mother’s tombstone and asked for money, because "I know that she would want you to do that."

"You just had to love a guy who had the big brass nuts to invoke his dead mother as a reason for us to send in our hard-earned cash," writes Mr. Black.

My own tastes run to Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, and professional wrestling. To live in this country, it helps to have a well-developed taste for the indigenous American grotesque.

Mr. Black’s ever-present outrage and jabbing finger are the necessary punctuation to this survey of religions, communes, popes, higher powers, the whole panoply of cosmic daddy figures we use to compel us to lead a moral life. Most religions are covered except Scientology—because, he writes, "I refuse to consider seriously anything Tom Cruise believes in."

Me of Little Faith—nice title—is an actual book, in that it seems that Mr. Black actually wrote it, as opposed to talked it. In other ways, it’s typical. Like the books of most comedians, it demands to be read while mindful of the voice and rhythm of said comic personality; otherwise, the jokes won’t be funny. A great comic says funny things, a run-of-the-mill comic says things funny.

Mr. Black does both, but in this particular case, he does more of the latter than the former.

He was raised Jewish but has evolved into an atheist who looks askance at most religions’ smug attitude about being the One True Way. "This is all—and I’m going to burst a bubble here—absolute bullshit. … Because that attitude is the spiritual equivalent of having a favorite team you root for. … Because what’s true for you may not be true for the guy standing next to you. We all work differently. Each of us is full of shit in our own special way."

At the same time, there’s just a touch of the spiritual, as when he stands beside the body of his dead brother: "I stared at his ashen, lifeless body and knew that he was gone. Yet his spirit filled the room. I felt it all around me. It was so strong that I knew he was still there. In this moment of extreme loss, I was comforted by him, by his presence. I never expected that."

Mostly, though Mr. Black steers away from the serious. He mentions that Hebrew "is truly a language of phlegm," and pays tribute to the courtly, retiring Amish: "How have they managed to do it? And to do it without bothering anybody? It’s astonishing. Memo to all other religions: Watch and learn. Now."

I’ve seen Lewis Black perform a couple of times and would happily pay cash money to see him again—or for that matter, read him again. My only problem with Me of Little Faith is that, while it isn’t a long book, it still has some padding, particularly a play that Mr. Black wrote for the Public Theater in 1981, which hasn’t aged well.

That said, I laughed out loud a half-dozen times—not Mark Twain, but in these deracinated times, good enough.

Scott Eyman reviews books regularly for The Observer. He can be reached at seyman@observer.com.

THE SPIES OF WARSAW
By Alan Furst
Random House, 266 pages, $25

IT'S 1937, AND Lt. Col. Jean-François Mercier is the French military attaché in Warsaw. A minor nobleman and former cavalry officer, he’s rather restive in his largely desk-bound assignment—as one would expect from a man decorated with the Croix de Guerre, a passing acquaintance of Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle is taller, but otherwise not a patch on Mercier. "He had fair skin, pale, and refined features, all of which made him seem younger than he was, though these proportions, classic in the French aristocrat, were somehow contradicted by very deep, very thoughtful, gray-green eyes. Nonetheless, he was what he was, with the relaxed confidence of the breed and, when he smiled, a touch of the insouciant view of the world common to the southern half of France." Insouciant enough, that is, to prefer Simenon to Stendhal, and intelligent enough to enjoy both.  read more »

WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES
By David Sedaris
Little, Brown and Company, 323 pages, $25

IF YOU GO about your daily rounds in New York carrying a copy of David Sedaris’ new book, you will be popular—besieged, even.

"Where did you get that? I pre-ordered it and I don’t have it yet!"

Along the way—having promised to lend the book to everyone at the hair salon, and then spilling coffee on it and dog-earing the pages so frequently that it looks like a small accordion—you’ll meet the fans of Amy Sedaris, who joins her brother on the recordings of his books. These have their own cult following. (Yes, When You Are Engulfed in Flames is out in audio, too.)  read more »

WHAT HAPPENED
By Scott McClellan
PublicAffairs, 341 pages, $27.95

FROM JULY 15, 2003, until April 26, 2006, Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, told the world what the Bush administration thought the world needed to know about the Bush administration—and not much more. To the job of representing a White House disinclined toward openness, Mr. McClellan brought a kind of hapless obstinacy. He seemed incapable of anything beyond duly repeating the day’s talking points, so he didn’t garner a lot of respect. When the title of his new memoir, What Happened, began to circulate, it evoked a fair amount of snickering in Washington. Reporters wanting to find out what happened knew that Mr. McClellan was usually the last to know.  read more »

According to Mark Bowden, the 1958 NFL Championship game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants was more than a great game; it was a watershed moment that ushered in a new era of professional sports in America. The game, a thrilling overtime victory for the Colts, led by quarterback Johnny Unitas, marked the beginning of professional football’s advance from the dregs of American sport to its current position as the most popular and financially lucrative game in the richest country in the world.

In the early and mid-’50s kids wanted to be Mickey Mantle, but by the late ’50s and early ’60s, everyone was trying to be like “Johnny U,” the man with the “Golden Arm.” And nothing, Mr. Bowden notes, is more responsible for football’s surge than television: “Baseball,” he writes, “seemed made for radio,” while football “seemed made for television.”  read more »

GREETINGS FROM BURY PARK
By Sarfraz Manzoor
Vintage, 269 pages, $13.95

Among the vast library of written material produced in the wake of Bruce Springsteen’s three-plus decades of superstardom—biographies, hagiographies, magazine profiles, fan testimonials, academic treatises, lyric exegeses, blog and private journal entries—Greetings From Bury Park may be the first to blame Mr. Springsteen for the writer’s inability to get laid.

“If not for Bruce,” Sarfraz Manzoor writes near the end of his sadly unilluminating memoir, “I might have grown up and settled for the love of a sensible girl.”  read more »

Netherland
By Joseph O’Neill
Pantheon, 256 pages, $23.95

The title of Netherland, the third novel by Irish-born Joseph O’Neill, refers not to “Neverland” or a place at the end of mist and mystery; it embraces rather the Dutch origins of New York City. The events of 9/11 plant dismay in a modern marriage, not eased by a move into the Chelsea Hotel. Rachel is inclined to go back to London with their son, while Hans, a banker, stays in the city and tries to work things out. The novel never sounds Irish, despite the yearning and unwinding strains in Mr. O’Neill’s writing. But does it really sound Dutch (the author was raised in Holland)? If not, where is the steady pull of the language coming from? This is as much of a puzzle as the city that Hans begins to discover, thanks in part to his Trinidadian friend Chuck Ramkissoon, whose great cause in life is to restore cricket to the New York area.  read more »

Hospital: Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God, and Diversity on Steroids
By Julie Salamon
The Penguin Press, 363 pages, $25.95

For anyone with a healthy fear of death, disease or antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the idea of spending more than an hour in a hospital—let alone a day or a week—is deeply unnerving, about as terrifying as being forced to swim naked in a tank of leeches. It’s not just the in-your-face possibility of death at any moment, around every corner. It’s the stench of bodily fluids, the click and suck of oxygen machines, the boredom of waiting, the drama of waiting, the migraine-green hue of everything and, of course, those ubiquitous hand sanitizers that seem to do little beyond reminding you just how germ-ridden your local hospital is. No wonder the wild, life-and-death world of modern hospitals gets woefully little attention from the press.  read more »

The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and the 82 Days that Inspired America
By Thurston Clarke
Henry Holt, 321 pages, $25

For a people whom Tocqueville described as living eternally in the future, we Americans do quite a lot of remembering. Eight weeks ago, it was Martin Luther King Jr., who has been gone longer than he was alive. Now we enter the season of remembrance for a former New York senator, Robert F. Kennedy, a season made all the more poignant by the depressing news that the Liberal Lion, Ted Kennedy, is suddenly and unexpectedly a lion in winter.  read more »

THE CROWD SOUNDS HAPPY: A STORY OF LOVE, MADNESS, AND BASEBALL
By Nicholas Dawidoff
Pantheon, 271 pages, $24.95

Nicholas Dawidoff's fourth book, The Crowd Sounds Happy, is the culmination of 22 years spent thinking and writing about baseball and family. After six years working for Sports Illustrated, Mr. Dawidoff wrote his first book The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg (1994). More recently, his The Fly Swatter: Portrait of an Exceptional Character, about his grandfather, economist Alexander Gerschenkron, was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in biography.

In the intervening years, Mr. Dawidoff offered up a short personal essay, "My Father’s Troubles," in the June 12, 2000, issue of The New Yorker. It chronicles Mr. Dawidoff’s relationship with his mentally ill father and lays the groundwork for The Crowd Sounds Happy, a sad, occasionally poignant and darkly funny memoir about Mr. Dawidoff’s twin and countervailing passions: his love of and devotion to baseball and the shame and pity he felt toward his ailing father.

Naturally, this dichotomy is expressed in his love of the Boston Red Sox (his grandfather’s team) and his hatred of the New York Yankees, the team of the city where his father lived. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, once a month, he, along with his sister, would be forced to visit their father at his home on the Upper East Side, enduring countless embarrassments and minor indignities. "To me, [the city] was a fallen place, only to be endured, gotten over, like a case of food poisoning," he writes.

NICHOLAS DAWIDOFF'S FATHER WASN'T always disturbed. Once upon a time, he was a Yale Law graduate and newlywed, a promising young attorney with a burgeoning family. But that didn’t last long. He was laid off for being "a lame horse" and soon he was having hallucinations and acting violently.

Beginning at age 3, Nicholas lived apart from his father in New Haven with his mother, a private school teacher, and sister Sally, two years his junior. They would always be poor—another source of shame and frustration.

The Crowd Sounds Happy, which is more a set of vignettes than a sustained narrative, can be boiled down to an exercise in expunging the guilt Mr. Dawidoff feels for shunning his pitiable father and frustrating his mother when she couldn’t give him what he wanted. It also serves as a psychological treatise on the benefits of obsessive baseball fandom; it’s called transference, right?

It’s not clear, alas, that Mr. Dawidoff has improved upon his original work in The New Yorker. "My first memory of my father is of leaving him," he wrote in the magazine. "For months, he had been unhinged, experiencing hallucinations so powerful that he communicated with dead squirrels. Then he began hitting my mother, and not long after that she decided it was time for us to go."

As an opening line, it’s powerful in its unemotional directness—something the memoir lacks. In fact, the initial essay made only a few references to baseball. It’s as though the sport has been introduced to act as a buffer between the book and the reader—just as it did between young Nicholas and his anger toward his father.

Maybe Mr. Dawidoff is still relying a bit too much on baseball.

Jake Brooks, former deputy managing editor of The Observer, now works for the Daily News. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

A CASE OF EXPLODING MANGOES
By Mohammed Hanif
Alfred A. Knopf, 323 pages, $24

Back in 1998, The New York Times Magazine ran a profile of George W. Bush that began with an account of how W. and his mother resolved their debate over whether non-Christians were admitted to heaven: They called Billy Graham, who affirmed W.’s belief that according to the New Testament only Christians were allowed, with the caveat that, even so, one should never presume to "play God." This was not, as you might imagine, an attempt by the liberal Times to expose the candidate as a religious fanatic whom it would be insane to elect as president. The gist was that Mr. Bush’s genuine religiosity was what made him so appealing. Sure, he was a man who seriously entertained the notion that many of the citizens he hoped to lead were literally going to hell—but at least he was, in that year of total inquisition, sincere.

It’s perhaps too soon for a satirical novel that capitalizes on the foibles of the Bush administration, but Mohammed Hanif, head of the BBC’s Urdu service, has given us the next best thing. A Case of Exploding Mangoes is a comic novel starring General Zia ul-Haq, the Pakistani dictator killed in a mysterious 1988 plane crash that also claimed the life of the American ambassador, Arnold Raphel. The cause of the accident is still unknown, but, as you’d expect, conspiracy theorists have rushed into the breach. In Mangoes, Mr. Hanif imagines a conspiracy of his own as revealed by would-be presidential assassin Ali Shigri, vengeful son of an old regime colonel murdered by Zia’s henchmen.

There are many reasons to read this excellent novel, and one for which it should be celebrated: Mr. Hanif has found in Zia a veritable Homer Simpson of theocratic zealotry, lovably hilarious even as he denies clemency to a blind woman who’s about to be stoned to death—for the crime of having been gang-raped. If this seems impossible (or inappropriate), consider the Three-Stooges rhythm of events set off when the Times editorial page reacts by calling Zia a "barbaric, wily dictator, our government’s fundamentalist friend who is relentlessly marching his country back in time": The General calls on his information minister for background on the man atop the masthead. The addled information minister for whom the name Arthur Sulzberger rings no bell gets Pakistani intelligence on the case. When they come up empty, it’s all up to Pakistan’s New York press attaché:

"The press attaché called up a friendly Pakistani cab driver who, he knew, read every word in every paper and always alerted him to any stories about Pakistan.

"‘Sulzberger,’ the cabdriver shouted into his cab phone, jumping a Manhattan traffic light. ‘Sulzberger ... that Jew.’

"The information travelled from his cab to the Pakistani consulate in New York, reached the Information Ministry in Islamabad over a secure teleprinter, and five minutes before his deadline the information minister received a note marked ‘Classified.’

"The owner of the New York Times was a Jew.

"General Zia heard it with a sense of relief. He knew in his guts when he was right."

The inevitable comparison here is to Dr. Strangelove, and just as the Kubrick film crystallized the absurdities of nuclear escalation into an archetypal cast of idiots-who-run-the-world, Mangoes provides the necessary update. Mr. Hanif’s Zia is neither a technocrat like Herman Kahn nor a cleric like the Ayatollah Khomeini, but something scarily in between: a pious fool whose megalomania is hidden even from himself by a cloak of folksy humility.

MR. HANIF'S GENERAL ZIA is closely modeled on his real-life counterpart, who in 1978 deposed the avowedly pro-democratic president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (father of Benazir) on the specious ground that Pakistan was in danger of collapsing into civil war. "By Jingo," Zia told foreign correspondents in the wake of the coup, "you will see elections held in October." What followed instead, by Jingo, were 11 years of brutal dictatorship punctuated by Bhutto’s execution on trumped-up charges in 1979.

Zia’s eventual support for anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan led Ronald Reagan to praise Pakistan as "the last bastion of the free world." Human rights organizations like Pakistan’s Political Prisoners Release and Relief Committee had other ideas, describing the torture of 150 political prisoners as "rang[ing] from solitary confinement to sustained beatings, water ducking, introducing chilies in the rectum, electric shocks, deprivation of sleep for long periods, burning the body with cigarettes, beating of the genitals and threats to relatives and so on." But no one denied Zia’s personal charm: According to Soviet president Andrei Gromyko, when Zia took Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov’s hand in 1982 and assured him that Pakistan would not interfere with the Soviet Union’s plans for Afghanistan, no one doubted him for a minute.

Finally, no send-up of the foreign supporters of Afghanistan’s mujahideen would be complete without a cameo by the Evil One. Mr. Hanif manages it with flair: A bored Saudi "in the construction business" referred to only as OBL wafts through an American ambassador’s party for funders of the resistance: "[OBL] skulked for a few minutes, trying to catch [the Pakistani intelligence chief’s] eye. To OBL’s horror, [the chief] saw him and showed no signs of recognition, but the local CIA chief followed [his] gaze, moved rightwards, making space for him in the circle, and said, ‘Nice suit, OBL.’"

Damian Da Costa in on the staff of The Observer. He can be reached at ddacosta@observer.com.

THE AMERICAN RESTING PLACE: FOUR HUNDRED YEARS OF HISTORY THROUGH OUR CEMETERIES AND BURIAL GROUNDS
By Marilyn Yalom
Houghton Mifflin, 297 pages, $30

IT'S A GOOD TIME to be alive if you’re interested in the American way of death.

In January, we were treated to This Republic of Suffering, by Harvard’s president, Drew Faust. Widely, extravagantly praised, Ms. Faust’s project is a chronicle of disjuncture: She argues that with the Civil War—total, mechanized war—came the birth of modern death as a commercial concern and nationalist obsession. Mass-produced (and pregnantly empty) coffins, industrial embalming, battlefield graves reopened to give unknown soldiers "dignified" burials—these are our afterlives in an age when limbs can be scattered to the wind with the pull of a trigger.

And now we have Marilyn Yalom’s The American Resting Place. Elegant, elegiac and just a bit ponderous, it offers continuity and evolution in place of grand historical rupture: Its subtitle promises 400 years of history. Which is not to say that the new book is irreconcilable with Ms. Faust’s; on the contrary, in Ms. Yalom’s telling, the Civil War novelties—embalming, reburial, professional undertakers—take their place alongside earlier and subsequent trends in grave marking and cemetery layout. (One of the newest innovations is the video tombstone, complete with commemorative DVD.)

MARILYN YALOM IS no novice when it comes to macro-micro history—done right, perhaps the most instructive and crowd-pleasing of mod scholarly forms. Her previous century-hopping efforts include A History of the Breast (1998) and A History of the Wife (2002); her terrific Birth of the Chess Queen (2004) yoked the emergence of that potent piece (absent in the original oriental game) to both the Virgin Mary cult and the rise of female sovereigns in early modern Europe. The hyper-specific intrigue of these subjects is self-evident, as are the intellectual and political resonances they sound—Ms. Yalom is a senior scholar at Stanford’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Lacking the tight-wound verve of breasts or chess queens, her latest is rather more difficult to pin down.

Academic survey or coffee-table history? Travelogue or field guide? The American Resting Place has more than a little trouble deciding what it wants to be. But this may be less a failing than a consequence of uncommon success: The book delivers a staggeringly exhaustive trove of shoe-leather research. Accompanied by her photographer son Reid (whose 60-odd black-and-white photos preface the book and give it that coffee-table aroma), Ms. Yalom spent three years traversing the country, ultimately visiting some 250 cemeteries. The broad middle of the book devotes a chapter, and a thematic tag line, to each of 10 locales, from "Death’s-Heads and Funeral Gloves: Boston, Massachusetts" to "Who Owns the Bones? Sites and Rites in Hawaii." (New York, alas, gets "Cemeteries as Real Estate.")

Do some people have an eye for cemeteries? For sure, Ms. Yalom has done her homework—over 200 meticulous endnotes’ worth. But the impressive scholarship is supercharged by intuition: 250 graveyards, and it seems Marilyn Yalom could sense the singular profundity of each.

There’s Holt Cemetery in New Orleans, where the most impressive tombstones sit on a slight rise above the rest—just high enough to have been spared Katrina flood waters. There are the earliest New England burial grounds, where grave decorations shift from Puritan "death’s heads" (grotesque skulls with wings) to benevolent Great Awakening cherubs to secular Greek willow trees—all before the Revolution. There’s the old black churchyard in Sunbury, Georgia, where the headstones carry inscribed glass inserts—a design found nowhere else in the United State but reminiscent of African funerary statuettes.

Watching Ms. Yalom marathon through untold speculators and stonecutters and landscape architects, exhaustive can become exhausting. The temptation is to see The American Resting Place as a reference book, definitive and dryly piecemeal. But this is an encyclopedia with an argument, and it warrants a cover-to-cover reading. The entries may trade on unlikely facts and outsize personalities but they tell a single story: death as the final and most fraught act of American self-invention and exclusion.

As surmised by the custodians of the earliest public burial grounds—who upon arrival immediately took to banning Jews and Catholics and blacks from the colonial six feet under—legal strictures of class and caste can be overturned, but death is something like forever. Hence the remarkable stratification, compulsory and otherwise, Ms. Yalom uncovers: the Brown Fellowship Graveyard for Light-Skinned Blacks in Charleston, S.C., which abuts the Thomas Smalls Graveyard for the Society of Blacks of Dark Complexion, the latter founded by a man with just enough melanin to be denied entry to the former. Even today, the big urban cemeteries read like seating charts for the American dream: new immigrant groups get plots in the periphery, which might become the center if and when a newer people’s corpses take their spots at the margins.

Cemeteries, it seems, are machines for turning the temporal into the spatial: Gravestones freeze birth and death dates, of course, but the history inscribed into the landscape is social, not personal. To be properly buried is not to have the greatest epitaph; it’s to know exactly where you stand in time, and to stay there in perpetuity.

OR NOT. MS. YALOM'S MOST poignant findings involve the ephemerality of resting places presumed to be final: Bodies are constantly moved, removed, forgotten; the cemetery as history book is a radical abridgement at best. Take tiny Trinity Churchyard at the foot of Wall Street, perhaps New York’s greatest burial ground; its 1,000 extant tombstones seem to say everything about the city’s early history. But already by 1800, it turns out, 100,000 New Yorkers had been buried at Trinity. Whatever happened to all those graves?

And so it seems the Republic of Suffering paroxysm of the Civil War may have been not so much transformative as revelatory. Unprecedented carnage meant the truth could no longer be buried: Sooner or later, we’ll all be unknown soldiers. Even if we leave a DVD.

Jonathan Liu, a writer living in Queens, reviews books regularly for The Observer. He can be reached at jliu@observer.com.

BRIGHT SHINY MORNING
By James Frey
Harper, 501 pages, $26.95

I WASN'T FAR INTO James Frey’s debut novel, Bright Shiny Morning—around page 50 of 501—when I felt a sense of déjà vu. The words weren’t stolen, but the story suddenly seemed so familiar.

This particular Carveresque passage described a married couple, Tammy and Carl, who live in a trailer park in the Pacific Palisades. They’d gotten pregnant young and come west from Oklahoma, dreaming of living near the beach. They had a bunch of kids who all grew up to be successful, but Tammy and Carl stayed in their trailer, sharing views of Malibu that others paid millions for. "Like hundreds of thousands of people a year," writes Mr. Frey, "[they] came to Los Angeles to make their dreams come true. Sometimes it happens."

A song started looping in my head: "Into the Great Wide Open," by Tom Petty. (It’s a song about a couple in L.A.—aren’t all Tom Petty songs about L.A.?—trying to make their dreams come true.) Later, at Mr. Frey’s mention of Reseda, a district in the San Fernando Valley, Mr. Petty’s "Free Fallin’" took over ("It’s a long day, living in Reseda/ There’s a freeway, runnin’ through the yard.")

That was it: James Frey’s book is one very long Tom Petty song.

And like a Tom Petty song—which is quite repetitive and predictable but which also sticks in your head in such a way that it becomes inextricably linked to some memory from your teens or 20s, of driving to Ocean City or to a football game or to a really good party—Mr. Frey’s book will stick with you, too.

BRIGHT SHINY MORNING ISN'T a great book, though it is, as Sara Nelson wrote in Publisher’s Weekly, "un-put-downable." Mr. Frey’s other books—the scandal-making memoir A Million Little Pieces (2003) and the quite obviously embellished follow-up, My Friend Leonard (2005)—were similarly addictive. His books are like crappy movies on a Sunday afternoon; you think, well, if I don’t like it, I don’t have to watch it. But then, you don’t really have anything else to do, and you get hooked—after 20 minutes, you have to know what happens to the druggie teenager—and, really, it’s only a few hours of your life. (Despite the length, the novel only takes an afternoon to read. More on that shortly.)

Still, Bright Shiny Morning isn’t very pleasurable. As always, Mr. Frey is obsessed with brutality, and few in his sprawling book escape to safety. There are four main stories: a superfamous Hollywood couple with a secret (their marriage is a sham—he’s gay and she’s bisexual); a young couple from Ohio escaping abusive families; a homeless man in Venice living an ethical, if drunk, life; and a young, smart Mexican-American woman working for an old, tyrannical white lady in Pasadena. All of these stories are crazy with violence.

Of course, that’s what makes the book a page-turner: Will Old Joe live after being assaulted by a bunch of meth heads? Will Dylan come back after being abducted by a biker gang? Will Amberton really order his lover’s mother to be killed? We have to know the answers to these questions, and Mr. Frey’s minimalist style is lighter than the breeze. At the same time, the stories are so over-the-top, the violence so grotesque, that it’s hard to take any of it very seriously. Which is unfortunate: Mr. Frey doesn’t intend for his novel to be read as a satire but rather as a hyper-realistic, this-is-the-way-it-is-out-there-motherfucker portrait of Los Angeles. He really believes that the world is relentlessly ugly. It isn’t.

BACK TO TOM PETTY, WHO tends to strike a more melancholy note in his odes to L.A. than Mr. Frey. Both trade almost entirely in stereotypes—that’s why Bright Shiny Morning feels so rote.

Of course the Mexican-American woman gets sidetracked from going to college and has to work as a housekeeper—and for a woman of particular cruelty and fierce physical strength. And of course the young couple from Ohio gets pregnant. Of course the big movie star is secretly gay. And of course the homeless guy has a heart of gold. These characters are supposed to be revelatory in some way, their stories tragic and shocking. But they’re just what we’ve heard a million times before. Girl moves to Hollywood to be an actress; girl ends up in porn. Boy moves to Hollywood to break into TV; boy ends up a junkie.

Mr. Frey writes like he’s sharing these stories for the first time. In a way, it’s charming, and the book’s insistence on its own importance is part of what keeps you reading. You can’t shake the hope that Mr. Frey will surprise you. But he doesn’t. Every story turns out just as you expect.

SPRINKLED AMONG THE four main stories and countless other mini-profiles of unnamed, central-casting sorts of characters are facts about the county of Los Angeles. In the beginning, full pages sport three or four lines of text noting some fact about the area (all that white space is one reason why the book is such a snap to read); later, Mr. Frey gets more ambitious, writing long descriptive passages about various neighborhoods.

Although he slaps a disclaimer upfront ("Nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable"), these "fact" passages are a real problem. Yes, it’s a novel, and in a novel—as Mr. Frey was reminded time and again after the controversy over A Million Little Pieces—you can make stuff up. But not really—not if your book is clearly meant to be a sweeping history of a certain place. And given Mr. Frey’s track record, there are obvious questions looming: How accurate are these "fun facts," as he calls them? What are his sources? It doesn’t help that long passages read just like Wikipedia entries.

Bright Shiny Morning isn’t the disaster some Frey-haters probably hoped for, but it’s not special, either. A supposedly honest look at the nastiness of human nature, written without punctuation (though there’s more than you’d think!) and a fake urgency that should lead somewhere new, the novel merely manipulates you into doing exactly what James Frey wants. He leads you into the hills high above Hollywood, shows you the most spectacular view of the hideousness that is Los Angeles, and then abandons you to make the only choice you can: to jump.

Hillary Frey (no relation) edits the culture pages of The Observer. She can be reached at hfrey@observer.com.

Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History
By Ted Sorensen
HarperCollins, 556 pages, $27.95

IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO READ Ted Sorensen’s Counselor without thinking of Barac