General.

NONFICTION

****

Freedom for the Thought We Hate

A Biography of the First Amendment

By Anthony Lewis

Congress shall make no law ...

It would be hard to find a better writer to introduce the First Amendment than Anthony Lewis. A constitutional law expert, civil liberties advocate, and legal affairs writer, he is best known for his accounts of pivotal Supreme Court cases, including Gideon's Trumpet (1964), about how Americans gained the right to an attorney regardless of ability of pay. In Freedom for the Thought We Hate, the former New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner takes a broader view, telling the story of the First Amendment as it has developed in American courts (the first free-speech case to refer to the First Amendment was heard in 1919). While his book is not a comprehensive history of the idea of free speech, Lewis covers the most important cases and ponders the debates about what the words of the First Amendment actually mean to our democracy. He makes points that will draw cheers from civil libertarians and a few that will surprise them as well.

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Basic Books. 221 pages. $25. ISBN: 0465039173

Hartford Courant *****

"Anthony Lewis recounts dozens of landmark court cases while eloquently conveying the simple majesty and importance of the First Amendment in this splendid account, which ought to be required reading in every high school and college." BIll WIllIAMS

Christian Science Monitor ****

"Lewis blends a profound understanding of First Amendment jurisprudence and history with an enjoyable writing style that his readers have long come to admire. In our war-torn era where dissent and open-minded debate have become problematic, Lewis compels us to remember the crucial function free speech serves in our democratic form of government." CHUCK LEDDY

Dallas Morning News ****

"Primers are too often both prim and boring. But in my 40 or so years reading Mr. Lewis' journalism, I have never found him either prim or boring. His vast knowledge and easy writing style make cases I have studied deeply come alive anew." STEVE WEINBERG

Los Angeles Times ****

"[Lewis] knows how to parse a Supreme Court decision. At the same time, he looks behind the printed page to scrutinize the experiences and values of the men and women whose utterances are given the force of law. The result is a short history of the 1st Amendment that is always illuminating and sometimes rollicking." JONATHAN KIRSCH

NY Times Book Review ****

"In the 21st century, the heroic First Amendment tradition may seem like a noble vision from a distant era, in which heroes and villains were easier to identify. ... Anthony Lewis is right to celebrate it." JEFFREY ROSEN

Providence Journal ****

"It's hard to imagine a book about legal history reading like a page-turner, but this book does. ... The questions that have yet to be settled press impatiently against the book's pages, reminding us that the First Amendment continues to shift under our feet even as we read." BETH SCHWARTZAPFEL

CRITICAL SUMMARY

Though Freedom for the Thought We Hate is a book about dissent, the critics spoke with one voice, unanimously praising it. Their reaction is no surprise, since the author is Anthony Lewis, whom the Dallas Morning News called "perhaps the most talented and experienced journalist in the country who writes about law." Every critic praised his engaging writing and his skill in selecting just the right facts to make a slim volume feel packed with relevant information. Reviewers disagreed, however, on the meaning of Lewis's survey for the future of the First Amendment. Jeffrey Rosen, a great legal journalist in his own right, pointed out that most upcoming challenges to American free speech will likely stem from conflicts over the power of corporations and the Internet. These issues, Rosen writes, will need to be settled by Congress, so Lewis's decision to center his account on the Court may be a little misleading. At the same time, Lewis's book reminded most reviewers of the constant need to defend free speech and to exercise it courageously--particularly in wartime.

****

The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw

One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird

By Bruce Barcott

An epic battle for a rare bird.

Sharon Matola arrived in Belize in the 1980s as the assistant to a filmmaker producing a documentary about the Central American rain forest. She fell in love with the country and decided to stay, soon founding a popular zoo and becoming an expert on local wildlife. In 2002, the Belizean government announced its plans for a hydroelectric dam that would flood the Macal Valley, the only known natural habitat of the endangered scarlet macaw. Matola protested the dam, but since she was an American, her opposition was seen as colonial oppression, and she was designated an enemy of the people. Despite venomous criticism and harassment, Matola refused to give up. She enlisted the Natural Resource Defense Council as an ally and appealed her case all the way to the London Privy Council.

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Random House. 313 pages. $26. ISBN: 1400062934

Miami Herald *****

"With a plot so multilayered and dramatic that readers will need to remind themselves it's a true account, the narrative achieves the depth of a case study and the accessible intimacy of a short feature. Throughout, Barcott's relaxed, lucid writing and inventive descriptions ... place readers firmly on the side of Matola and the birds." CHRISTINE THOMAS

NY Times Book Review *****

"No, it doesn't sound thrilling (which is doubtless why the publisher kept the word 'dam' out of the title), but Barcott ... makes it so, mashing up adventure travel, biography and nature writing in a steamy climate of corruption and intrigue." ELIZABETH ROYTE

Entertainment Weekly ****

"This fascinating account of the resulting battle touches upon greed, corruption, and the legacy of colonialism. While the outcome is sobering, there's a glimmer of hope for imperiled species everywhere in feisty irritants like Matola." TIM PURTELL

Seattle Times ****

"A seasoned journalist, Barcott ably handles this wide-ranging, multifaceted story. Employing novelistic scene-setting, pithy detail and crisp dialogue, he covers cumbersome legal hurdles, arcane international legalities and raucous public hearings with the graceful ease of a long-distance runner." TIM MCNUlTY

Washington Post ****

"Barcott's account of the fight that followed is nearly encyclopedic, sometimes to the point of overwhelming the reader with details on the history of dams, the geology of rivers, Caribbean piracy, offshore banking, the complex business of endangered-species listings and kindred and not-so-kindred matters. Every bit of detail counts, however, as his story meanders to its close." GREGORY MCNAMEE

Seattle Post-Intelligencer ***

"Barcott does a good job detailing such a complex story, but the effectiveness of The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw is hampered by a series of inconsistencies. The writer seems to have never met a narrative detour he does not want to take for several pages, sidetrips on such subjects as the history of dams that may be informative but stall the story's drive." JOHN MARSHALL

CRITICAL SUMMARY

Contributing editor to Outside magazine and author Bruce Barcott (The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier [1997]) has constructed a gripping and suspenseful account of one woman's crusade against corrupt foreign governments and multinational corporations to save the habitat of an endangered bird. Barcott's simple and eloquent prose, vivid descriptions, and ability to render the most complicated business deals and legal concepts in clear layman's terms allow him to tame this unwieldy tale, which has unexpected twists and turns. The biggest point of divergence? Most critics found Barcott's many narrative tangents informative, interesting, and even integral to the plot, while others called them tedious and distracting. Though the Chalillo Dam was completed in 2005, Matola's story proves that one person can make a difference. (The jury is still out on the fate of the scarlet macaws.)

****

Pictures at a Revolution

Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood

By Mark Harris

The revolution will be televised.

Oscar night, April 10, 1968. And the nominees for Best Picture are ... In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, and Doctor Doolittle. The nod went to In the Heat of the Night, starring Sidney Poitier--the first black winner of the Best Actor award and a talent more marketable and famous at the time than Sean Connery and Steve McQueen--and signaled a sea change in the way Hollywood did business. It was a filmmaking revolution, a moving away from the studio system that had dominated the industry for decades. Recounting in vivid detail the genesis of each film--the four that challenged entrenched notions of what film should be (and had been) as well as Doctor Doolittle, entrenched notions that came to symbolize an outmoded Hollywood on its last legs--Mark Harris holds a mirror to a culture in transition.

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Penguin. 496 pages. $27.95. ISBN: 1594201528

Boston Globe *****

"Previous books have covered Hollywood's high-profile identity crisis, most notably Ethan Mordden's 1990 study, Medium Cool: The Movies of the 1960s. ... Pictures at a Revolution is a superb achievement, and one can only hope that some aspiring, wild-eyed auteur reads it and storms the studio gates." MARK GRIFFIN

Washington Post *****

"[The author] writes about the five or six years in which the filmmakers, some of them old pros and some of them rank novices, struggled with a studio system in collapse, an audience whose tastes and enthusiasms seemed wildly unpredictable, and a culture being transformed by volatile social and political forces. ... Harris has created what seems likely to be one of the classics of popular film history, useful to dedicated students of film and cultural historians, and also to trivia buffs." CHARLES MATTHEWS

Los Angeles Times ****

"It is Harris' pleasure to recount the dramas attendant upon these films. ... I don't know of another book that is so rich a compendium of Hollywood moviemaking lore, so amusing, so appalling, so palpably true." RICHARD SCHICKEL

NY Times Book Review ****

"You can't build a book like this without interviews, and Harris seems to have talked to virtually everyone who's still around, and to great effect. ... American film in 1967 was heading into an unrivaled, if all too short, golden age, and Mark Harris's legwork and intelligence transport us gratefully back to that exhilarating moment when it was all still about to occur." JIM SHEPARD

CRITICAL SUMMARY

Mark Harris, a former editor for Entertainment Weekly, combines his remarkable knowledge of film history with interviews and research that capture the Zeitgeist of the late 1960s, particularly the cloistered, changing world of Hollywood. The films that challenged the industry's expectations were, Harris writes, "game changers, movies that had originated far from Hollywood and had grown into critics' darlings and major popular phenomena." In the manner of Otto Friedrich's City of Nets, Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, and Ethan Mordden's Medium Cool, the author does an admirable job of bringing that "revolution" to life. Drawing on his deep knowledge and a sly sense of humor (and irony) about Hollywood's quirkier side (witness an account of Jane Fonda's Fourth of July party in 1965), he crafts what Charles Matthews deems "likely to be one of the classics of popular film history."

****

The Principles of Uncertainty

By Maira Kalman

From sweets to streets, a treat for the eyes.

Even if you don't recognize illustrator and author Maira Kalman's name, you've probably seen her work--from her children's books about a dog named Max to New Yorker covers and an illustrated edition of The Elements of Style. You may also have seen the text and images of The Principles of Uncertainty, which began as an illustrated blog for the New York Times. The subject, simply put, is Kalman's life. As she travels through the city and the world, Kalman considers the virtues of candy and dodo birds, happiness and hats, leaves disguised as eyeglasses, and other such meaning-filled objects, while continually trying to answer the question, "What is the point?" The book showcases Kalman's eccentric but accessible illustrations and, perhaps more important, her irrepressible personality.

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Penguin. 336 pages. $29.95. ISBN: 159420134X

Los Angeles Times ****

"The element of style that unites Kalman's verbal and visual sides is wit. Her personality spills onto the page, not just in her paintings but in her unorthodox associations, conveyed in irregularly capitalized, handwritten commentary that snakes across and around her artwork." HELLER MCALPIN

Minneapolis Star-Tribune ****

"This is a unique, warmly intelligent book for the enjoyment of artists, writers and anyone who delights in works of genuine imagination." L. K. HANSON

New York Observer ****

"If you need someone to explain the connections between geography, history, philosophy, millinery, Bolsheviks, moss, all the stops on the F Train, stick insects, flamboyant desserts and what Goethe's writings look like when embroidered, you've come to the right place." BARBARA YABLON MAIDA

NY Times Book Review ****

"There were moments when all the sweets in this book did what too much sugar will: gave me a toothache and made me peevish. But then no one is saying you have to eat this whole bag of jellybeans in one sitting." ARIEL LEVY

CRITICAL SUMMARY

Reviewers were not faint in their praise of The Principles of Uncertainty, even if they spent most of their energy attempting to describe it. And no wonder: the list of items that Maira Kalman describes in the book could almost fill a book itself, even without her illustrations. Readers who are unfamiliar with Kalman's work but respond to even a few items on that list should probably take a look at Principles. Those who know her children's books or illustrations will be excited to see her take on a broader range of topics, including "the images and confusion of the dreamworld [that] linger in our waking hours" and create deep emotion and consciousness from her art (New York Times Book Review). But as with any book, the most important question will be whether the images--here, mostly visual--affect the reader's own perceptions of the world.

***

The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead

By David Shields

Ashes to ashes.

"We're just animals walking the earth for a brief time," asserts David Shields in this collection of brief essays. Interspersing his collection with biological facts, trivia, and famous quotations, Shields recounts episodes from his past--teenage acne, high school sweethearts, back problems--and explores his mixed feelings for his larger-than-life father, Milton Shields, whose vitality and optimism he both resents and envies. "He's strong and he's weak and I love him and I hate him and I want him to live forever and I want him to die tomorrow," he writes of the 97-year-old. Detailing the physical and mental processes of aging and the inevitability of death, Shields concludes that "life, in my view, is simple, tragic and eerily beautiful."

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Knopf. 225 pages. $23.95. ISBN: 0307268047

Boston Globe *****

"Such is the method in his good-humored madness: Mix equal parts of anatomy and autobiography, science and self-disclosure, physiology and family history; shake, stir, add dashes of miscellany, pinches of borrowed wisdom, simmer over a low-grade fever of mortality, and a terrible beauty of a book is born." THOMAS LYNCH

Seattle Times ****

A tremendous amount of research concerning how humans develop and age went into the book, and when Shields sat down to write, he made a wise and generous decision: to convey what he learned in a confident but self-deprecating manner, the way a smart friend might share facts over the dinner table." KIMBERLY MARLOWE HARTNETT

Rocky Mountain News ****

"It's clear that Shields' midlife journey plays a huge part of why he's motivated to examine the way our bodies break down, but it's his nearly schizophrenic emotions about his father that dominate the proceedings. ... The result is a radically thought-provoking reflection on the nature of our bodies and whatever kind of meaning we can assign to them while the heart is still pumping and the neurons are still firing." SCOTT C. YATES

San Francisco Chronicle ***

"The approach-avoidance technique that Shields employs as an author--diving fearlessly into his deepest feelings, then taking a quick turn toward the safety of the surface--may give the reader the literary bends. ... His emotional revelations are so well crafted, the facts he includes so intelligently curated, one just goes on hoping it will all make sense at some point. It doesn't." MEREDITH MARAN

Houston Chronicle **

"As we wend our way through the vignettes drawn from the Shields family history ... it's difficult to root for either the author's weltschmerz or his father's moxie. The conflict feels artificial, as if contrived to give his shapeless conglomeration of fatalistic quotes and anatomical information a backbone, so to speak." ERIC GERBER

Los Angeles Times **

"As one makes one's way through each brief chapter-essay, this hodgepodge stubbornly refuses to become a whole. ... And I would hesitate to show many of Shields' scientific passages to a researcher in the areas he covers." LIZZIE SKURNICK

NY Times Book Review **

"The Thing About Life is larded down with faddish miscellany, endless grab bags of quotes and microfacts that are supposed to illuminate but just clutter up the text. ... Judging from this book, I'd rather be out playing tennis and chatting up the ladies with Milton than hanging around the house comparing Woody Allen quotes with the erudite, teetotaling David." ALEX BEAM

CRITICAL SUMMARY

Veteran writer David Shields's examination of decrepitude and mortality defies categorization, consisting of "love and loathing, romance and biology, an encyclopedia of aging and a memoir of an adult son running to keep up with his 97-year-old father" (San Francisco Chronicle). Shields's analysis of his conflicted relationship with Milton, of his cynical rebuttals to his father's joie de vivre, lies at the heart of this dispassionate meditation. Several critics complained that the essays lack focus and list no sources for the many facts stated; others found the biological trivia overwhelming. Though interesting and revealing, The Thing About Life should not be read as "a treatise on the meaning of life: It's really just a collection of facts and musings" (Rocky Mountain News).

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****

The Good Rat

A True Story

By Jimmy Breslin

The author, a Pulitzer Prize--winning New York City columnist, fictionalized the infamous Gallo-Profaci mob war in his 1970 best seller, The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. Here, he revisits organized crime in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Burton Kaplan, a 70-something drug trafficker, worked for the lucchese organized-crime family, carving a figure "out of Dostoyevsky, of the Moors Murders, of Murder Inc." Acting as a middleman between mob underboss Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso and two crooked New York City cops, Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, Kaplan set up murders for hire. In 2004, while in prison for drug smuggling, Kaplan (the "good rat") testified against the two policemen-turned-hit men. Breslin, who recounts the trial in this collection of anecdotes and stories, chronicles the mob's ups and downs through five boroughs, its briberies and acquittals, its drug dealing and prison sentences, and its kidnappings and body dumps to offer a dirge for the Mafia's last half century--its best days long behind them.

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Ecco. 288 pages. $24.95. ISBN: 0060856661

Milwaukee Jrnl Sentinel *****

"The Good Rat is full of rich anecdotes of the often mundane (though successful) scams by which mobsters made their fortunes, the tales of stupidity and large living that wiped those fortunes out, and stark trial transcripts depicting savagery more viscerally frightening than any cinematic knockoff of mob life has ever generated." ADAM DUNN

Charlotte Observer ****

"Breslin has many great tales in his arsenal, and in his rambling, scattershot style he gets around to most of them in The Good Rat (if only, at times, for the duration of a neatly downed shot glass). The gang's all here, from Crazy Joe Gallo to the Teflon Don himself, John Gotti." SAM SHAPIRO

Los Angeles Times ****

"Breslin reveals his toughness, his lack of sentiment, which is, of course, what he admires in Kaplan. For him, it's not that the Mafiosi were good guys, just that they were honest about who they were." DAVID L. ULIN

USA Today ****

"Unlike the Sopranos or The Godfather, the bodies that pile up in Jimmy Breslin's new Mafia tale are far too cold to fit some romantic Hollywood notion of the Mob. ... Kaplan's testimony is classic gangland drama." ANTHONY DEBARROS

Rocky Mountain News ****

"This is Breslin at his Runyonesque best, mixing hard fact with subjective impressions to paint a nuanced and unforgettable picture of a near-mythic group. ... [But he] doesn't go smoothly from Point A to Point B to Point C, building a logically structured narrative." REBECCA JONES

CRITICAL SUMMARY

The Good Rule demythologizes the all-but-glamorous life of organized crime. While Breslin focuses on the trial of the "Mafia Cops," a story also recounted in Guy Lawson and William Oldham's The Brotherhoods (2006), Breslin, to critics' delight, uses the case to delve deep inside the Mafia's demise and the bloody, backstabbing stories within it. An unsentimental writer, Breslin sees the mob for what it is--a group of cold-blooded sheep, to which his inclusion of trial-transcript excerpts attests. Yet reviewers couldn't help but comment on the author's somewhat regretful tone, a funeral hymn for an era. Chronological confusion may trip up some readers, but overall, "For true crime fans, The Good Rat is the next standard-bearer; for Breslin fans new and old, it's a must" (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel).

RELATED ARTICLE: BOOKMARKS SELECTION

****

The Fortune Cookie Chronicles

Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

By Jennifer 8. Lee

As American as mu shu pork.

Chinese restaurants in the United States out-number all the McDonalds, Burger King, and KFC franchises combined. While that statistic may at first seem improbable, most Americans will also recognize it as a logical necessity in a world where a strip mall just can't be a strip mall without a Chinese lunch buffet. Lee, a second-generation Chinese American, travels across the United States and to 23 other countries to discover how we came to inherit our peculiar hybrid national cuisine, which has little to nothing to do with traditional Chinese cuisine (as exhibited by Lee's attempts to track down General Tso). Sampling selections as diverse as the origins of the free paper menu, the role of fortune cookies in the lottery, restaurant labor, and American Jews' deep cultural yearning for takeout, Lee assembles a menu as exotic as it is familiar.

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Twelve. 320 pages. $24.99. ISBN: 0446580074

Chicago Tribune ****

"Backed by exhaustive research, investigation, and a clear and detailed prose style, the book delves ... into the twinned history of 20th Century American Chinese immigration and food. It is a study of lives often overlooked: the immigrant who takes your phone order, the busboy who clears away your hot-and-sour soup bowl, the guy who brings mu shu pork to your door." BICH MINH NGUYEN

Los Angeles Times ****

"With her cultural background as a Chinese American, her craft as a reporter for the New York Times, her evident love of food and her quirky sense of wonder, Lee is our trusted guide. ... The Fortune Cookie Chronicles is a deeply enjoyable meal, for anyone who likes talking or thinking about food." SETH FAISON

Rocky Mountain News ****

"It's a journey into the complex culture, history and economics that inform any Chinese restaurant in any town. ... Lee (whose middle name '8' connotes prosperity in Chinese) does so in a richly rewarding and entertaining work that answers just about everything you ever wanted to know about Chinese food--and then some." JOHN C. ENSSLIN

Hartford Courant ****

"The book is not a literary masterpiece--portions are repetitious, the organizational structure seems murky and the breezy tone is occasionally cloying. Fortunately, none of those minor problems sinks the superb content served up." STEVE WEINBERG

NY Times Book Review ****

"Amusing as such diversions are, Lee's book is more serious than its jolly subtitle suggests, exposing some very ugly sides of the business. ... Inevitably, Lee's investigative trail leads back to the mass arrival of Chinese immigrants in California during the Gold Rush, when they became known as Celestials because they seemed so otherworldly." JANE AND MICHAEL STERN

San Francisco Chronicle ****

"Lee promises procedural journalism, a how-and-here's-why book like the work of Michael Pollan and Elizabeth Royte, but instead delivers an intoxicating ethnographic study of the history and culture of American Chinese cuisine. No, this wasn't exactly what we ordered nor what it looked like on the menu. But we support her digressions because the book we got is probably just as much fun as the one she promised." KEVIN SMOKLER

CRITICAL SUMMARY

We're in something of a golden age for food journalism, with exposes like Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, odysseys like Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, histories like Mark Kurlansky's Salt, and quirky memoirs like Julie Powell's Julie and Julia. The Fortune Cookie Chronicles is a bit of each, and reviewers held it to similar standards. Most critics felt that it made the cut as a unique exploration of food, culture, immigration, and identity. A few critics, however, while thoroughly enjoying the book's quirky, fascinating anecdotes and histories, felt like there was something missing. Lee, well-known for both her city-beat reporting for The New York Times and her salon-like parties, could have made herself a stronger character in the book to give it more unity. Despite this complaint, every reviewer had to admit that something about the subject matter and its author was irresistible.