THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA, by Michael Pollan

This book has some very interesting information in it. The main message is that we are using one foodstuff in America in so many ways that it leads to bloat -- too much available cheap processed food, too many calories, exaggerated serving sizes to connote value, and a lack of a food culture strong enough to resist the confusion sown by food marketers. Great points! However, the author suffers from what he decries. What should have been a lean, mean 175 pages turns into a bloated and meandering tome, boring in too many spots, while losing the thread more often than not. Just because words come cheaply, and because people are impressed by (and will presumably pay a higher price for) a large serving of text doesn't mean that it is good for any of us. Yet, there wasn't an editorial culture strong enough at his publisher to fight this off. Shame. If an abridged version ever came out, it would be worth reading. But, the serving size needs to be halved. This is the Big Gulp version of what could have fit in a demitasse.

TOO LATE TO SAY GOODBYE, by Ann Rule

All Anne Rule books are well researched, written, and interesting. Name one that took you longer than 3 days. This one is no different. While it is great, and the story deserved to be told for the purpose of the memories of the victims, it is not the same intensity as Death By Sunset, 'Stranger..", or Everything She Ever Wanted. This is not due to the writing or research, merely due to the fact that Bart Corbin was just not a very interesting person. He was an egotisical, self-centered man, who thought he could get away with anything. This profile is not rare in true crime novels. Nevertheless, the story is interesting and worth reading.

THE GLASS CASTLE, by Jeannette Walls.

It's probably the most thoughtful and sensitive memoir I can ever remember reading - - told with such grace, kindness and fabulous sense of humor. It's probably the best account ever written of a dysfunctional family -- and it must have taken Walls so much courage to put pen to paper and recount the details of her rather bizarre childhood - - which although it's like none other and is so dramatic - - any reader will relate to it. Readers will find bits and pieces of their own parents in Rex and Rose Mary Walls. Her journey across the country, ending up in a poor mining town in West Virginia and then finally in New York City, is a fascinating tale of survival. Her zest for life, even when eating margarine and sugar and bundled in a cardboard box with sweaters, coats and huddling with her pets, is unbelievably beautiful - - and motivating. If I could give a book ten stars, it would be "The Glass Castle."

MY GRANDFATHER’S SON, by Clarence Thomas.

Clarence Thomas, the most conservative justice on a distinctly conservative U.S. Supreme Court, may well be the nation's most polarizing legal figure, and so it is only fitting that he has penned a polarizing memoir. In addition to chronicling his amazing journey from crushing poverty in his native Georgia to the nation's highest court, "My Grandfather's Son" is a furious assault on liberalism generally and on what Thomas calls the liberal political elite that sought to derail his confirmation.In his 15 years on the high court, the 59-year-old justice has long since established his once-doubted legal and intellectual bona fides. Yet with an eye on posterity, he seems to crave validation as having deserved his appointment and, more broadly, as a noble man fighting to do the right thing in an often bigoted, deceitful world. As Thomas puts it in his preface, he is rescuing his own history from the "careless hands" and "malicious hearts" of unnamed others.Whether Thomas' much-anticipated memoir will advance this cause is doubtful. Thomas' supporters will cheer his often eloquent and always feisty accounts in which every liberal idea is derided as a foolish "piety" belied by his life experience. But his polemical, score-settling approach is likely only to deepen the enmity of his detractors.Nowhere is this more true than in Thomas' treatment of the he-said / she-said conflagration over Anita F. Hill's charges that he made crude sexual advances toward her. Neither his successful Senate confirmation in 1991 nor the passage of time has mellowed his view of what he then famously decried as a "high-tech lynching." Spewing invective, Thomas depicts Hill as an abrasive, vindictive, politically motivated liar exploited by a "smooth-tongued" liberal "mob" (including a biased press) that was hell-bent on his personal destruction to prevent a more conservative court from overturning Roe vs. Wade. He casts himself as Tom Robinson, the black man wrongly accused of rape in "To Kill a Mockingbird," his favorite book as a youth. (Hill, a professor at Brandeis University, has declined to comment on the book or Thomas' characterization of her as a "mediocre" but ambitious lawyer and "my most traitorous adversary.")Thomas is refreshingly candid about the depths of his suffering, and one comes away with a deep sadness about our broken politics and the ferocious disincentives for anyone to seek high government appointment.Baring emotional wounds, however, is not the same as presenting a convincing case of innocence. Since the confirmation hearings, several careful journalists have shown that he was nothing like the uptight, prudish figure he presented at the time -- someone who could not possibly have talked about pubic hairs and Long Dong Silver. In law school, Thomas was a voracious consumer of pornography with a coarse sense of humor -- and credible evidence exists that his pornographic interest extended much later into his life. Thomas cops to none of this except to note briefly that, from "immaturity," he might have joined in a few discussions of pornography at Yale, when the movie "Deep Throat" and its ilk were mainstream cultural phenomena. Nor does he address others' claims that would seem to corroborate Hill's charge that Thomas made unwanted sexual advances toward her when she worked for him at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.This doesn't necessarily mean that Hill's accusations were true. It does mean that Thomas' sense of outrage is exaggerated and one-sided. He rails against a vast left-wing conspiracy for distorting his true character. Yet the portrait painted by his supporters at the time and now by Thomas was (and is) also false. For all his fury at those who so intrusively investigated him, he has only praise for those who slung the mud at Hill, tarring her with little foundation as journalist David Brock did in describing her as "a little bit nutty, a little bit slutty."The risk is that Thomas' polemical rendering of his confirmation fight will overshadow more effective -- and in some ways more important -- parts of his memoir. The enigma of Thomas has always been how a black man growing up in the Jim Crow South, who lived the American dream at least partly due to affirmative action, could be so intractably conservative and so scornful of the very programs from which he benefited."My Grandfather's Son" answers this question powerfully. As the title indicates, Thomas was reared by his grandfather, Myles Anderson, because his father abandoned him as a toddler and his mother hadn't the wherewithal to raise him. To say that Anderson practiced tough love is an understatement. He beat Thomas, denied him sports (despite the boy's athletic prowess) and subjected him at a tender age to hard physical labor. Emotionally remote, Anderson later kicked him out of the house when -- in a major break from his parochial upbringing -- Thomas decided to leave a Missouri seminary college.But as Thomas lovingly recounts, his grandfather taught him self-reliance, tenacity and religious faith. These gave him a resilience and independent spirit that Thomas convincingly credits with allowing him to leave behind the specter of an unproductive and potentially crime-ridden life and, instead, to excel amid widespread bigotry and want.Although Thomas' conservatism emerged after a flirtation with lefty radicalism, the rightward turn follows with perfect logic from the searing emotional lessons of his childhood. He was taught to steel himself against weakness, despise dependency and overcome racism through individual excellence. He did so, brilliantly, to the point where his greatest resentment comes from being the recipient of an unwanted helping hand -- the affirmative action program that helped him gain entrance to Yale. For Thomas, this was not a welcome door-opener, but rather "the soft underbelly of his career," a debasing of his own genuine achievement that encouraged doubts about his abilities.Although Thomas ends the memoir at the moment he is sworn in as a justice, his Supreme Court opinions are a natural extension of the narrative. His jurisprudence is most notable for his virulent opposition to affirmative action (including a rejection of the idea, belied by Thomas' own experience, that minority students learn better in a multi-racial environment), his attack on the constitutionality of New Deal-style social programs and his support for a more active role for religion in public life.This correlation between personal values, political beliefs and constitutional philosophy pose an ironic dilemma for the author. Of all the justices, Thomas has been among the most adamant in insisting that it is wrong for a judge's moral preferences and personal experiences to color his view of the law. Yet the memoir suggests on almost every page that Thomas has followed the opposite approach -- that his legal views appear to be the sum of his life experiences, that he is his grandfather's son both as a man and as a justice. This revelation, perhaps unintended, has the virtue of honesty, but whether it is a cause for celebration or worry depends entirely on where one stands along the chasm that divides our political culture.

SLASH, by Slash with Anthony Bozza.

From one of the greatest rock guitarists of our era comes a memoir that redefines sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll
He was born in England but reared in L.A., surrounded by the leading artists of the day amidst the vibrant hotbed of music and culture that was the early seventies. Slash spent his adolescence on the streets of Hollywood, discovering drugs, drinking, rock music, and girls, all while achieving notable status as a BMX rider. But everything changed in his world the day he first held the beat-up one-string guitar his grandmother had discarded in a closet.
The instrument became his voice and it triggered a lifelong passion that made everything else irrelevant. As soon as he could string chords and a solo together, Slash wanted to be in a band and sought out friends with similar interests. His closest friend, Steven Adler, proved to be a conspirator for the long haul. As hairmetal bands exploded onto the L.A. scene and topped the charts, Slash sought his niche and a band that suited his raw and gritty sensibility.
He found salvation in the form of four young men of equal mind: Axl Rose, Izzy Stradlin, Steven Adler, and Duff McKagan. Together they became Guns N' Roses, one of the greatest rock 'n' roll bands of all time. Dirty, volatile, and as authentic as the streets that weaned them, they fought their way to the top with groundbreaking albums such as the iconic Appetite for Destruction and Use Your Illusion I and II.
Here, for the first time ever, Slash tells the tale that has yet to be told from the inside: how the band came together, how they wrote the music that defined an era, how they survived insane, never-ending tours, how they survived themselves, and, ultimately, how it all fell apart. This is a window onto the world of the notoriously private guitarist and a seat on the roller-coaster ride that was one of history's greatest rock 'n' roll machines, always on the edge of self-destruction, even at the pinnacle of its success. This is a candid recollection and reflection of Slash's friendships past and present, from easygoing Izzy to ever-steady Duff to wild-child Steven and complicated Axl.
It is also an intensely personal account of struggle and triumph: as Guns N' Roses journeyed to the top, Slash battled his demons, escaping the overwhelming reality with women, heroin, coke, crack, vodka, and whatever else came along.
He survived it all: lawsuits, rehab, riots, notoriety, debauchery, and destruction, and ultimately found his creative evolution. From Slash's Snakepit to his current band, the massively successful Velvet Revolver, Slash found an even keel by sticking to his guns.
Slash is everything the man, the myth, the legend, inspires: it's funny, honest, inspiring, jaw-dropping . . . and, in a word, excessive.

THE WAR, by Geoffrey C. Ward.

The War, the companion volume to Ken Burns' documentary, looks at first glance like the coffee table book of the season. It is, but only in the sense that, given its size, a coffee table might be the most practical place to read it. And The War, which lands in bookstores this week, should be read by everyone, from high schoolers, many of whom, as Burns points out in his introduction, "think we fought with the Germans against the Russians in the Second World War," to baby boomers, who think they know what their parents went through.
Unique not only among previous Burns companion volumes but among all books on World War II, The War pursues two main currents: the stories of four American towns during the war years and the bigger picture of both the European and Pacific fronts. The course of the war is never allowed to become too distant a subject. When battles are linked to the lives of the men who served and their friends and family in Waterbury, Conn.; Mobile, Ala.; Luverne, Minn.; and Sacramento, Calif., history becomes the stuff of personal drama.
Geoffrey C. Ward, prize-winning biographer of Franklin Roosevelt and author of companion volumes for three other Burns films, including The Civil War, handles the historical narrative deftly. What, one wonders, is left to say about this war? The answer is not so much new information as new interpretation.
Ward is tougher than almost any recent historian on the generals and war planners whose decisions were responsible for such massive blunders as the feeble defense of the Philippines in 1942 and the landing at Anzio in Italy in 1944. And the reader will be, too, when men we have come to know die needlessly.
Ward juxtaposes major events with illuminating details. In Mobile, for instance, both country music legend Hank Williams and the father of home-run hero Hank Aaron worked in the same shipyard, the kind of integration that would not have happened if not for the war effort.
But it's the personal side of the book, the stories of the common people from these towns and many others, including Japanese-Americans who went off to fight the Nazis while their parents lived behind barbed wire in interment camps, that pulls the reader in.
Their stories are told through newspaper articles, old photographs, letters to and from the front and, sometimes, most heart-rending of all, home movies that family members have kept for more than 60 years. They are also told, in many instances, by the participants themselves. All of these serve to re-create a time when Americans got their war news from the morning papers and radio rather than television and the Internet.
We find out the fate of soldiers, sailors and airmen as their loved ones find out. Each new death — usually delivered in the form of a Western Union telegram — hits the reader with the jolt of an emotional rifle slug (the reproduction of one such telegram provides one of the book's starkest photos).
Part history, part memoir and part photo album, The War is compelling on many levels. The photographs are a mesmerizing collection of both the war the GIs saw and the changing world they left behind. Many are so upsetting that for a long time they were known only to the men who took them: In the Ardennes Forest, American soldiers try to distinguish between our dead and the enemy in a pile of frozen corpses; in Dresden, a German town destroyed by Allied bombs, dead men, women and children are heaped in piles more than six feet tall; Marines on Okinawa stand around a radio looking stricken as they hear the news that the war in Europe is over. When will their war be over?
Much of The War will hit the uninitiated with a shock. Readers will begin to understand why fighter pilot Quentin Aanenson could never return to his father's farm in Minnesota. "I find there are times when I'm pulled back into the whirlpool," he says. "The intensity of that experience was so overwhelming that you can't let go of it."

AMERICAN CREATION, by Joseph J. Ellis

Academic fashion determines the way whole generations are educated, and since the '60s, as historian Joseph Ellis slyly remarks, a "hegemonic narrative" has prevailed within the academy, in which race, class, and gender are the privileged categories and the Founding Fathers of the American Republic have all too often been dismissed as the deadest of dead white males -- "racists, classists, and sexists, a kind of rogues' gallery rather than a gallery of greats." Historians have focused their attention, instead, on America's dispossessed: slaves, women, and Native Americans.
But in the last few years, the cultural focus has returned to the Founding Fathers with the appearance of a number of hugely popular new books, including bestselling biographies of Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, and Washington. The Founders are back: back with a vengeance, thanks to writers like Ellis himself, whose elegant, balanced books on the Founding era and biographies of Jefferson, Adams, and Washington have done much to return the public's attention to this remarkable group of men and their accomplishments.
Part of the urgent new interest in the founders might be attributable to the attacks currently being made on their greatest achievements, the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The significance of habeas corpus, for instance, such a tortured issue today, can best be understood by going back to James Madison and the context within which he pressed for its enshrinement in the new nation's law. Another attraction is the way the Founders, brilliant men by any standards, shine by contrast with our present-day political leaders. As Henry Adams remarked way back in the 19th century, if you looked at all the American presidents panoramically, you would have to conclude that Darwin got it exactly backward.
The question that has always fascinated Ellis -- and so many other historians of the Founding era -- is, "How did they do it?" In American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic, Ellis states the case.
During the last quarter of the eighteenth century a former colony of Great Britain, generally regarded as a provincial and wholly peripheral outpost of Western Civilization, somehow managed to establish a set of ideas and institutions that, over the stretch of time, became the blueprint for political and economic success for the nation-state in the modern world…. [These institutions included] representative government bottomed on the principle of popular sovereignty, a market economy fueled by the energies of unfettered citizens, a secular state unaffiliated with any official religion, and the rule of law that presumed the equality of all citizens.Posterity has generally deemed these achievements triumphs. But there were blunders at the Founding, too, disasters that might have been averted but were not, causing tragedy and all but tearing the Union to pieces. Most notable among these was the failure to end slavery, or at least to come up with a gradual scheme for emancipation, and the failure to create and enforce a fair settlement with the Native Americans. Ellis takes a close look at both the triumphs and the tragedies, showing us new facets of the familiar stories.
What makes Ellis's work so persuasive is his unwillingness to see the Founders in a simplistic light, either as ideal heroes or as racist villains. They were great men but undoubtedly flawed ones, and none of them has escaped with his reputation unstained. As Ellis remarks, "It is uncommon for the same men who make a revolution also to secure it," and the process of securing it involved compromises that some of the protagonists found nearly unbearable.
In a fascinating chapter on the creation and ratification of the Constitution, Ellis argues that the climax of that particular drama was not the Constitutional Convention of 1787 but the Virginia Ratifying Convention of 1788, which pitted a cast of titans against each other in a bitter fight over federal versus state authority. James Madison and George Washington, backed by Alexander Hamilton, argued in favor of a model in which federal authority would supersede that of the individual states, while George Mason and the great orator Patrick Henry fought for the principal of state sovereignty and a minimum of centralized power. The Henry-Madison debate in June 1788 was, Ellis claims, possibly "the most consequential debate in American history" -- even more so than the Lincoln-Douglas debates over slavery or the Darrow-Bryan one on evolution.
Eventually, the two sides were obliged to come to a compromise that pleased hardly anyone; in fact, Madison, at that time, felt that he had lost all the major battles and that "the principal of state sovereignty had been qualified but not killed, as he believed it should be." Ellis points out that the solution was a fruitful one in spite of itself, "making argument itself the answer by creating a framework in which federal and state authority engaged in an ongoing negotiation for supremacy, thereby making the Constitution, like history itself, an argument without end." Not quite entirely without end, perhaps; an end of sorts to aspects of the argument would certainly come on the battlefields of the Civil War.
The Antifederalist fear -- some have called it paranoia -- is worth considering. Its spokesmen, from Patrick Henry to its modern proponents, have argued that once in place, the federal government's "relentless expansion of arbitrary power was unstoppable, its tendency toward corruption was inevitable, and its appetite for despotism was unquenchable" -- an anti–Big Government position, in other words. For much of our country's history, this complaint came from the political right; now, though, it is gaining new adherents from the center and left, due to the Bush administration's unprecedented usurpation of power. The argument lives on, it seems.
In two subsequent chapters, Ellis shows how both Madison and Jefferson changed their positions due to the exigencies of political life after 1788. The beginning of the two-party system in 1791 defied everyone's conceptions of what the Constitutional government was supposed to be about, and it was psychologically impossible for Washington and Adams, "the last of a classical breed" and instinctively nonpartisan, to conceive of themselves as party men. But Alexander Hamilton's new fiscal programs led Madison and Jefferson, the southern agrarians, to fear that the Republic was being taken over by a sinister conspiracy of northern bankers and money men: the federal government, they believed, was running amok. Thus was born the Republican Party, with Jefferson at its head and Madison as his right hand.
"Given [Madison's] role as the most prominent Federalist of all in 1787-88, for him to recognize the Antifederalists as the heroic predecessors of the Republicans was akin to having Martin Luther declare his ultimate allegiance to the Vatican," Ellis comments dryly. Jefferson, too, was now displaying protean qualities that would ultimately lead him to defy any sort of political classification. When it became evident, during his presidency, that Napoleon Bonaparte was considering offering the Louisiana Territory for sale, Jefferson displayed his willingness to act unconstitutionally if the occasion demanded. "Throughout the 1790s he had labeled the Federalists 'monarchists' and insisted that any energetic projection of executive power violated republican principles. Now, he had just performed the most aggressive executive action ever by an American president, a projection of executive authority that would stand the test of time as perhaps the boldest in American history. If one wished to acquire an empire, it turned out, one had to become an imperial president."
It is hard to see how the two principal tragedies of the Founding era could have been evaded. Ellis shows us how during his first presidential term Washington, encouraged by Secretary of War Henry Knox, tried hard to create and implement a fair deal for the Native Americans in accordance with the republican principles for which the revolution had been fought. "It would reflect honor on the new government," Knox wrote, "were a declarative Law to be passed that the Indian tribes possess the right of the soil of all lands…and that they are not to be divested thereof but in consequence of fair and bona fide purchases, made under the authority, or with the express approbation of the United States." Knox and Washington envisioned a series of Indian homelands east of the Mississippi, protected by the federal government, that would eventually become states, but for many reasons -- especially the unstoppable streams of white settlers pouring into the Indian territories -- their efforts ended in debacle. It was a debacle Washington took personally, Ellis tells us, "believing that his signature on the [failed] Treaty of New York was his pledge of honor, as well as the solemn word of the United States government. Both were now being exposed as worthless."
The issue of slavery was, of course, the single most divisive question that faced the Founders. It was almost foreordained that the Constitution would fail to settle it, since there was no possible settlement that the 13 states could have agreed on: the Union would have dissolved before it even existed. But the Founders' failure on this subject went beyond a mere politic silence. As a group they were simply unable to imagine a functional biracial society. The resultant fissures in the newborn Republic were more than evident to the founding generation, but these men chose to push the inevitable earthquake into the future. It is a difficult choice to approve -- but a different course of action would probably have doomed the nascent Republic.
The most interesting aspect of Ellis's take on the Founders and their work is his vision -- a correct one, I think -- of the Union and the Constitution they created as ever-evolving, non-monolithic entities. Ellis's characterization of the Constitution as "an argument without end" has proved to be a just one, as anyone can see by tuning in to the Senate proceedings on C-SPAN today. Showing us the founding era as a series of philosophical conflicts and painful compromises rather than the triumphal progress celebrated in school textbooks makes American history -- and the embattled American present -- more comprehensible, and infinitely more accessible. --Brooke Allen
Brooke Allen is the author of Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers; Twentieth-Century Attitudes; and Artistic License. She is a contributor to The New York Times Book Review, The New Criterion, The New Leader, The Hudson Review, The Nation, and more.

MUSICOPHILIA, by Oliver Sacks.

Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does--humans are a musical species.
Oliver Sacks's compassionate, compelling tales of people struggling to adapt to different neurological conditions have fundamentally changed the way we think of our own brains, and of the human experience. In Musicophilia, he examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians, and everyday people--from a man who is struck by lightning and suddenly inspired to become a pianist at the age of forty-two, to an entire group of children with Williams syndrome who are hypermusical from birth; from people with "amusia," to whom a symphony sounds like the clattering of pots and pans, to a man whose memory spans only seven seconds--for everything but music.
Our exquisite sensitivity to music can sometimes go wrong: Sacks explores how catchy tunes can subject us to hours of mental replay, and how a surprising number of people acquire nonstop musical hallucinations that assault them night and day. Yet far more frequently, music goes right: Sacks describes how music can animate people with Parkinson's disease who cannot otherwise move, give words to stroke patients who cannot otherwise speak, and calm and organize people whose memories are ravaged by Alzheimer's or amnesia.
Music is irresistible, haunting, and unforgettable, and in Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks tells us why.

LONE SURVIVOR, by Marcus Luttrell with Patrick Robinson.

Four US Navy SEALS departed one clear night in early July, 2005 for the mountainous Afghanistan-Pakistan border for a reconnaissance mission. Their task was to document the activity of an al Qaeda leader rumored to have a small army in a Taliban stronghold. Five days later, only one of those Navy SEALS made it out alive.
This is the story of the only survivor of Operation Redwing, fire team leader Marcus Luttrell, and the extraordinary firefight that led to the largest loss of life in American Navy SEAL history. His teammates fought valiantly beside him until he was the only one left alive, blasted by an RPG into a place where his pursuers could not find him. Over the next four days, terribly injured and presumed dead, Luttrell crawled for miles through the mountains and was taken in by sympathetic villagers who risked their lives to keep him safe from surrounding Taliban warriors.
A born and raised Texan, Marcus Luttrell takes us from the rigors of SEAL training, where he and his fellow SEALs discovered what it took to join the most elite of the American special forces, to a fight in the desolate hills of Afghanistan for which they never could have been prepared. His account of his squadmates' heroism and mutual support renders an experience for which two of his squadmates were posthumously awarded the Navy Cross for combat heroism that is both heartrending and life-affirming. In this rich chronicle of courage and sacrifice, honor and patriotism, Marcus Luttrell delivers a powerful narrative of modern war.

QUIET STRENGTH, by Tony Dungy with Nathan Whitaker.

Tony Dungy's words and example have intrigued millions of people, particularly following his victory in Super Bowl XLI, the first for an African American coach. How is it possible for a coach--especially a football coach--to win the respect of his players and lead them to the Super Bowl without the screaming histrionics, the profanities, the demand that the sport come before anything else? How is it possible for anyone to be successful without compromising faith and family? In this inspiring and reflective memoir, Coach Dungy tells the story of a life lived for God and family--and challenges us all to redefine our ideas of what it means to succeed. Includes a foreword by Denzel Washington and a 16-page color photo insert.

THE AGE OF TURBULENCE, by Alan Greenspan

Later this year, Alan Greenspan's memoir will be released, titled "The Age of Turbulence."
Publication date is Sept. 17 (you cannot yet pre-order it on Amazon). Greenspan's editor is pushing the rumor that the Maestro's promotional tour will include an appearance on the Tonite Show with Jay Leno.
There are lots of books about The Maestro (including Bob Woodward 's Maestro). Many are less than flattering, with titles like Greenspan's Fraud; Who Shot Goldilocks?; and Bubble Man;
I still get a chuckle every time I recall the Onion quote about his retirement: "I guess the crash-and-burn lifestyle of a 'chairman of the Federal Reserve' finally caught up with the guy."

BORN STANDING UP, by Steve Martin.

The history of Western culture is full of artists who bled, starved, or courted madness for their work and their audience. But come on: How many of those phonies stuck an arrow through their head for us? Steve Martin's Born Standing Up is a spare, unexpectedly resonant remembrance of things past, the things in question being balloon animals and bunny ears, as well as the awkwardness Martin felt with his sullen father and the profound silliness he himself unleashed on stage. The book is unexpected not because fans have forgotten the sunburst that was Martin's stand-up but because you'd be forgiven for wondering if he has. It's been decades since he began reinventing himself as a wry, quietly powerful novelist, a snowy-haired movie dad, and a real, as opposed to ironic, sophisticate. ''I ignored my stand-up career for twenty-five years,'' he writes, ''but now, having finished this memoir, I view this time with surprising warmth. One can have, it turns out, an affection for the war years.''
Martin's prose is unusually meditative for a guy who once insisted that the ozone layer had to be saved because it was shielding us from another, more distant layer — of farts. Off stage, he always tended toward the non-wild and not-so-crazy. By 15, Martin was doing magic acts for Cub Scouts and making notes: ''Leave out unessasary [sic] jokes... relax, don't shake... charge money.'' At 20, he performed for a week at a club in San Francisco, where a sign in the kitchen read ''Anyone giving money to Janis Joplin before her last set is fired!'' It was here that his act became not comedy but ''a parody of comedy.'' Every desperate thing he'd done just to fill a 25-minute set — balloons, banjo playing, nose-glasses — suddenly cohered.
Describing the road to his colossal fame, Martin drops tidbits about being intimidated by Linda Ronstadt (''Steve, do you often date girls and not try to sleep with them?'') and passing Elvis backstage in Vegas (''Son, you have an ob-leek sense of humor''). He talks about anxiety attacks and his father's death. But this is not some star's tell-all. Martin's one true subject is the evolution of his comedy — the transcendent moments when he realized, say, that punchlines were the enemy, that a white suit could be seen better in a concert hall. Born is a smart, gentlemanly, modest book. That it comes from a man who's spent his life lampooning arrogance makes it all the more winning. In 2001, while hosting the Oscars, Martin had a one-liner that deserves to be remembered as one of the great skewerings of celebrity vanity. ''Please hold your applause,'' he said. ''Until it's for me.'' Fair enough. Here it comes: A

RESCUING SPRITE, by Mark R. Levin.

Although Mark Levin is known as a constitutional lawyer and a nationally syndicated broadcaster, he is, first and foremost, a dog lover. In 1998, he and his family welcomed a half-Border Collie/half-Cocker Spaniel they named Pepsi into their lives. Six years later, his wife and son persuaded him to adopt a dog from the local shelter, a Spaniel mix. It turned out he was older than originally thought, and he was the most beautiful dog they'd ever seen. They named him Sprite. Their lives would never be the same.Sprite and Pepsi became fast friends. They did everything together, from rummaging through the trash to loudly greeting the deliveryman. And the Levin family fell in love with him -- with his gentle nature, beautiful face and soft, huggable fur. But on Halloween night, shortly after joining their family, Sprite suddenly collapsed and was rushed to the animal hospital. It was the first of many such visits, and the start of a long journey for the Levin family, filled with much joy and anguish.During the next two years, Sprite and Pepsi were inseparable. And Sprite's bond with the Levin family deepened. Friends, neighbors, and even Mark's radio audience came to know and love Sprite. As Mark's daughter turned eighteen and graduated from high school and Mark's son turned fifteen, Sprite's health deteriorated -- even as his spirits remained high and his beauty and grace continued to inspire. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas 2006, the Levin family said their emotional final goodbye. Crushed and consumed with grief, Mark turned to family, friends, and fans for help.But new hope came when the Levins least expected it.Rescuing Sprite is a stunningly intimate look atthe love between a family and a dog, one that movingly shows, in Mark Levin's words, that "in the end, we humans are the lucky ones."The author will donate a portion of his proceeds from the sale of this book to animal shelters.

90 MINUTES IN HEAVEN, by Don Piper with Cecil Murphey

More than 1 million copies sold!On the way home from a conference, Don Piper's car was crushed by a semi-truck that crossed into his lane. Medical personnel said he died instantly. While his body lay lifeless inside the ruins of his car, Piper experienced the glories of heaven, awed by its beauty and music. 90 minutes after the wreck, while a minister prayed for him, Piper miraculously returned to life on earth with only the memory of inexpressible heavenly bliss. His faith in God was severely tested as he faced an uncertain and grueling recovery. Now he'd like to share his life-changing story with you. 90 Minutes in Heaven offers a glimpse into a very real dimension of God's reality. This New York Times bestseller encourages those recovering from serious injuries and those dealing with the loss of a loved one. The experience dramatically changed Piper's life, and it will change yours too.

CLAPTON, by Eric Clapton

I found a pattern in my behavior that had been repeating itself for years, decades even. Bad choices were my specialty, and if something honest and decent came along, I would shun it or run the other way.”With striking intimacy and candor, Eric Clapton tells the story of his eventful and inspiring life in this poignant and honest autobiography. More than a rock star, he is an icon, a living embodiment of the history of rock music. Well known for his reserve in a profession marked by self-promotion, flamboyance, and spin, he now chronicles, for the first time, his remarkable personal and professional journeys. Born illegitimate in 1945 and raised by his grandparents, Eric never knew his father and, until the age of nine, believed his actual mother to be his sister. In his early teens his solace was the guitar, and his incredible talent would make him a cult hero in the clubs of Britain and inspire devoted fans to scrawl “Clapton is God” on the walls of London’s Underground. With the formation of Cream, the world's first supergroup, he became a worldwide superstar, but conflicting personalities tore the band apart within two years. His stints in Blind Faith, in Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, and in Derek and the Dominos were also short-lived but yielded some of the most enduring songs in history, including the classic “Layla.” During the late sixties he played as a guest with Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan, as well as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and longtime friend George Harrison. It was while working with the latter that he fell for George’s wife, Pattie Boyd, a seemingly unrequited love that led him to the depths of despair, self-imposed seclusion, and drug addiction. By the early seventies he had overcome his addiction and released the bestselling album 461 Ocean Boulevard, with its massive hit “I Shot the Sheriff.” He followed that with the platinum album Slowhand, which included “Wonderful Tonight,” the touching love song to Pattie, whom he finally married at the end of 1979. A short time later, however, Eric had replaced heroin with alcohol as his preferred vice, following a pattern of behavior that not only was detrimental to his music but contributed to the eventual breakup of his marriage. In the eighties he would battle and begin his recovery from alcoholism and become a father. But just as his life was coming together, he was struck by a terrible blow: His beloved four-year-old son, Conor, died in a freak accident. At an earlier time Eric might have coped with this tragedy by fleeing into a world of addiction. But now a much stronger man, he took refuge in music, responding with the achingly beautiful “Tears in Heaven.”Clapton is the powerfully written story of a survivor, a man who has achieved the pinnacle of success despite extraordinary demons. It is one of the most compelling memoirs of our time.

THREE CUPS OF TEA, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

Three Cups of Tea is a truly inspiring story and also a very readable action-adventure! Many climbers have passed through the same areas of Pakistan as Mortenson, and made the same promises to the local people - to help them in some way or another; but the difference between Greg and so many others is that he followed through. He didn't set out to be a hero, he didn't even set out to 'make a difference' - he just set out to fulfill a promise that would have been so easy to forget. Despite the many obstacles in his way he raised the money and returned to Pakistan, but it took a further two-years, more money and many road-blocks, to build that first school.

GOOD DOG. STAY., by Anna Quindlen

The life of a good dog is like the life of a good person, only shorter and more compressed,” writes Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anna Quindlen about her beloved black Labrador retriever, Beau. With her trademark wisdom and humor, Quindlen reflects on how her life has unfolded in tandem with Beau’s, and on the lessons she’s learned by watching him: to roll with the punches, to take things as they come, to measure herself not in terms of the past or the future but of the present, to raise her nose in the air from time to time and, at least metaphorically, holler, “I smell bacon!” Of the dog that once possessed a catcher’s mitt of a mouth, Quindlen reminisces, “there came a time when a scrap thrown in his direction usually bounced unseen off his head. Yet put a pork roast in the oven, and the guy still breathed as audibly as an obscene caller. The eyes and ears may have gone, but the nose was eternal. And the tail. The tail still wagged, albeit at half-staff. When it stops, I thought more than once, then we’ll know.” Heartening and bittersweet, Good Dog. Stay. honors the life of a cherished and loyal friend and offers listeners a valuable lesson on four-legged family members: Sometimes an old dog can teach a person new tricks.
Biography

INTO THE WILD, by Jon Krakauer

Into the Wild is the story of Christopher McCandless, who grew up in a wealthy suburb of Washington, D.C., Annandale, Virginia, and died at age 24 in a wilderness area of the state of Alaska. After graduating in 1990 from Emory University, McCandless ceased communicating with his family, gave away his savings of $24,000 to OXFAM and began travelling, later abandoning his car and burning all the money in his wallet.
In April 1992, an Alaskan named Jim Gallien gave McCandless a ride to the Stampede Trail in Alaska. There McCandless headed down the snow-covered trail to begin an odyssey with only ten pounds of rice, a .22 caliber rifle, a camera, several boxes of rifle rounds, some camping gear, and a small selection of literature—including a field guide to the region's edible plants, Tana'ina Plantlore. He took no map or compass. He died some time in August, and his decomposed body was found in early September by moose hunters.
The book begins with the discovery of McCandless's body inside an abandoned bus (63°51'36.13"N 149°24'50.62"W)[3] and retraces his travels during the two years he was missing. Christopher shed his real name early in his journey, adopting the moniker "Alexander Supertramp". He spent time in Carthage, South Dakota with a man named Wayne Westerberg, and in Slab City, California with Jan Burres and her boyfriend Bob. Krakauer interprets McCandless' intensely ascetic personality as possibly influenced by the writings of Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, and his favorite writer, Jack London. He explores the similarities between McCandless' experiences and motivations and his own as a young man, recounting in detail his own attempt to climb Devils Thumb in Alaska. He also relates the stories of some other young men who vanished into the wilderness, such as Everett Ruess, an artist and wanderer who went missing in the Utah desert during 1934 at age 20. In addition, he describes at some length the grief and puzzlement of McCandless's family and friends.
McCandless survived for approximately 112 days in the Alaskan wilderness, foraging for edible roots and berries, shooting an assortment of game—including a moose—and keeping a journal. Although he planned to hike to the coast, the boggy terrain of summer proved too difficult and he decided instead to camp in a derelict bus. In July, he tried to leave, only to find the route blocked by high water. Toward the end of July, after apparently remaining healthy for more than three months, McCandless wrote a journal entry reporting extreme weakness and blaming it on "pot. seeds." As Krakauer explains, McCandless had been eating the roots of Hedysarum alpinum, a historically edible plant commonly known as wild potato (also "Eskimo potato"). , which are sweet and nourishing in the spring but later become too tough to eat. When this happened, McCandless may have attempted to eat the seeds instead. Krakauer theorizes that the seeds contained a poisonous alkaloid, possibly swainsonine (the toxic chemical in locoweed) or something similar. In addition to neurological symptoms such as weakness and loss of coordination, the poison causes starvation by blocking nutrient metabolism in the body.
According to Krakauer, a well-nourished person might consume the seeds and survive because the body can use its stores of glucose and amino acids to rid itself of the poison. Since McCandless lived on a diet of rice, lean meat, and wild plants and had less than 10% body fat when he died, Krakauer theorized he was likely unable to fend off the toxins. Roots of wild potato were used extensively by aboriginal people, eaten both raw and cooked and used as a licorice substitute. Inuit hunters eat wild potato roots while hunting. However, when the Eskimo potatoes from the area around the bus were later tested in a laboratory of the University of Alaska Fairbanks by Dr. Thomas Clausen, toxins were not found. In the most recent edition of his book, Krakauer has slightly modified his theory regarding the cause of McCandless' death. He believes the seeds of the wild potato had been moldy, and it is the mold that contributed to the seeds' toxicity. The exact cause of the young man's death remains open to question. McCandless may simply have starved to death, a theory backed by the fact that McCandless weighed an estimated 67 pounds at the time his body was discovered.

BOOM!, by Tom Brokaw

n The Greatest Generation, his landmark bestseller, Tom Brokaw eloquently evoked for America what it meant to come of age during the Great Depression and the Second World War. Now, in Boom!, one of America’s premier journalists gives us an epic portrait of another defining era in America as he brings to life the tumultuous Sixties, a fault line in American history. The voices and stories of both famous people and ordinary citizens come together as Brokaw takes us on a memorable journey through a remarkable time, exploring how individual lives and the national mindset were affected by a controversial era and showing how the aftershocks of the Sixties continue to resound in our lives today. In the reflections of a generation, Brokaw also discovers lessons that might guide us in the years ahead. Boom! One minute it was Ike and the man in the grey flannel suit, and the next minute it was time to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” While Americans were walking on the moon, Americans were dying in Vietnam. Nothing was beyond question, and there were far fewer answers than before.Published as the fortieth anniversary of 1968 approaches, Boom! gives us what Brokaw sees as a virtual reunion of some members of “the class of ’68,” offering wise and moving reflections and frank personal remembrances about people’s lives during a time of high ideals and profound social, political, and individual change. What were the gains, what were the losses? Who were the winners, who were the losers? As they look back decades later, what do members of the Sixties generation think really mattered in that tumultuous time, and what will have meaning going forward? Race, war, politics, feminism, popular culture, and music are all explored here, and we learn from a wide range of people about their lives. Tom Brokaw explores how members of this generation have gone on to bring activism and a Sixties mindset into individual entrepreneurship today. We hear stories of how this formative decade has led to a recalibrated perspective–on business, the environment, politics, family, our national existence. Remarkable in its insights, profoundly moving, wonderfully written and reported, this revealing portrait of a generation and of an era, and of the impact of the 1960s on our lives today, lets us be present at this reunion ourselves, and join in these frank conversations about America then, now, and tomorrow.

THE INNOCENT MAN, by John Grisham

John Grisham’s first work of nonfiction, an exploration of small town justice gone terribly awry, is his most extraordinary legal thriller yet.In the major league draft of 1971, the first player chosen from the State of Oklahoma was Ron Williamson. When he signed with the Oakland A’s, he said goodbye to his hometown of Ada and left to pursue his dreams of big league glory.Six years later he was back, his dreams broken by a bad arm and bad habits—drinking, drugs, and women. He began to show signs of mental illness. Unable to keep a job, he moved in with his mother and slept twenty hours a day on her sofa.In 1982, a 21-year-old cocktail waitress in Ada named Debra Sue Carter was raped and murdered, and for five years the police could not solve the crime. For reasons that were never clear, they suspected Ron Williamson and his friend Dennis Fritz. The two were finally arrested in 1987 and charged with capital murder.With no physical evidence, the prosecution’s case was built on junk science and the testimony of jailhouse snitches and convicts. Dennis Fritz was found guilty and given a life sentence. Ron Williamson was sent to death row.If you believe that in America you are innocent until proven guilty, this book will shock you. If you believe in the death penalty, this book will disturb you. If you believe the criminal justice system is fair, this book will infuriate you.