Great Reads for Grown-Ups

If you're looking for some eclectic stocking stuffers or a few gifts to scatter around the menorah, this year's list of nonfiction favorites offers something for every taste. Are the readers in your life consumed by eating, cheating, or envy? Then rush right out and grab a copy of Alan Richmond's laugh-out-loud-funny Fork It Over, David Callahan's eye-opening The Cheating Culture, or Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety, a commentary on the things that drive us batty. For readers who prefer a more placid view of humankind, the Dalai Lama offers some soul-soothing advice in The Wisdom of Forgiveness. No list of recommended titles for librarians would be complete without books about reading and literature, of course, and this year's selections include a worthy trio: Will in the World (the incredible story of the greatest playwright who ever lived), The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll (a jaw-dropping look at the life of Dare Wright, the creator of the wildly successful Lonely Doll series), and Why Read? (an impassioned plea for the importance of literature in children's lives). I hope you'll be challenged and inspired by the following 10 titles. I know I am.

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead. Callahan, David. Harcourt. $26. ISBN 0-15-101018-8.

A "seismic change has altered the terms of American life"—and not for the better, writes David Callahan. In this compelling jeremiad, the director of research for Demos, a nonpartisan public policy group, and a commentator on National Public Radio, reveals that Americans are cheating in all areas of their lives more often and feeling a lot less guilty about it. In fact, things have gotten to the point where many people believe that they "place themselves at a disadvantage if they play by the official rules rather than the real rules." What's contributed to this widespread deception? Callahan points to the erosion of ethical standards in the workplace (padding expense accounts), sports (illegal performance-enhancing drugs), relationships (illicit Internet romance), and schools (plagiarizing and using text messaging during standardized tests). Chillingly, even individualism, that quintessentially American character trait, has begun to "turn toxic" as personal aspirations become fueled by an envy of others' possessions and accomplishments. What are parents of young children to do? Callahan recommends they live a lifestyle in which money and status are no longer perceived as "the greatest good" and counsel their kids to play by the ethical rules.

Status Anxiety. de Botton, Alain. Pantheon. $24. ISBN 0-375-42083-5.

Are you a winner or a loser? If you find yourself fixated on that question, join the club. Status anxiety is the obsession of our age, says Alain de Botton, and it's a "worry so pernicious as to be capable of ruining extended stretches of our lives." What are its symptoms? They include a preoccupation with "lovelessness" (the feeling that the world doesn't give a hoot about you), material goods (especially one's unfulfilled expectations), snobbery and its practitioners' penchant for belittling those who are not the "right sort," and our dependence upon luck or "fickle talent." De Botton, the author of the bestselling How Proust Can Change Your Life, traces the history of status anxiety—beginning with the French Revolution and extending to today's tendency to secretly envy one's friends' successes—and offers an entertaining, humorous cure for this affliction. By embracing philosophy, the arts, religion, politics, or a Bohemian lifestyle (à la Greenwich Village Beats), de Botton says we can inoculate ourselves against further contagion. After all, there's "more than one way… of succeeding in life."

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. Greenblatt, Stephen. Norton. $26.95. ISBN 0-393-05057-2.

If you're looking for the most interesting biography ever written about the Bard, search no further. Greenblatt, a professor at Harvard University and the editor of The Norton Shakespeare, sets out "to discover the actual person who wrote the most important body of imaginative literature in the last thousand years." The result is a highly readable, first-rate literary detective story that attempts to solve the many mysteries surrounding Shakespeare's extraordinary life. Greenblatt speculates that the playwright was the well-educated son of a financially improvident Catholic glove maker. Young Will joined a traveling theater troupe and rose through its ranks by virtue of his ready wit and good will. But Shakespeare also had a competitive side, and he knew how to make the most of his uncanny knack of reflecting Elizabethan London's complex culture. Greenblatt's insights into Shakespeare's plays make the Bard's old, familiar phrases seem both astonishing and fresh, and he offers a fascinating breakdown of the effect of the Protestant Reformation on the English language. Reading Will in the World is bound to make you fall in love with Shakespeare's words all over again. In fact, it's almost impossible to read more than a dozen pages before reaching for your own well-worn copy of The Complete Works.

The Wisdom of Forgiveness: Intimate Conversations and Journeys. His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Victor Chan. Riverhead. $24.95. ISBN 1-57322-277-1.

“Do you hate the Chinese?” asked Victor Chan during his first audience with the Dalai Lama in 1972. Chan expected the exiled religious leader to give him the cold shoulder once Chan revealed that he was Chinese. After all, the Tibetan leader wouldn't have been forced to live in India if it hadn't been for China. But instead of expressing anger and resentment, the Dalai Lama professed a profound forgiveness toward his adversaries, "with no reservations." So began what would eventually become a 30-year dialogue about the nature of life and spirituality, the importance of compassion, and the wisdom of forgiveness. Chan, who is on the faculty of the Institute of Asian Research at the University of British Columbia, offers readers an unprecedented behind-the-scenes glimpse into the daily routines and spiritual practices of one of the world's most revered men. And what a view it is. Chan describes an encounter between the Dalai Lama and Oprah (she was interviewing him for a magazine article), as well as a jolly meeting between His Holiness and his great friend Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Why is it that people of all ethnic and religious persuasions seek out the Dalai Lama's counsel and teachings? Here's Tutu's take on it: "Because he is good, he is good, he is good."

Defining the Wind: The Beaufort Scale and How a Nineteenth-Century Admiral Turned Science into Poetry. Huler, Scott. Crown. $23. ISBN 1-4000-4884-2.

Scott Huler was working as a copy editor in 1983, paging through a dictionary, when he experienced an epiphany of sorts. Huler, who is now a writer and an occasional contributor to NPR, happened upon an unusual entry—a simple chart that deftly describes 13 grades of wind. The chart was created hundreds of years ago by Sir Francis Beaufort of the British Admiralty. Unlike most charts, Huler couldn't get this one out of his head, and over the years, he returned to it "as to a treasured poem or a favorite passage in Aeschylus or the Bible." It's easy to understand Huler's fascination: "The Beaufort Scale is… the ultimate expression of concise, clear, and absolutely powerful writing, 110 words in 6-point type," he explains. "In fact the Beaufort Scale description of the wind doesn't merely reach th[e] highest perfectible level of clarity. As may be necessary, reaching that level, it surpasses it and becomes poetry." The object of Huler's admiration describes every conceivable type of wind—ranging from calm currents of less than 1 mph ("smoke rises, vertically") to fresh breezes of 19 to 24 mph ("small trees in leaf begin to sway; crested wavelets form on inland waters") to hurricanes with gusts surpassing 73 mph ("devastation occurs"). Huler's search to discover "the guy who wrote this awesome wind scale that blew my mind" led him to libraries, archives, the British Admiralty, the British Broadcasting Company, and Montevideo, Uruguay, the site of Beaufort's earliest charts. Readers will be absorbed by this story of the nature of scientific inquiry and the power and value of concise, poetic observation.

The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright. Nathan, Jean. Holt. $25. ISBN 0-8050-7612-3.

Jean Nathan's well-researched account of the life of the creator of the Lonely Doll series is as mesmerizing (and horrific) as a Hitchcock thriller. Born in 1914, writer and photographer Dare Wright was the only daughter of Edith Stevenson Wright, a narcissistic, controlling mother. Tired of her marriage, Edie divorced, quickly sloughed off Dare's brother, Blaine, on relatives, and "devoted herself" to bringing up her adorable daughter. But Edie's brand of devotion would give even a strict Freudian analyst pause. The two shared the same bed well into Dare's adulthood, and Edie treated her daughter like a doppelganger. The mother and daughter also photographed each other compulsively, often in provocative poses. Dare grew up to become a passive, self-absorbed, model-trim, asexual, stunning blond—with an almost fetishistic attachment to an oversized doll that she called… Edith. Originally published in the late '50s and '60s—a sweeter, less politically correct era—the Lonely Doll series was a publishing sensation. The oversized books, which feature Dare's black-and-white photos and gingham covers that match the doll's dress, tell the story of Edith, a lonely doll who is befriended by Mister Bear and his son, Little Bear. Despite The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll's sometimes disturbing details, this is an unflaggingly empathetic, nonjudgmental portrait of the artist as a lonely little girl.

Fork It Over: The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater. Richman, Alan. HarperCollins. $24.95. ISBN 0-06-058629-X.

"I am a restaurant critic. I eat for a living," says Alan Richman in the introduction to this humorous, lively collection of essays. "I know how to eat as well as any man alive." That's for sure. Richman is GQ magazine's long-time food, wine, and restaurant critic and a recipient of nine distinguished James Beard Awards for restaurant reviewing. How has the quick-witted, occasionally smart-alecky Richman managed to become one of the world's most accomplished food critics? Simple. He lies, chats, and steals. Like most restaurant reviewers, Richman makes reservations under a pseudonym. But he also chats up waiters and busboys to get the skinny on what's happening behind those swinging kitchen doors. And he snitches the menus. Although Richman can be snide, he's also surprisingly self-deprecating, as when he reminisces about a boyhood epiphany he had while "dining" with his parents on the $1.09 steak special at Tad's, a now-defunct cafeteria-style chain in Chicago. Richman also offers "Ten Commandments for Diners," which include such tips as "pay no attention when the waiter suggests a 'favorite dish'" and "never order the house wine (anything is better: lager brewed from the toxic waters of America's Great Lakes)." This guy can flat out write—and he's funny. Just remember—don't read him with your mouth full.

In the Shadow of No Towers. Spiegelman, Art. Pantheon. $19.95. ISBN 0-375-42307-9.

Art Spiegelman, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus, is no ordinary cartoonist. And In the Shadow of No Towers is no ordinary graphic novel. It's Spiegelman's no-holds-barred look at the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The first thing you'll notice about this extraordinary book is its size: at 10" x 14.5", it's huge. Spiegelman thought the "giant scale… seemed perfect for oversized skyscrapers and outsized events"—and he's absolutely right. The book's stunning cover is a reprise of Spiegelman's now-famous illustration that appeared on the cover of the New Yorker magazine immediately following 9/11—a haunting black-on-black silhouette of the vanquished World Trade Center's towers, those lost "icons of an innocent age." In the Shadow of No Towers was published as a board book (yes, a board book!), and it's an inspired decision. The format allows Spiegelman (a self-confessed neurotic with a Chicken Little-like personality) to capture the terrifying experience of a sky that was truly falling. The artist asserts that after 9/11 "all New Yorkers were out of their minds compared to those for whom the attack remains an abstraction." Spiegelman's family lives just blocks from Ground Zero, and he re-creates the frightening, surreal experience of collecting his daughter from a nearby high school as the smoking towers toppled: "My wife, my daughter and I are rushing…. We hear a roar, like a waterfall and look back. The air smells of death." If you're looking for a dispassionate response to the events of 9/11, look elsewhere. Spiegelman rants. He raves. He's pissed. In the Shadow of No Towers is a frank "slow motion diary" of one man slouching toward New York City's "New Normal"—living life under a continuous state of alert.

The Undressed Art: Why We Draw. Steinhart, Peter. Knopf. $23. ISBN 1-4000-4184-8.

Painter Mark Tansey created an enormous canvass in 1984 entitled Triumph of the New York School. Full of military figures and painted in the ambitious style of Velázquez's 17th-century masterpiece, The Surrender of Breda, the painting depicts a defeated army about to sign a truce. The message of Tansey's painting is clear: abstract painting has triumphed over representational art. What has been the fate of drawing? "Since the middle of the twentieth century, abstraction and expressionism have been the lodestones of fine art, and drawing has been diminished and disparaged," observes Peter Steinhart. But Steinhart, a naturalist and a former editor of Audubon magazine, has recently noticed signs to the contrary. Day in and day out, countless amateurs and professional artists are meeting in classrooms, church basements, community centers, studios, and libraries to draw nude models. And this phenomenon isn't happening exclusively in large urban areas like New York City or the San Francisco Bay Area, where Steinhart has been dropping in on live-drawing groups for the last 15 years; it's happening in places like Missoula, MT, Woodstock, IL, and McLean, VA. In this fascinating gem of a book, Steinhart offers wonderful insights into the link between the act of drawing and the way our brains work and helps us understand the pure and simple power of sketching the human figure.

Why Read? Edmundson, Mark. Bloomsbury. $21.95. ISBN 1-58234-425-6.

Most librarians are aware of the somber findings of "Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America," released last summer by the National Endowment for the Arts. The survey revealed what librarians have long suspected: young people are reading less quality fiction and poetry. Edmundson is determined to stem the tide, but he's not advocating any old kind of page turning. Instead, he's talking about the kind of thoughtful reading that challenges our deepest beliefs and assumptions, the kind of reading that changes lives. Edmundson, a professor at the University of Virginia, knows firsthand what he's talking about. He's observed that today's college students expect literature courses to be "lite" and prefer profs who are more entertaining than challenging, more schooled in Seinfeld than in Socrates. That's a far cry from the days when such courses offered students a clear-eyed examination of powerful themes and ethical choices or, as Edmundson puts it, "an enhanced opportunity to decide how they should live their lives." Through reading and studying great books, says Edmundson, students have a chance to learn how to make a difference in the world—rather than just learning how to make a living.