Victor Davis Hanson Encounter Books ($21.95) by Anis Shivani Victor Davis Hanson, classics professor at Cal State Fresno, conservative military historian in favor with the current administration, and long-time California Central Valley farmer, has taken a crack at charting a middle course on the thorny problem of illegal Mexican immigration. On this issue, both the […]

Khassan Baiev (with Ruth and Nicholas Daniloff) Walker & Co. ($26) by Scott Esposito Recently, much has been made of the Pentagon's choice to prevent the distribution of images of American soldiers killed during the Iraq war. This gesture speaks volumes to the effect the brutality of war can have on people when that brutality […]

Elaine Pagels Random House ($24.95) by H. E. Everding As the biblical scholar Marcus Borg has said, "You can believe all the right things, and still be a jerk." In a sense, that's what Elaine Pagels experienced when after her son's near fatal illness she sought solace from a form of Christianity that represented faith […]

Edited by Isabelle de Courtivron Palgrave ($22.95) by Karl Krause True to its title, most of the essays collected in Isabelle de Courtivron's Lives in Translation focus on lives: first person narratives, struggles, and ponderings about life as an Other. Love affairs with languages and their emotional histories abound as these writers contemplate writing in […]

Phillip Lopate Basic Books ($25) By Ricky Opaterny It is no small irony that Philip Lopate is considered a master of the personal essay and yet his work is almost entirely out of print. Getting Personal, a selection of essays that range from the confessional to first-person journalism and criticism, draws work from six of […]

Edited by John Morthland Anchor Books ($15) by Adam Hall To write rock criticism having never read the work of the late Lester Bangs is a bit like attempting to ignite an audience never having heard of Iggy Pop: you can do it, but you'll have no idea how much better your predecessor was. Bangs's […]

Blake Bailey Picador ($35) by Kathleen Andersen Richard Yates could once be held up as the exemplar of the "writer's writer"—hailed by his peers as one of the greatest authors of the 20th century, but largely unread by the people he was so committed to writing about: ordinary Americans. This was a shame both for […]

Smedley Butler Feral House ($9.95) by Joel Turnipseed It's easy enough to imagine the long history of Marine Corps war heroes: Dan Daly cutting the pistol from a dead horse to continue fighting in Haiti, where he earned his second Medal of Honor; barrel-chested Lewis "Chesty" Puller, serving in campaigns stretching from World War I […]

Edited by Harvey Shapiro The Library of America ($20) by Jeffrey Alfier This anthology is one in a new series called the American Poets Project, an effort intended to produce a "compact national library of American poetry." Editor Harvey Shapiro—himself a veteran of 35 combat missions as a B-17 tail gunner—sets a solemn tone for […]

Jack Kerouac Edited by Regina Weinreich Penguin Poets ($13) by Keith Abbott If we talk about nothing, doesn't the talk become something? And don't we see, or think we see, the nothing through our something? What this process can achieve is a sense of space. There's this much room between the nothing we wish to […]