Between the covers: What’s really going on in the world of books

The novel is set in San Francisco in the 1890s, where “great fortunes are being made and family dynasties established as new money erases the often unsavoury pasts and shady dealings of their founders”. Its publisher, Simon & Schuster, describes it as having “the dark bits of Tim Burton and the shiny bits of Wes Anderson”, while the Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Michael Chabon said that Fowler “re-creates a lost world so thrillingly, with such intelligence, trickery, and art, that when you at last put the book down and look up from the page it all seems to linger, shimmering, around you, like the residue of a marvellous dream”.

Good news, too, for fans of Ian Rankin’s famous DI Rebus, after the author (above) implied on Twitter that the retired detective will make a comeback (his fourth) in the novel he is currently writing. After a series of teasing tweets about the book, one follower asked: “Dare I ask if it is a Rebus?” Rankin replied, “Yes”. Between the Covers first met Rankin in 2008, when he seemed happy to have retired the character and written the first, post-Rebus book, Doors Open.

Then again in 2009, to talk about The Complaints, when a fan approached him to say: “If you’re writing another book, please can we have Rebus back in it? I couldn’t get to grips with that last one.” Rankin replied, with remarkable patience: “Don’t make your mind up just yet. I’ve got a new book out in September [Dark Entries]. It’s got an Edinburgh cop in it ....” Nonetheless, Rebus returned in 2012’s Standing in Another Man’s Grave, 2013’s Saints of the Shadow Bible and last year’s short story collection, The Beat Goes On. Rebus proves to be as bad at retiring as Rankin himself, then.

Also in that 2009 interview, Rankin revealed that he was planning on retiring as soon as Dark Entries was published. “I’m contractually obliged to write one more book,” he said, and then he planned to jack it all in and go travelling when he turned 50. He’s now 54, and still going strong. Long may he, and Rebus, continue.

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The literary World Cup: readers' best all-time teams

Albert Camus (at the front, wearing a flat cap), the best real-life literary goalie – here, with the University of Algiers football team. Photograph: Roger-Viollet/Rex Features

Back when the World Cup was in those exciting and unpredictable first rounds, we were playing away at Penguin's imaginary books World Cup, where an England with JK Rowling, George Orwell and Agatha Christie in attack and the likes of Shakespeare and Dickens in the midfield could possibly – possibly – have had a chance to win something.

The UK imprint imagined matches and footballing incidents on Twitter, and we joined in the fun, asking for your all-time favourite literary teams. Now that the actual competition is coming to an end, here are our top five writers' XIs.

TimFootman offered an all-nationalities, all-time XI with Albert Camus as goalkeeper (because – "duh" – the French author played as a goalie while studying at the University of Algeria). He chose a pretty hard-core defence (Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, Samuel Richardson and Vikram Seth) "because you need big guys at the back", went for a self-explanatory "middlebrowfield" with John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett and Elizabeth Gaskell, and chose Bret Easton Ellis, Will Self and DBC Pierre in attack because, "as Mr Suárez proved, it's the scary, unpredictable, slightly bonkers ones who get results." No comment.

Photograph: Toby Moses

tagomagoman gave an extensive justification for this killer and eclectic XI, managed by "respected and innovative coach with a steely heart of darkness" Joseph Conrad. Some of our favourite picks:

James Joyce (centre-back): "The ultimate cultured centre-back famously left his native Ireland to learn his trade on the continent. It is a rare forward who can find a way past his impenetrable prose."

Cormac McCarthy (central midfield): "This tough tackling, no nonsense player patrols the border country between midfield and defence. If you thought the Comanche attack in Blood Meridian was brutal you should see what he does to a midfield runner who has the temerity to approach his territory."

F Scott Fitzgerald (central midfield): "Seen by some as a luxury player too keen to sit back and admire his own beautiful passes. Sometimes seems more concerned with his celebrity lifestyle with his glamorous wife than his career. But when he puts his mind to it, boy can he play. With the steely McCarthy beside him they form a formidable midfield."

William Burroughs (right midfield): "Old snake hips is one of the most feared wingers in the game. Has suffered with 'refuelling' issues in the past, but as long as he receives his 'vitamin supplement' before the game is a reliable asset. Famous for terrorising full-backs with his notorious cut-up technique that leaves them gasping for comprehension. Should score more goals, but suffers from a wayward shot."

Photograph: Toby Moses

neophil33 disagreed with Penguin's version of the French team and offered the following instead (with Anatole France, François Rabelais, Alphonse Daudet, Marguerite Duras, Louis Aragon, François Mauriac as subs), which sparked quite a debate. "That midfield could be a bit flaky", said shinerbock. "I'd have Proust among the subs – just in case you needed to bring someone on to run down the clock", offered AnotherBe. shinerbock jumped in again: "You can't have Rimbaud and Verlaine in the same team together. Even on opposite wings. There's no discipline there. Bring them on as 'impact subs', when Baudelaire's been sent off for showing off." Etcetera.

Photograph: Toby Moses

"At last, a competition Ireland will dominate", ventured theundertone. We had as many as four different Irish teams suggested – here's one by SanPaolo: from Patrick Kavanagh ("weird loner, ideal keeper") to Oscar Wilde ("big target man, ex-boxer, great turn – of phrase) and Samuel Beckett ("mercurial forward, famously not many kicks") on the attack and of course Joyce at the midfield ("creative, but tendency to overelaborate"). Although as Sunburst said, perhaps their star player would suffice: "between 11 best English novelists of the 20th century and one chapter of Ulysses, I'd confidently put my money on the latter."

Photograph: Toby Moses

And finally, how irresistible is this team from Ancient Rome suggested by Serdal:

Cicero (goalkeeper): "Reliable, can do everything, great reflexes, huge belief in his own abilities, can be a show-off, never to blame in his own mind."

Caesar (left-back): "Lean, efficient, fast, unfussy, able to influence referees with his propagandistic style."

Ovid (left midfield): "Great work-rate, though defensively suspect, the side's greatest technique and pacey as hell, should complement Caesar's qualities."

Virgil (central midfield): "Used to be a slim, tricky player, in his later days a player of gravity but lots of emotions, able to mix the rough and the magical."

Photograph: Toby Moses

There were so many other brilliant line-ups that we had to leave out – do take a look at the delightful thread, which included discussion of referees and even a wink to our own sports writers. And, as always, add your own or tell us what we’ve missed in the comments below. But let's close with a team from Magnusson which he promises will be "precise, efficient and beautiful in its simplicity":

Photograph: Toby Moses

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Book reviews roundup: How to Build a Girl, Village of Secrets and A Broken World

'She writes with breathtaking brio' … Caitlin Moran. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

"Any novel that begins with its 14-year-old narrator masturbating in the same bed as her sleeping little brother can't be all bad. Indeed, Caitlin Moran's spirited coming-of-age tale romps from strength to strength. After her popular essayistic memoir How to Be a Woman, Moran's first novel for adults, How to Build a Girl, follows the remaking of Johanna Morrigan, a pudgy, smart-mouthed teenager from the West Midlands". Lionel Shriver in the Times pronounced herself "a Moran fan … At 39, the author can still summon the raw, jangled experience of being a teenager." "There's a lot about masturbation here – as much an age of coming as a coming of age novel", noted an equally admiring Julie Burchill in the Spectator: "She writes with breathtaking brio, like a great professional hoofer who has been toe-tapping since tot-hood but has never grown tired of performing: very much a 'Ta-da! – see what I did there?' type of writer." But Liz Jones in the Evening Standard didn't agree: "The problem is, this novel has no depth or pathos. Even though it's based on what she knows, there is no sense that this new girl is real … It's all quite glib … Moran hasn't stretched herself … It would be easy to give this book a good review … But I feel it's my job … to warn young women when I think they're wasting their money."

Village of Secrets by Caroline Moorehead, an account of Chambon-sur-Lignon in France, the "remote mountain village", as Sinclair McKay wrote in the Daily Telegraph, "that provided sanctuary and escape for numbers of Jewish people … is riven with complexity". It is "also about ownership of history. Moorehead analyses how, in recent years, the story … has been fluffed up as a sort of national comfort blanket – a beacon of redemptive light in Vichy darkness … at the expense of difficult truth … If anything, Moorehead's pacy, headlong narrative, zigzagging across the war years and different territories with so many piercing vignettes and close detail, packs too much in and the structure suffers. A longer book would have given more room for reflection …" Alan Judd in the Spectator praised the book for pointing out "the brute facts. France was one of only two sovereign states (the other was Bulgaria) to do the Nazis' work for them, rounding up and deporting over 150,000 – half of them Jews – to death or slavery. From the start, Vichy 'consistently offered more than Germany asked for, more and also sooner'."

On the cover of the anthology A Broken World: Letters, Diaries and Memories of the Great War, edited by Sebastian Faulks and Hope Wolf, the author of Birdsong is "for obvious commercial reasons", wrote Libby Purves in the Times, put first "and much bigger". Wolf's "area of research in war writing includes 'miniature narratives and popular form (anecdotes, jokes, cliches, memes)' and Faulks himself handsomely acknowledges in his introduction that the book's merits are largely due to her search for the oblique, the overlooked and the international. He is right … the pleasure of the book is in the straightforward human responses." According to Gerard Henderson in the Daily Express "it is the pain, the suffering and the confusion that dominates this impressive work – the awful reality of warfare summed up by Private Frank Cocker, who wrote from the front in 1915, following the loss of his brother: 'My heart is so stunned I don't know whether it is broken or not.'"

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The World Cup is political theatre of the highest order

Germany has a football team to match its ambition and character. Photograph: Rex Features

Is anything more global than football? Fifa believes that the 2014 World Cup will exceed the total world audience of 3.2 billion that watched the 2010 South African tournament. The USA team's games have attracted record viewing figures at home, and, in an increasingly fragmented media world, national team's games have truly exceptional audiences everywhere. Few singular events – not a man on the moon, not the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics – have held humanity's attention like the World Cup final between Germany and Argentina that awaits us.

Alongside the 75,000 people in the crowd at Rio's Maracanã on Sunday the global digital chorus will be immense. Facebook announced more than a billion World Cup-related interactions during the first half of the tournament among 220 million people. In the first week alone, the 459m exchanges exceeded those reported for Sochi 2014, this year's Super Bowl and the Oscars combined. The semi-final between Brazil and Germany generated 35m tweets peaking at more than half a million a minute when Germany's fifth goal went in.

Among the tweeters inside the Maracanã on Sunday we can expect commentary from Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, seated alongside the rest of the BRIC premiers: Brazil's president Rousseff, Russia's Vladimir Putin, South Africa's Jacob Zuma and China's Xi Jinping. The Brazilian foreign service will need to find some space for the finalists themselves: chancellor Merkel and presidents Gauck and Kirchner. No doubt the heads of state of Costa Rica, Mexico, Iran and the US, all of whom have been engaging via social media, will put in their 1o cents' worth too.

In this respect the World Cup is political theatre of the highest order – an instrument of soft power, a node in the global networks of power – but its dramatic structure is a complex and shifting thing. For the devotee, the early rounds are like gorging on an addictive DVD box set. Suddenly one is watching two, three, even four episodes a night. A significant part of the world has been rearranging its sleeping and working patterns around the tournament. In China, reports suggest this has triggered a wave of deaths through nervous overexhaustion.

Alongside the spectacle has run the counterspectacle of the protest movements and the Kevlar-plated leviathan of the Brazilian security forces. This feels more like an experimental parallel-universe novel, where two worlds run alongside each other reflecting and commenting but only very rarely actually touching. The protests have taken many forms – street art, computer hacking of sponsors' websites – but the demonstrations dwindled to almost nothing. The cost of this has been the militarisation of public space and the absurdly aggressive policing of dissent, making the few brave forays by dissidents the critical grit beneath the glitter.

The multi-character, multi-layer stories that the tournament has generated, the highly structured dramatic climaxes of the games, and the mad chatter of public running commentary on characters and private lives, makes the World Cup feel like a great global soap opera. Cameroon and Ghana are consumed by fights over money between the players and their notoriously rapacious football officials. Luis Suárez loses his emotional control and is punished, globally lampooned but lauded in Uruguay.

While the games in Brazil are the fulcrum of any one of these many plotlines their most dramatic and meaningful expressions occur at home. This is more the territory of a multi-authored international collection of short stories and essays. England's journey seemed a textbook exposition of the private opulence of the Premier League and the public squalor of the national team. In Iran, it is the female characters who are strongest. Officially banned from viewing football with men, they have followed the national team surreptitiously in mixed cafes and then paraded through central Tehran in defiance of the theocracy. Hundreds of thousands of ecstatic Colombians welcomed home their team as if they were champions rather than defeated quarter-finalists – their best World Cup performance ever serving as a suitable marker for a nation finally moving beyond the protracted drug wars of the last three decades.

These nations and stories are no longer tied to just one place but are diasporas. Mexico's victory against Croatia saw LA Chicanos take to the streets of South Central in such numbers that the LAPD intervened. Algeria's passage to the second round was met by ecstatic crowds and magnesium flares in Algiers, but also in Paris, Lyon, Marseille and Roubaix, where celebrations turned into street fights with the police.

Is there something grander at work than this global kaleidoscope? Is there no clearer arc of meaning at work? There are certainly recurring themes. The global inequalities of ethnicity, gender and class were surely on display when one compared the makeup of the crowds with their teams, and the teams with their coaching staff. But it is narrative that we crave. As teams have been eliminated and the incredible cacophony of games and goals quietens, the semi-finals have focused our attention on the plotlines of just four nations.

The Dutch are returning home to contemplate the limits of being a small nation in the global order and by some way the smallest population of the four. However much team and economy are nurtured by brilliant coaching and innovative education, there seems to be a ceiling on their progress. Brazil has had a bitterer pill to swallow – the manner of their departure from the competition, comprehensively humiliated by Germany 7-1, forensically laid bare the illusions of Brazilian football. Brazil no longer plays good or beautiful football: the game, like many of its institutions, has been poisoned by corruption, elite mismanagement, cynicism, a brutally Hobbesian will to win, and no amount of overwrought patriotism, mawkish crying and fist pumping can disguise it.

The backdrop to the Argentinians' almost impregnable nerve and defensive concentration on the field is president Kirchner's bitter fight with US-based vulture funds over its rescheduled debt obligations. Under immense economic pressure and looking a major debt default in the eye, the country still aims to cock a snook at the international order. The huge numbers of Argentinian fans have been the most voluble and unruly at the tournament. The idea that they might win the final is their host's nightmare scenario.

Germany, still described in the hapless cliches of efficient machines and ruthless, clinical finishing, were actually dazzling: precisely the word that the French press used to laud the Brazilians at the 1938 World Cup when they surprised the world and showed us what the new football looked like. Now the positions are reversed. Germany, finally emerging as what it has been for decades, the pre-eminent European power, has a football team to match its ambitions and its character: brilliantly organised but instantly flexible, individually accomplished but telepathically networked, technically superior to the Brazilians in touch, positioning and anticipation. Yet they carry other German traits too: a collective solidarity that disdains the egotistical, and a realistic conservatism about an uncertain world, for no one feels victory is assured.

Clifford Geertz, the anthropologist wrote: "Culture is the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves." If there is a global culture and a global humanity, then the World Cup, more than any other phenomenon, is where those tales are told. We are fortunate then that the game we have chosen as our collective avatar should be so inventive a storyteller that a single game of football – the World Cup final – can, for 90 minutes, bind so many strands of this turbulent planet together.

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Upstairs at the Party by Linda Grant review when Bowie ruled the world

Captures the absurdity of the times … Linda Grant. Photograph: Geraint Lewis/Rexv

This is the story of friendships that cohere at a northern university in the 70s. The narrator, Adele, was born and brought up in a Jewish family in Liverpool: "I grew up to be the leader of a circle of schoolgirls, bolshy, sophisticated, ambitious, supercilious, a little bit cynical already, who smoked and wore plum-coloured lipstick and very short skirts."

She has a terrible secret: her father, Harry, a petty criminal, killed himself when he was exposed as the organiser of a small Ponzi scheme. The family and their world are changed for ever. But, like her mother, Adele is a strong woman. She takes a job at the perfume counter of Lewis's in Liverpool. She quickly finds it stultifying, but is determined to do better and talks herself into one of the new universities in Yorkshire by pretending to be Allen Ginsberg's cousin.

At university she is soon involved with a new group of friends, and the novel revolves around their fates. It is an era when students believed that they could change the world; that false consciousness was a blight to be overcome; that people could elect to be gay or straight; that socialism, along the lines of Marcuse, would triumph; and that mental illness should be understood, as RD Laing prescribed, as an aspect of normality. On the campus there is a vogue, no doubt influenced by David and Angie Bowie, of dressing up to suggest that there are no absolutes of sexual orientation. Adele takes none of these notions seriously.

The centre of the story is Evie, who arrived at the university as Lorraine, but changed her name when she took up with Stevie, also known as Stephen Platt. They swap clothes, and in some ways became one androgynous person, but their relationship breaks down. Stevie leaves after a few terms – and dies on the night of Adele's 20th birthday.

"If you go back and look at your life there are certain scenes, acts, or maybe just incidents on which everything that follows seems to depend," muses Adele, many years later. "If only you could narrate them, then you might be understood. I mean the part of yourself that you don't know how to explain."

Linda Grant gives the impression of looking for an organising principle for the novel: the mystery of Evie's demise. For many years after they have all left university, Adele is obsessed by what happened on the fatal night. Who saw her last? Who could have helped? Who is to blame? But the problem with this otherwise fine novel is that there is not much of a mystery to be solved. Her family secrets, revealed in some handy notebooks, are not really very significant. Evie was a troubled child, ethereally beautiful, and caught up in something she didn't fully understand.

But Grant excels in capturing the absurdity of the times, and the phenomenon of a university consciously trying to introduce societal change through exposure to brutal architecture and experimental teaching. She is also brilliant on the naivety and vulnerability of the young students, from flamboyantly gay Bobby to Gillian, the viola player turned revolutionary. Rose, who becomes a successful barrister, acknowledges at the friends' final meeting that she was exactly the graduate the university was trying to produce: "My life has never departed from the plan. It all worked, didn't it? It worked terribly, terribly well."

You could read into this Grant's feeling that the higher banalities have come to roost and have not left us. "There was a revolution," says Adele, "just not the one they had in mind."

It is a great talent to be able to keep afloat so vividly and so plausibly this many characters. While not exactly a feelgood book, Upstairs at the Party has the great virtue of being a wonderfully and perceptively written story, which rings utterly true, and as a consequence lifts the spirits.

• Justin Cartwright's latest novel is Lion Heart (Bloomsbury). To order Upstairs at the Party for £11.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.

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1913: The World Before the Great War by Charles Emmerson – review

Kaiser Willhelm II with Winston Churchill at Lowther Castle, north-west England, 1906: were the signs of the conflict to come self-evident? Photograph: Corbis

Did you read the writing on the wall in 2012? Could you tell that a third world war would start in 2013 when Russia and Iran responded to the American attack on Syria? If a lack of restraint had pitched us into global conflict last year, historians would have woven narratives to show the signs we missed (I was preparing my own version).

The inevitability of the first world war is usually traced in a similar way, back through events of 1913 and before, and several excellent books have looked at how the world went to war, notably Christopher Clark's excellent The Sleepwalkers. Emmerson's 1913 tries hard to ignore what follows and mostly it succeeds.

This is not an attempt to explain how the war started but more to show what was lost, what it felt like to be alive in that unlucky-number year. If you were European, particularly British, it felt very good indeed. The British empire was not what it was, damaged as much close to home by suffragettes and Irish nationalists as it was threatened by the growing challenges from the US, China and restless colonies. Emmerson presents this world through portraits of its great cities, which seems appropriate as many of them were linked up in a way we would recognise as global: the modernity of some aspects of city life a century ago is striking, with the startup of global brands such as Gucci and Ford, although there were still sheep cropping Hyde Park.

Many of the choices of cities are obvious, divided into groups such as Europe's imperial capitals, some key American cities, a scattering of others – Algiers, Bombay, Tehran – and a handful of cities belonging to "twilight powers", although in the absence of a compelling argument, some choices can seem random. To capture a year of the world in a single snapshot is, of course, impossible, but Emmerson provides a real sense of 1913 by combining details of individual lives with sweeping international trends: one of the great pleasures of this book is to see parallels between then and now.

Yet he clings to the view that the world in 1913 was one of innocence, security and mutual understanding, epitomised, perhaps, by the ball in Berlin in May 1913, attended by the British king-emperor, the German kaiser and the Russian tsar. Not unlike the after party of the G20 summit in St Petersburg last year, and therefore hardly a reliable measure of international relations.

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HUMAN TRAFFICKING AROUND THE WORLD: Hidden in Plain Sight

Aug 16, 2013

Stephanie Hepburn and Rita J. Simon
Columbia University
ISBN 978-0231161459
550 pages
$27.95

Reviewed by John Tirman

Human trafficking is one of those issues that rankle people even when they don't understand its actual shape and scope. At least a dozen books have appeared in the past few years describing the horrors of sex trafficking, a gruesome practice of enslavement and perversion affecting millions of (mostly) girls the world over, including, with alarming frequency, in the United States. But as Stephanie Hepburn and Rita J. Simon point out in their encyclopedic study of global trafficking, the larger crime is forced-labor trafficking, which is three times greater than that for sex commerce. The official response to each is inadequate - under-resourced, legally fragile and too often complicit.

The scale of these crimes is staggering. "As of 2005 this global phenomenon reaped an annual worldwide profit of $44.3 billion and affected more than 12.3 million persons," the authors write. About half are children. Other forms of trafficking are rampant - human organs, most prominently - but forced labor accounts for two-thirds of the cases. Victims are often recruited with promises of jobs abroad or within their own countries, but once in the grip of the traffickers they are essentially slaves. Various forms of subjugation are involved, such as debt bondage resulting from exorbitant "fees" for transportation, food and housing, but it all amounts to a system of violently enforced servitude from which escape is only a remote possibility.

While the common perception of trafficking tends to focus on sexual exploitation in places like Thailand and Dubai, the United States is among the top 10 destinations. Thousands of victims are brought into America each year from all over the world. They are used mainly for household labor, agriculture, food and care services, and in the garment industry. Those in industry are housed in substandard quarters and do not get paid, or owe so much because of the traffickers' "fees" that payment is irrelevant.

Sex trafficking to the United States is estimated to bring 50,000 women and girls to our shores each year, mainly for prostitution. The authors cite a case of Mexican women trafficked to Florida to work, they thought, as maids or waitresses. "Upon arrival in the United States, the traffickers raped the women and girls, confiscated their travel documents, and forced them to prostitute. Guards prevented them from leaving the brothels, and if the victims tried to escape they faced severe physical punishment as well as threats of deportation."

Forced labor follows similar patterns the world over. Hepburn and Simon march the reader through 23 countries, including several in Europe, to illustrate different dimensions of the problem. This is not just a pathology of "Ninotchkas" from post-Soviet Russia or sex-crazed sheiks or sex tourists in Bangkok. This is an enormous enterprise that touches every corner of the globe.

Most disquieting is how laws in many countries are used against trafficking victims. For example, in Italy, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, laborers brought in illegally, under duress, can be put in detention, fined and deported as illegal immigrants. Time and again, the authors explain, trafficking victims are charged and sometimes jailed for prostitution or using false papers, among other lawbreaking. In India (and elsewhere), the law enforcement system is so deplorable when it comes to prosecuting traffickers that it's the rare case that makes it to a conviction. The authors recount that "a rescued victim from Nepal was repeatedly deposed and continually asked embarrassing questions in an attempt to get her to withdraw the charges." Laws are changing, and some judicial and police practices are improving, but the pace is slow and incommensurate with the scale of the crimes.

Hepburn and Simon, lawyers associated with American University, parse the different causes and sources of human chattel - desperate poverty is the font of vulnerability, of course, but conflict-riddled countries are particularly prone to exploitation. In Iraq after the U.S. invasion, contractor immunity granted by U.S. officials in effect gave permission for the abuse of workers, who were imported from many of the same countries we see with large guest-worker programs: Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and so on. Reconstruction and the promise of good wages drew many workers who were then diverted to household servitude or worse.

Women in Iraq are "particularly vulnerable to a variety of crimes such as kidnapping, sexual assault, and human trafficking. One trafficking ring sold 128 Iraqi women to Saudi Arabia in 2008 and 2009. The ring was made up of Iraqi police officers, members of the Governorate's Council ... and security officials." Poor families are preyed upon by syndicates pretending to be adoption agencies or nongovernmental organizations that will take their children to better lives, only to sell them into slavery or the sex trade, or as child soldiers. "I did anything possible to keep them with me," a woman who sold two of her children explained, "but I lost my husband while I was pregnant with my fifth child and life became too hard." The Iraqi government estimates that there are at least 900,000 widows in Iraq, and poverty among them is high.

Throughout this grim account, the authors only rarely let emotions slip through. The book reads like a policy document, sometimes a legal one, organized identically in each chapter. Statistics abound. This is a bit off-putting but nonetheless valuable. It's a good companion to the 2010 book by Louise Shelley, "Human Trafficking: A Global Perspective," which emphasizes the role of transnational organized crime. Kevin Bales, an anti-slavery activist, has written several books, including "The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today" and "Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy," which use victims' stories to illustrate larger themes, humanizing this topic without sensationalizing. Many other books on the subject published in the past 10 years, as the issue of trafficking has become more prominent, rely on personal testimony. Among the best is the remarkable "Sold" by Patricia McCormick, about a 13-year-old sold into prostitution. It is being made into a movie, as a few others have been.

Among these tales of slavery and sexual depravity (some of them published in novels that seem a hair's breadth away from exploitation themselves), Hepburn and Simon's "Human Trafficking Around the World" comes off as a kind of reference book or college text. But it's an immensely learned and informative piece of work, much needed to prod and set aright the misperceptions and lethargy that beset this disturbing issue.

John Tirman is executive director and principal research scientist at the MIT Center for International Studies.

Copyright 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

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THE ORDINARY ACROBAT: A Journey Into the Wondrous World of the Circus, Past and Present

May 3, 2013

Duncan Wall
Knopf
ISBN 978-0307271723
322 pages
$26.95

Reviewed by Elizabeth McCracken

It is called "the circus," singular noun, definite article, as though there were only one. But the history of the circus is multitudinous, badly documented, clouded by legend and stereotypes; it is the history of many circuses over many years, each circus composed of many acts - rings within rings within rings. It's hard to know where to start looking at it.

In his lovely new book, "The Ordinary Acrobat," Duncan Wall finds useful spots from which to peer at the history of the form: from the top of the trapeze platform, beneath a cascade of juggling balls and behind a red nose on his own face in the circus-mad Paris of 2003. He joins the circus to understand it.

Wall wasn't always a circus obsessive. His conversion occurred while he was in Paris during college, attending a circus in the Parc de la Villette. The performance was nothing like the circus of his youth: "The juggler had a Mohawk. The acrobats were unshaven and dressed in ratty black suits with the cuffs rolled up. ... It was visceral, real, and admirably raw." Thereafter, Wall was what the French call a circusphile and the Americans "a gawk": lovestruck, circus-struck. A year later, in 2003, he returned to Paris on a Fulbright fellowship to enroll in the Ecole Nationale des Arts du Cirque de Rosny-sous-Bois: In other words, he came to gawk from the inside.

"The Ordinary Acrobat" interlaces chapters about his triumphs and phobias in his studies, his interviews of Parisian circus figures and the wider history of the European circus. The history in the book is effortless and compact, if necessarily less than comprehensive. He covers an astonishing amount in a 300-page book, with sections on Philip Astley (the English businessman who essentially invented the circus), Barnum, Cirque du Soleil and the earliest origins of the feats that eventually became the compilation known as the circus.

Wall concentrates on a handful of acts, however - what might be described as a variety of human arguments with gravity: acrobats, jugglers and clowns. He explains how acts evolved; how jugglers changed their emphasis from seeing what extraordinary things they could keep in the air to simply seeing how many; how acrobats moved from displaying beauty to risking death; how clowns, once satirists, became beholden to the tastes of children.

Wall breaks the reader's heart with stories of the acts he was born too late to see. Perhaps you don't mind having missed the 800 bear trainers at Ivan the Terrible's wedding, but what about the retracting stage at the Nouveau Cirque in the late 19th century, which revealed a swimming pool for pantomimes nautiques, including one featuring 30 polar bears on slides? Or the clown who performed in a mobile designed by Alexander Calder? Or the rope walker Saqui: "Men flocked to ogle her bravery and catch a glimpse of her thigh. Women copied her style."

Wall trains with the acts himself. In the most oddly thrilling chapter, he juggles with the legendary Jerome Thomas. The first time they'd met, Wall had exaggerated his juggling skills and has had to cram: Now he shows Thomas what he can do. "You have some nice tricks there," Thomas tells him. "Now let's work on the quality of the gesture." Wall writes particularly well about jugglers, who might seem the least likely of artists - surely juggling is a party act! - but who, as he describes them, are sculptors of space. One of the students at the school where he studies theorizes that the jugglers ("the crazy ones," a tumbling coach calls them) break into the building at night to practice.

There are some hitches. The book wants to retrofit a memoir - the journey of a young man investigating the circus - into the history and research. But there's not much drama to those first-person events. The book also suffers from an occasional gee-whiz tone: By showing himself being disabused of his circus prejudices, Wall wants to disabuse the reader at the same time. Indeed, the opening pages discuss how dull the circus was to Wall as a child (which is irksome if you're already interested). But Wall the author and current professor at the National Circus School of Montreal surely knows more, has traveled further from those misconceptions. At any rate, the circus, as he points out, is not entirely a young person's game. His clowning mentor, Andre Riot-Sarcey, puts it this way: As most clowns "get older they get better. ... They get sadder, too, but that has to happen naturally, as the soul replaces the body."

One of Wall's missions is to convince nonbelievers that the circus - as a whole and its component parts - is art, and the book is lovely and light on that subject, and on art in general. Art, the juggler Thomas explains, requires the spectator to work, to ask questions: Who is this performer? What does his act mean? Who is he influenced by? The spectator, he says, thinks about all this without even realizing it.

Wall asks how it is possible to make someone think without realizing it. "You make ... him work ... his imagination," the juggler says, spacing the words out slowly. "You make him (BEGIN ITAL)dream." There is plenty in "The Ordinary Acrobat" to set circusphile and circus-skeptic alike to dreaming.

Elizabeth McCracken is the James Michener chair in fiction at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of five books, including the forthcoming story collection "Thunderstruck."

Copyright 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

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A CAUSE GREATER THAN SELF: The Journey of Captain Michael J. Daly, World War II Medal of Honor Recipient

Jan 20, 2013 by Washington Post book reviewers

Stephen J
Ochs
ISBN 978-1603447836
271 pages
$42.50

Reviewed by Bing West

This is a classic tale about how the values of the "one percent" generation shaped military leadership during World War II. After he graduated from Georgetown Prep, Michael Daly's insouciant willfulness caused his dismissal from both Princeton and West Point; he seemed spoiled and wealthy enough not to care. Yet rather than disappoint his family, he volunteered for the Army infantry and fought splendidly from the time of the 1944 Normandy invasion until he was gravely wounded as the war ended.

Stephen J. Ochs, who teaches history at Georgetown Prep, has interwoven Daly's career with the rise of his Irish Catholic-family and the U.S. Army's implacable drive across France and Germany. Throughout the narrative, Daly's tactical brilliance in leading a squad, a platoon and a company shine through. His repeated acts of valor rivaled those of the much-decorated Audie Murphy. After the war, though, Murphy became a moody loner. In contrast, Daly took on an ever-expanding role as a volunteer at St. Vincent's Hospital in Bridgeport, Conn., tending to the indigent and the dying.

His daughter summed up Michael Daly's life by calling war "the one time in life when you are willing to sacrifice everything for the guy alongside of you. ... You had a cause greater than yourself."

Bing West can be reached at bookworld@washpost.com.

Copyright 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

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ON DUPONT CIRCLE: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and the Progressives Who Shaped Our World

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Washington Post book reviewers

Aug 10, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

James Srodes
Counterpoint
ISBN 978-1582437163
325 pages
$26

Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

In January 1916, the young journalist Walter Lippmann dropped a note to Franklin Roosevelt, the young assistant secretary of the Navy. Lippmann was planning a visit to Washington and "would like to see you if it is possible for a little talk while I am there. ... I shall be staying at 1727 19th Street," he wrote, a boarding house described by James Srodes in "On Dupont Circle" as "a nondescript row house on a tree-shaded side street just two blocks east of busy Connecticut Avenue - jocularly known to its inhabitants and many visitors as The House of Truth." It had "a raffish, slightly bohemian atmosphere that made it highly attractive to the young people who were drawn there."

They were drawn to it out of a shared commitment to the Progressive cause, a belief that the best and the brightest could employ modern science to solve the nation's and the world's most pressing issues. They were "a hybrid of various reformist movements that had come and gone before," now united by "the revolutionary concept that a strong and active government was needed to intercede for the individual citizen as a referee and advocate in the increasingly exploitative relationships people had with big corporations and big city governments, which had agendas that too often ignored the public good." Many of them were "university-trained, fiercely ambitious intellectuals" who believed - to use a phrase that by now has become hopelessly trite but then seemed fresh and new - that they could change the world.

The names of some of them remain familiar to this day: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Felix Frankfurter, John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen. Herbert Hoover, though he does not seem to have hung around at 1727 19th St. - indeed it is difficult to imagine the reserved, humorless Hoover "hanging around" anywhere - was not part of the group, but as a leading apostle of the notion that engineering could conquer all, he was certainly an ally. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., though far older than the others, lived in the neighborhood and "relished ruling over the dinner table debates as both referee and devil's advocate." Communism was much in the air at the time, but was resisted by these well-dressed young revolutionaries, as was socialism. Lippmann had flirted seriously with it, but eventually rejected it:

"In short, if socialism did not produce quick improvements in society, Lippmann was prepared to find another cause to support. In that, he and Frankfurter were like many other Progressives: what was important, essential, was that an idea had to work. Where doctrinaire socialists put their faith in strong central government to improve society, Progressives like Frankfurter and Lippmann argued a faith in the scientific certainty and expert interpretation of statistics to determine social policy. Facts, they believed, were indisputable. All one had to do was gather the facts, the data, the unassailable statistics that were transforming the industrial age in such a dramatic fashion, and the way to broader improvements in any community would be virtually automatic."

Srodes is not as clear about this as he should be. Having said earlier that the Progressives believed in "a strong and active government," he then implies in the paragraph above that they had rejected socialist support for "strong central government." In fact, they had not. They believed that a strong government was necessary to attack the problems that private interests could not or would not address, but they believed that government action should be rooted in the rational accumulation of factual evidence, data that could point not merely to where governmental action was needed but to what action should be undertaken. They were disciples of expertise, and they tended to place considerably more faith in it than was always warranted. Frankfurter, in many respects the wisest and most principled of them, told Roosevelt in 1928 - FDR had just been elected to his first term as governor of New York - that he was against "a new type of oligarchy, namely government by experts ... experts should be on tap but not on top."

The electoral successes of Roosevelt, first as governor and then as president, gave the Progressives the opportunity they had so eagerly sought to put their ideas into action. Though FDR himself was neither an expert nor an idea man - nor, for that matter, was he an ideologue - he relied heavily on real or self-described experts during all of his eventful years in elective office. Experts gave the country the alphabet-soup agencies of the New Deal, they packed the offices of the White House and the federal departments, they wrote the bills that were sent to Congress. Even though we have become increasingly skeptical about the power of expertise to cure societal and political ills, the persistence of their influence can be seen throughout not only the agencies of the federal government but also those of government at all levels.

The little crowd that gathered occasionally near Dupont Circle had its full share of shortcomings. Srodes mentions a lack of interest in "discrimination against minorities," private lives that were occasionally "chaotic and destructive to themselves and others," and a lack of sophistication about economic matters. He doesn't mention arrogance, which unquestionably was an important part of the equation. Nearly a century after they first began to gather, their idealism looks more than a little naive, but it is true that "their assumptions of our exceptionalism, of our duty to foster our kind of democracy for diverse people, of our commitment to intrude commercially, militarily, culturally" around the world remain deeply engrained, on the right as well as on the left.

Perhaps because sufficient evidence simply does not exist, Srodes doesn't manage to make as much out of the Dupont Circle location as his title and opening pages imply. Indeed, after those first pages are out of the way, the book becomes a fairly straightforward narrative of the march of the progressives toward the culmination of their faith in the New Deal. To be sure, it is interesting to be reminded that the Dulles brothers, regarded ever since their rise to high office in the Eisenhower administration as high priests of Cold War confrontation, were as young men closer to what now would be characterized as liberal positions than to conservative ones. The chaotic sexual life of Sumner Welles is a much-told tale, as is the romance of FDR and Lucy Mercer, but these stories add a dollop of spice to what might otherwise be heavy going.

On a strictly personal note, I must add that, however important the house at 1727 19th St., NW, may or may not actually have been to the rise of the Progressive movement, the disclosure that it played any role at all adds an agreeable fillip to my occasional walks through the neighborhood. I start out at Logan Circle, walk west along Q St., north along 19th to Florida Ave., then back home through a winding route that takes me past many of the places mentioned in "On Dupont Circle." Sometimes I go past 1733 N St., where the young Roosevelts lived at the time, and at others past 1323 18th St., where some of the older Progressives gathered from time to time. It's a part of Washington that tourists only occasionally see, but one every bit as interesting as the ones where the tour buses go.

Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj@washpost.com.

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By WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD REVIEW SERVICE

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Washington Post book reviewers

Jun 15, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Various Authors
Various
ISBN NA

Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle

1. Edmund Wilson wrote two massive - but not a word too long - critical studies: "Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War"; and "To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History," an interpretive history of the ideas that led to the Russian Revolution of 1917 (the Finland train station in St. Petersburg was the point of re-entry into Russia by the revolution's principal architect, the previously exiled Vladimir Lenin). Newly republished as an FSG Classic (paperback, $18), "To the Finland Station" comes with Wilson's introduction to the 1971 edition (the book first came out in 1940). There he accepts the criticism that he went too easy on Lenin in the book, his excuse being that much more information about Lenin's behavior became available after the writing. "It would appear," Wilson concludes, "that Vladimir Ilyich showed special consideration and kindness only to people who did not disagree with him, but was quite harsh and rude with others."

2. Lenin's exile had lasted more than two decades, and stretched from the boondocks of Russia to London, Paris and Geneva. Although beset at times by loneliness and bordeom during those years, he was a model of self-discipline. "He planned each day down to the final minute ...," writes Helen Rappaport in "Conspirator: Lenin in Exile" (Basic; paperback, $18.99), "allotting set amounts of time for work, rest, and recreation. ... He remained mentally vigorous, engaging nonstop in a voluminous correspondence with activists in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and underground cells across Russia."

3. It was Lenin's successor as communist in chief, Josef Stalin, who made Victor Serge persona non grata. Born in Brussels to anti-czarist exiles, Serge went to Russia in 1919 to join the young revolution, but by the end of the '20s he'd been arrested for disloyalty, and in 1936 he left the country for good. In his "Memoirs of a Revolutionary," translated from the French by Peter Sedgwick with George Paizis (New York Review Classics; paperback, $17.95), Serge evokes the literary boomlet he found in the Russia of 1922: "Boris Pilnyak, Vsevolod Ivanov, Konstantin Fedin. Their works were intense and impetuous, saturated with virile humanism and a critical spirit. ... The great tradition of Russian literature, interrupted during the stormy years, was being born again in the second year of peace! It was miraculous."

Dennis Drabelle can be reached at drabelled@washpost.com.

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD: What the Happiest People Know About Getting and Spending

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Washington Post book reviewers

Apr 27, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Laura Vanderkam
Portfolio
ISBN 978-1591844570
248 pages
$26.95

Reviewed by Moira E. McLaughlin

Forget saving for college, cutting coupons, and even bulking up your 401k. Laura Vanderkam's newbook, "All the Money in the World" examines money from a unique perspective: What if money can buy happiness? "We often assume we can't afford X, Y or Z, or that only rich people experience certain things and we'll never be rich," she writes. "We assume certain expenditures are absolutely necessary, even though much of humanity survives without them. And so we live with a constrained mental picture of our lives."

Vanderkam's compelling book is not a lesson in greed or shallowness; rather, she asks you to consider ignoring what society says you ought to buy or own, and instead make choices according to your actual needs and desires. You like your morning latte? Buy it guilt-free knowing that you're forgoing that designer sweater. You want to head to Paraguay for two weeks with your family? Do it knowing that you picked up extra work to pay for it. You like donating your money? Find a fun cause that speaks directly to you.

Her main suggestion is to think creatively about your money, and therefore your life, and Vanderkam interviews dozens of people who are doing just that, from those who raise chickens in their backyards, to prospective parents contemplating the cost of children. The result is a book that will quell readers' anxieties about money and inspire them to stop seeing money's limitations and start seeing its potential, no matter what their tax bracket.

Moira E. McLaughlin can be reached at mclaughlinm@washpost.com.

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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BOOK WORLD bestsellers — March 11, 2012

Notable additions to the list this week include the new memoir from the late Anthony Shadid, whose tragic death while on assignment in Syria stunned the journalism community, and Jodi Picoult’s new novel, the #1 debut of which shows she still has the magic touch ...

BOOK WORLD

Bestsellers — March 11, 2012

[click on the author’s name to be linked to Book World’s review]

NONFICTION HARDCOVER

1. THE START-UP OF YOU: ADAPT TO THE FUTURE, INVEST IN YOURSELF, AND TRANSFORM YOUR CAREER

(Crown Business, $26). By Reid Hoffman & Ben Casnocha {2}

2. STRENGTHS FINDER 2.0: ... ONLINE TEST FROM GALLUP'S “NOW, DISCOVER YOUR STRENGTHS”

(Gallup, $24.95). By Tom Rath {71}

3. THE POWER OF HABIT: WHY WE DO WHAT WE DO IN LIFE AND BUSINESS

(Random House, $28). By Charles Duhigg {1}

4. AMERITOPIA: THE UNMAKING OF AMERICA

(Threshold, $26.99). By Mark R. Levin. Claiming that the American Dream (individualism) is at risk, courtesy of a rise of utopian fervor. {7}

5. BECOMING CHINA’S BITCH: AND NINE MORE CATASTROPHES WE MUST AVOID RIGHT NOW

(Turner, $27.95). By Peter D. Kiernan {1}

6. HOUSE OF STONE: A MEMOIR OF HOME, FAMILY, AND A LOST MIDDLE EAST

(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26). By Anthony Shadid {1}

7. BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS: LIFE, DEATH, AND HOPE IN A MUMBAI UNDERCITY

(Random House, $27). By Katherine Boo {4}

8. THINKING, FAST AND SLOW (FSG, $30)

By Daniel Kahneman. The Nobel Prize winner (economic sciences) examines the modes of thought that fuel our decision making. {12}

9. STEVE JOBS (Simon & Schuster, $35)

By Walter Isaacson. The life of the offbeat, visionary founder of Apple, based on numerous interviews with Jobs himself. {19}

10. THE BLOOD SUGAR SOLUTION: THE ULTRA-HEALTHY PROGRAM FOR LOSING WEIGHT, PREVENTING DISEASE, AND FEELING GREAT NOW!

(Little, Brown, $27.99). By Mark Hyman {1}

FICTION HARDCOVER

1. LONE WOLF (Atria, $28)

By Jodi Picoult. It’s the day of reckoning when a father’s serious accident compels his estranged family to grapple with long-ignored issues. {1}

2. KILL SHOT (Atria, $27.99)

By Vince Flynn. Readers are given a “prequel” of sorts with a chronicle of agent Mitch Rapp’s first year in the CIA. {4}

3. PRIVATE GAMES (Little, Brown, $27.99)

By James Patterson & Mark Sullivan. A very au courant mystery, featuring murder at the London 2012 Summer Olympic Games. {3}

4. VICTIMS (Ballantine, $28)

By Jonathan Kellerman. Alex Delaware and Milo Sturgis rush to nab a killer who leaves some rather gory corpses behind. {1}

5. CELEBRITY IN DEATH (Putnam, $27.95)

By J.D. Robb. It’s murder at a film premiere party at which Lt. Eve Dallas is a guest. {2}

6. I’VE GOT YOUR NUMBER (Dial, $26)

By Sophie Kinsella. A phone — one lost, one found — scrambles a young woman’s happily engaged bliss. {3}

7. WATERGATE (Pantheon, $26.95)

By Thomas Mallon. An inventive take on the presidential scandal; who did erase those missing 18½ minutes of tape? {2}

8. DEFENDING JACOB (Delacorte, $26)

By William Landay. The son of a noted assistant DA is accused of murder, putting his family in a tailspin. {5}

9. DEATH COMES TO PEMBERLEY

(Knopf, $25.95). By P.D. James. A bit of murder is injected into the milieu of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.” {13}

10. CINNAMON ROLL MURDER

(Kensington, $24). By Joanne Fluke. A jazz band’s leader is dead, and it’s up to Hannah Swensen to root out the culprit. {1}

NONFICTION PAPERBACK

1. THE FOX EFFECT: HOW ROGER AILES TURNED A NETWORK INTO A PROPAGANDA MACHINE

(Anchor, $15). By David Brock & Ari Rabin-Havt {2}

2. THE 5 LOVE LANGUAGES: THE SECRET TO LOVE THAT LASTS (Northfield, $14.99)

By Gary D. Chapman. Knowing that special someone. {30}

3. BOSSYPANTS (Reagan Arthur, $15.99)

By Tina Fey. An amusing memoir from the acclaimed former SNL writer, comedian and actress. {9}

4. THE VOW: THE TRUE EVENTS THAT INSPIRED THE MOVIE

(B&H, $14.99). By Kim & Krickitt Carpenter. The wrenching ordeal that began with a car accident in November, 1993. {5}

5. THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS

(Broadway, $16). By Rebecca Skloot. How one woman’s death from cervical cancer in 1951 led to the creation of the prodigious HeLa cell line. {52}

6. MINDSET: THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY OF SUCCESS

(Ballantine, $16). By Carol S. Dweck. Why one’s attitude is as important as talent. {1}

7. WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU’RE EXPECTING (Workman, $14.95). By Heidi Murkoff & Sharon Mazell. Fourth edition of the popular guide. {20}

8. HEAVEN IS FOR REAL: A LITTLE BOY’S ASTOUNDING STORY OF HIS TRIP TO HEAVEN AND BACK

(Thomas Nelson, $16.99). By Todd Burpo {60}

9. THE OFFICIAL SAT STUDY GUIDE

(College Board, $21.99). This revised manual offers 10 practice tests and loads of tips. {101}

10. GETTING TO YES: NEGOTIATING AGREEMENT WITHOUT GIVING IN

(Penguin, $16). By Roger Fisher and William Ury. Second edition. {8}

FICTION PAPERBACK

1. THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST

(Vintage, $15.95; $9.99). By Stieg Larsson. The Millennium Trilogy concludes with Lisbeth Salander hunting for her failed assassin. {2}

2. THE LUCKY ONE (Grand Central, $14.99; $7.99)

By Nicholas Sparks. True love awaits at the end of the search for a woman smiling in a photo; a new feature film. {5}

3. THE SIXTH MAN (Vision, $9.99)

By David Baldacci. An alleged serial killer’s attorney is murdered before King & Maxwell can confer on the case; the mass market (and third) edition of this novel. {9}

4. REDWOOD BEND (Mira, $7.99)

By Robyn Carr. A flat tire on the way to Virgin River forever alters a young mom’s future. {1}

5. THE HELP (Berkley, $16)

By Kathryn Stockett. A frank chronicle of the lives of several black maids working in a town in 1960s Miss. {46}

6. THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

(Vintage, $14.95; $7.99). By Stieg Larsson. First book in the late Swede’s “Millennium Trilogy.” {126}

7. THE TIGER’S WIFE (Random House, $15)

By Téa Obreht. While on a humanitarian mission, a doctor in the Balkans is confronted by the riddles of her own family’s past. {16}

8. THE JUNGLE (Berkley, $9.99)

By Clive Cussler with Jack Du Brul. Juan Cabrillo, and the crew of the high-tech ship “Oregon,” aim to stop a plot of world domination. {1}

9. PORTRAIT OF A SPY (Harper, $9.99)

By Daniel Silva. Art conservator and sometime agent Gabriel Allon parries with an American-born cleric and terrorist. {2}

10. LIVE WIRE (Signet, $9.99)

By Harlan Coben. A client’s missing husband brings athlete-cum-agent Myron Bolitar’s past front and center. {1}

Rankings reflect sales for the week ended March 4, 2012. The charts may not be reproduced without permission from Nielsen BookScan. Copyright 2012 by Nielsen BookScan. (The right-hand column of numbers represents weeks on this list, which premiered in Book World on Jan. 11, 2004. The bestseller lists in print alternate between hardcover and paperback; the complete list can be found online.)

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THE WORLD WE FOUND

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Washington Post book reviewers

Feb 15, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Thrity Umrigar
Harper
ISBN 978-0061938344
308 pages
$25.99

Reviewed by Frances Itani, who latest novel, "Requiem," will be published in the United States in August.

In her previous and highly successful novel, "The Space Between Us," Thrity Umrigar examined how two women of different backgrounds in India were capable of carrying on in the face of despair. Her latest novel, "The World We Found," is set in India and the United States. It examines choices made by a group of friends and the consequences that must be borne because of each choice.

Four young women - Armaiti, Laleh, Kavita and Nishta, bound by friendship and idealism - were university students in Bombay during the late 1970s. The novel starts about 30 years later but resonates against memories of this youthful past, shared during a period of political and social upheaval in India. It had been a time when the four friends, all from different family backgrounds, had faced the world with optimism and marched into what they thought would be a future improved by their ideals and well-meaning actions.

Now, each of the women is nearing 50. Armaiti, the only one of the four who lives in the United States, learns that she has a brain tumor and six months, at most, to live. The narrative is set in motion by her wish to see her three closest friends before she dies.

But time and circumstance have separated their lives in unexpected ways. Nishta, a Hindu woman who married a Muslim, has not been heard from in many years. In Bombay, Laleh and Kavita set out to find her so that she can be told about Armaiti's illness and invited to go with them to the United States.

They don't know that after the Hindu-Muslim riots in Bombay in 1992-93, Nishta and her husband left their residential area and moved to a Muslim part of the city where their circumstances have become strained and difficult. Nishta has had to adopt a Muslim name and is forbidden to communicate with her former friends. This story takes over the narrative and provides the intrigue and tension of the latter half of the novel.

Umrigar is skilled at intertwining the compelling stories of her characters within the setting of political and religious forces that dominate present-day India. Who has the power? Who has the money? The lives of these women and their partners again intersect, but questions and revelations arise. Each is forced to examine some aspect of loyalty, of guilt, of shame, of forgiveness and love.

"What's the clarifying principle here?" Kavita asks her friends. "Remember how we used to try and solve all political arguments by asking that question? It's amazing how we were ever stupid enough to think there was a single answer. Because there isn't one. What happened? Life happened. In all its banality, bru­tality, cruelty, unfairness. But also in its beauty, pleasures, and delights. Life happened.'"

Indeed, the clarifying principle that was once at the core of their discussions has become murky. The past has not, after all, been "beaten down, like cotton stuffed inside a mattress." The past will be carried within them, and they must all be responsible for decisions they are about to make. The situation becomes more frightening and the moral questions more complex as the story reaches its thrilling climax.

It takes courage to explore the idealism and hopes of youth and to compare these with the realities of lives lived three decades later. What has been compromised? What has been gained or lost? And the always unanswerable question: What might have happened if other choices had been made?

Umrigar handles these important themes with expertise and without judgment. A storyteller through and through, she ensures that her characters face up to the costs and consequences created by their choices, right or wrong, principled or unprincipled. As Laleh observes: "I'm saying that it all matters. Everything matters. Our virtues (BEGIN ITAL)and our sins."

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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TRAPPED: How the World Rescued 33 Miners From 2,000 Feet Below the Chilean Desert

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Washington Post book reviewers

Nov 4, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Marc Aronson
Atheneum
ISBN 978-1416913979
NA pages
$16.99

Reviewed by Abby McGanney Nolan

In a book about Chile's famously trapped miners, you expect a certain depth of research. But it's Marc Aronson's wide, expansive view that is so refreshing. From geology and engineering to economics, mythology and religion, Aronson provides young readers with insights and analogies that can be applied far beyond what happened last year in an undersupervised Chilean mine. Of course, he has a dramatic story to tell, pivoting between the miners' situation (profound darkness, scarce food, impressive teamwork) and the rescuers' complicated efforts to recover the 33 men. Rounding out all the facts, maps and diagrams, Aronson displays a certain storytelling bravado. Besides welcome references to NFL draft picks and future NASA voyages, he also brings up larger points, such as his notion that the Americas should be named not for Amerigo Vespucci but for the silver-rich town of Potosi (in modern-day Bolivia). Even the captions — "Open pit mines such as this show our capacity to gouge out the earth" — have attitude. Aronson doesn't call for a halt to mining but for a renewed appreciation for Earth and for the people who "enter the kingdom of the dark." A year after their rescue, many of the 33 miners are still struggling, and the risks and rewards of mining are still worth studying.- Abby McGanney Nolan

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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BOOMERANG: Travels in the New Third World

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Washington Post book reviewers

Oct 7, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Michael Lewis
Norton
ISBN 978-0393081817
213 pages
$25.95

Reviewed by Carlos Lozada

In 2008, the satirists over at the Onion released a straight-to-video comedy that included a faux news segment on little-known national stereotypes. Dutch people love speaking to telemarketers. Puerto Ricans can dangle from steel beams for hours on end. Irish men have enormous nipples. And poncho'd Peruvians always swoop in at the last second and save the day.

Well, turns out they missed a few. In "Boomerang," his latest book on the planet's seemingly endless financial implosion, journalist Michael Lewis drops in on Iceland, Greece, Ireland and Germany, and chronicles the mess they've made of their markets and money. Yet even as "Boomerang" captures the essence of the international economic crisis -- a sort of travelogue version of Lewis' must-read "The Big Short" -- it also offers an odd collection of searing, sometimes funny but mostly head-scratching judgments and stereotypes about the offending countries. Lewis not only shows us what the Greeks and Icelanders and Irish and Germans did to get into trouble, but attempts to unveil their souls, too. And it's not a pretty sight.

Lewis' financial-disaster tourism begins in Iceland, where "an entire nation without immediate experience or even distant memory of high finance had gazed upon the example of Wall Street and said 'We can do that.'"

And for a while, it seemed they could. From 2003-07, Iceland's banking system, stock market and real-estate sector all boomed. But it was an illusion, a web of cronyism in which bankers lent each other vast sums to buy stuff -- Beverly Hills condos, private jets, Elton John singing at your birthday party -- at insanely inflated prices. It was all among friends, because, as Lewis writes, Iceland "is less a nation than one big extended family."

Then the bubble burst and the banks imploded, collectively leaving each Icelander on the hook for some $330,000 in banking losses. The country's problem, according to Lewis, is one of national character. These aren't a bunch of sweet Scandinavians, he warns, but a people with "a feral streak in them, like a horse that's just pretending to be broken." (The evidence is that several men bump into Lewis on the street, without apologizing.) The Icelanders thought they were special -- during the boom, the president gave speeches extolling "our heritage and training, our culture and home market" -- but they weren't. Lewis pokes fun at the lack of sophistication among the country's financial elites, not just the fishermen turned investment bankers, but the philosophers, veterinarians and poets making up the government economic team.

These men might have saved themselves, however, if they had gotten out of the way and let Iceland's women run the show. "One of the distinctive traits about Iceland's disaster, and Wall Street's, is how little women had to do with it," Lewis concludes.

Greece, Lewis' next stop, offers the book's most fascinating tale: how the kindly monks managing the millennium-old Vatopaidi monastery jutting out over the Aegean Sea became the nation's poster children for greed and corruption.

Father Arsenios and Father Ephraim -- whom Lewis compares to Enron execs Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay -- managed to acquire ownership rights to a lake and somehow swapped it for much more valuable government land in a murky deal that, once revealed in the national press, outraged the public. (Lewis' description of the monks negotiating with a former Citigroup-exec-turned-finance-ministry-official is alone worth the book's $25.95 price tag.) Thanks in part to cozy ties with the prime minister's chief of staff (they heard his confession, after all), the monks ended up building a commercial real estate empire worth some $1 billion in an effort to restore Vatopaidi to its former glory.

Greece's innate corruption is corroborated by anonymous interviews with two whistle-blowing tax collectors (cheating on your taxes is a "cultural trait" in Greece, one lamented) and by Lewis' account of how Greek officials lied their way into the European Union by doctoring their economic data. "Government statisticians did things like remove (high-priced) tomatoes from the consumer price index on the day inflation was measured," as well as move stuff like pensions and defense spending off the books. That's how a deficit greater than 10 percent of GDP came in under 3 percent -- and how the Greeks joined the EU club.

For Lewis, these episodes get to the heart of the country's character: Greeks are selfish. Greeks are insular. Greeks can't say anything nice about each other. "The epidemic of lying and cheating and stealing makes any sort of civic life impossible," he writes. As for whether Greece will pay its debts or will default and pull Europe deeper into crisis, it is "really a question of whether Greece will change its culture" -- and he's not optimistic about that.

Why jet around the world and pass judgment on nations and populations after short stays here and there? Because, Lewis says, the crisis created a unique occasion for international psychoanalysis. "The tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet from 2002 to 2007 ... wasn't just money, it was temptation," he explains. "It offered entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge. Entire countries were told, 'The lights are out, you can do whatever you want to do and no one will ever know.'"

The moment the money is taken away is equally revealing. After Ireland's economic boom of the 2000s -- when the chronically pessimistic Irish people "discovered optimism" -- a precipitous collapse and massive bank bailout did not lead to Greek-style protests or American-style town halls or Wall Street marches. Lewis marvels at the lack of a public backlash: Ireland was the first European nation to watch its banking system crumble, but its ruling business-friendly conservative party stayed in power until early this year. Also, aside from an egg-thrower at a shareholders' meeting of the Irish bank AIB and a property developer who adorned his cement mixer with anti-banker slogans and left it between the gates of Parliament, there was not much protest.

Lewis chalks up such acceptance to the longtime and intimate relationship between the Irish and wretchedness. "They'd gone from being abnormally poor to being abnormally rich with pausing to experience normality," he writes. So when the boom ended, it was painful, but at least historically familiar.

The wierdest of all the trips -- or at least Lewis' wierdest analysis -- has to be Germany. The author wallows in a supposed German obsession with fecal matter, then uses it as a metaphor for the nation's role in the continent's financial turmoil. "Germans longed to be near the (expletive), but not in it. This, as it turns out, is an excellent description of their role in the current financial crisis." OK.

Germans did not go nuts during the global credit boom. They did not spend beyond their means and run up massive deficits; citizens did not buy a bunch of overpriced assets they couldn't afford; former government financial officials did not dash off to make bundles at investment firms. But that doesn't mean they were blameless, or that they won't suffer. Not only did German banks become top creditors for all these spendthrift European nations, but they also lost a pile in America's subprime debacle, purchasing assets they thought were safe. Why? Because, Lewis writes, Germans believe in rules, not just excrement. "The Germans took the rules at their face value: They looked into the history of triple-A-rated bonds and accepted the official story that triple-A-rated bonds were completely risk-free." Even when they weren't. Lewis quotes a Wall Street trader, circa 2007, explaining who was still buying the securities he was peddling: "Stupid Germans in Dsseldorf."

Now Germany's "preternatural love of rules" will come into play as the world waits to see if it bails out the EU. After all, when the Germans signed on to the euro, they didn't think they were signing on to be Europe's insurance policy, but what did they know? "The same instincts that allowed them to trust Wall Street bond salesmen also allowed them to trust the French, when they promised there would be no bailouts, and the Greeks, when they swore that their budget was balanced," Lewis posits. Those silly Germans -- so gullible!

Lewis has a wonderful talent for distilling complicated stories, whether bond trading in New York ("Liar's Poker") or a baseball-analysis revolution in Oakland ("Moneyball"), in simple terms and with telling detail. "Boomerang" -- adapted from a series of essays he wrote for Vanity Fair -- doesn't disappoint on this score.

Everyday Irish people speak in "basis points" rather than percentages, indicating how deeply finance had penetrated their lives. The vacancies in Reyjavik's posh 101 Hotel -- "the sort of place bankers stay because they think it's where the artists stay" -- embody the city's sudden collapse. And the conundrum of ascetic Greek monks somehow getting fat on a menu of cucumbers and raw onions suggests that not all was as it seemed.

But the book's incessant moralizing and stereotyping may leave readers wondering why Lewis, beyond traveling throughout Europe, also took the path from master storyteller to itinerant scold. "Boomerang" is full of wonderful characters and unforgettable scenes. But it's also preachy, even angry, and the mix is as distracting as it is enlightening.

Carlos Lozada is Outlook editor at The Washington Post. He can be reached at lozadac(at symbol)washpost.com.

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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SEX ON SIX LEGS: Lessons on Life, Love, and Language from the Insect World

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Aug 5, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Marlene Zuk
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 978-0151013739
262 pages
$25

Reviewed by Becky Krystal

If nothing else, "Sex on Six Legs" will make you think twice the next time you step outside -- or anywhere, really. Biology professor Marlene Zuk's look at the insect world is often insightful, especially for the parallels she draws between bugs and people. What sets us apart from insects now that scientists have shown that some can count, recognize individuals and communicate geography? Maybe just their torrid, ruthless sex lives (if you think the Washington dating scene is rough, you don't know the half of it). Woe to the female dung flies drowned or irreparably injured by overeager suitors. The less titillating material is just as buzz-worthy: More than 80 percent of all animal species are insects, including more than 350,000 species of beetles, one-fourth of all the creatures on earth.

Zuk conveys an obvious affection for the tiny critters, and her expertise, including her knowledge of other scientists' research, is impressive. Sometimes, though, the text veers too far into academia for the layperson, sounding more like a digest of studies than a narrative. Even readers with a basic biology background may find their eyes crossed after attempting the passage on insect sex ratios. Still, Zuk peppers her writing with geeky wit and the underlying possibility that, when it comes to evolutionary superiority, humans may not be so big after all.

Becky Krystal can be reached at krystalb(at symbol)washpost.com.

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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Review-a-Day for Fri, Jun 24: The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families After World War II

by Tara Zahra A review by Mark Mazower

No sooner had I finished this fascinating book than I remembered the shattering scene in Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise when the teenage orphans whom a fatherly priest has been shepherding to the safety of a secluded chateau suddenly turn on him like a pack of wolves and stone him to death. It is an unforgettable moment that seems to sum up all the madness of France's panic in the summer of 1940. But in its almost Jacobin ghoulishness, the event is also mysteriously implausible.

Now, after reading The Lost Children, it seems more decipherable. Throughout the war and after it, Europeans were completely obsessed with the fate of children. Everything -- the health of society, the prospects for democracy, the future of the nation itself -- was believed to depend on their well-being. And so much threatened their tiny souls: the war destroyed hearth and home, forced families apart, and flung people together in temporary alliances that could not last. In her portrayal of the precise moment when civilization collapsed, revealing its most treasured possessions to be no more than a bunch of feral psychopaths, Nemirovsky captured the deepest anxieties of her generation.

Tara Zahra, a historian who made her name writing about the ambiguities of nationality in Czechoslovakia, has now added an important contribution to the growing literature on Europe's reconstruction after World War II. Children -- what was happening to them as a result of the war, and what to do with them after it -- turn out to have been at the epicenter of what she terms a "psychological Marshall Plan." Through the arguments about children we come to learn much about postwar Europe's state of mind.In fact, the intense debate about how to care for children and bring them whole out of the war's devastation was already underway before the end of hostilities.

The wartime anxiety articulated by Suite Francaise also permeated the Czech fortress ghetto Terezín, where Jewish educators debated the appropriate pedagogy for the children in their care. And this was just the beginning. After the war, the arguments intensified. Should children be brought up as self-reliant individuals, or were they to see themselves as part of a collective? If the latter, was their natural unit the family or the nation? This dilemma posed itself with special force for Jewish children, because so many families had been destroyed, so many children were left parentless, and the chances for any resumption of Jewish communal life in Europe seemed remote.

But it was not only Zionists who sought to claim children for their national cause. With the credibility and the prestige of Europe's nation-state model challenged by the experience of Nazi rule, most political activists keen to guarantee the rebirth of their nation at liberation regarded children as a precious resource. Several decades of demographic scaremongering had not helped. Orphans in particular found themselves fought over in a fashion not so different from the way Nazis had tried to claim blue-eyed and blond-haired Polish children during the war. But now the children in question were born to German women and French soldiers, and it was the French authorities who sought to bolster their war-torn country and weaken the boches by grabbing children for themselves.

To Germany's east, Czech officials acted similarly, and one of the many virtues of Zahra's pan-European optic is to reveal the persistence of nationalism across the continent at the war's end and the relative insignificance of the ideological divide of the Cold War in this moment of reconstruction. Czechs and Poles were as anxious to claim children as the French were, and for similar reasons. In every case, of course, it was a matter of the right kind of children: Jewish babies or black babies were not wanted, and a government might at one and the same time be trying to keep half-German babies in and push Jewish children out.

Another theme that runs through Zahra's book is the mistrust that officials, psychologists, and activists shared for parents. This was not just a matter of pursuing orphans: most of the children in displaced persons camps, for instance, had one or both parents and other close relatives alive. But could parents themselves be trusted to live up to their ethical and psychological responsibilities (this was where many of the professionals had their doubts), or to bear their responsibilities to the nation? Thus the postwar years saw two contradictory trends: on the one hand, the revival of a discourse of familialism that made the nuclear unit the core of social stability and ultimately turned the 1950s into the most conservative decade of the century; and on the other, the emergence of a new state activism that supervised parents and children alike, and intervened in unprecedented ways in their personal affairs.

The most extreme form that this intervention took was kidnapping, something we associate with the Nazis' Germanization campaign in occupied Poland in particular. The shadow of Roald Dahl's Child Catcher -- immortalized in the film version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang -- hangs over these pages, especially as the organized seizure of children continued after the Nazi defeat. Zahra tells several extraordinary stories. In 1946, a few Polish Jewish survivors criticized Zionist representatives who had spirited off their children from communal children's homes in order to smuggle them into Palestine against the wishes of their parents; but despite their protests, they failed to secure their return.

Another episode comes from France a few years later, in the so-called Finaly case, where a tug-of-war over two Jewish boys between their surviving relatives and the Catholic creche headmistress who had sheltered them degenerated into outright abduction by the Church, which smuggled the boys into Spain. The case made national headlines and led some observers to fear another Dreyfus affair until the boys were returned to their relatives in 1953, a decade after their parents, who died in Auschwitz, had parted with them. One thinks, too, of the accusations of child abduction leveled by both sides in the Greek civil war; the so-called "child-gathering" of the leftist rebels, who spirited thousands across the Albanian frontier and into a life behind the Iron Curtain, remains contentious to this day.

Zahra is especially good at tracing the connections between pedagogic theories and nationalist politics, and her rich source basis allows her to demonstrate the ubiquity of the problem. Was there anyone in the 1940s who did not worry about Europe's future in terms of its children? And yet the children themselves are only an intermittent presence in these pages, entering as a source of strife and disappearing once the conflict over them is resolved. Compared with some recent popular histories, their voices are infrequently heard here, and as a result one cannot help but wonder whether all this anxiety about their psychic resilience was really warranted.

There is not much worth reading on the long-term impact of wartime on children, but what there is suggests that kids are on the whole a tough lot, able to thrive in the most extraordinary circumstances and with a remarkable capacity to develop their own sense of what is happening to them. Perhaps, from the child's viewpoint, Nemirovsky's kindly priest-guide and Dahl's sinister Child Catcher were two sides of the same coin. On the basis of this book, there would be much to support such a view: when World War II ended, it was the adults who were lost.

Mark Mazower teaches history at Columbia University.

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Review-a-Day for Wed, Jun 1: I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive

by Steve Earle A review by Don Waters

Everyone knows that terrible things happen in old country songs: A wife leaves her husband; a guy dies at war. Life's rough, times are hard.

Steve Earle, the well-known singer-songwriter, embraces this heartbreaky landscape in his first novel, a rowdy country music song turned into narration. The book's title -- and what a superb title it is -- comes from Hank Williams' last No. 1 hit, before his death, at age 29, in 1953.

Hank's ghost haunts the pages of Earle's story. But mostly he just haunts Doc, an ex-doctor who's fallen on hard times. Long ago, Doc injected Hank with morphine, to ease his back pain, which may have contributed to his death.

Ten years later, Doc is living in San Antonio, and he's a bit of a ghost himself. A functional heroin addict, with "needle-ravaged legs," Doc has to "hustle like any other hophead on the street." And let's briefly peruse this cratered avenue: It's full of "working girls," a pawnshop, liquor store and a "gauntlet of junkies." Prime territory, in other words, for outlaws.

"Day in, day out," Doc emerges from his boardinghouse to score dope and shoot up with a "family heirloom" syringe. There may as well be a worn trail in the pavement leading from Doc's room to his local bar, where he "could be found every day between eleven and five."

To finance his habit, Doc treats "outcasts of various persuasions" for STDs with "black market penicillin" and performs frequent abortions.

Into this hard life floats another ghost, the aptly named Graciela. Graciela's beautiful, young, Mexican, and she needs Doc to terminate her pregnancy.

It soon becomes clear that there's something holy about the girl. She affects the boardinghouse, and its inhabitants, like some kind of apostle. She heals people, including Doc, showing him that a life full of friends trumps veins full of opiates.

"It was amazing," Doc thinks at one point, "how addictive fellowship was."

On this street, amid this sludge and wonder, Earle's bighearted desperadoes are also undeniably funny. Doc's long prayer to God is its own bright miracle. And his arguments with Hank are hysterical. And then there are the wonderful secondary characters, the hustlers, the crooked cop and the black tranny hooker.

Earle does stumble several times with blemishes in his prose. For one, he goes heavy on the exclamation points. In the first scene, in the span of three pages, I count 16 of them. After a while, this gets annoying!

And then there is Earle's presentation of sound. Here's someone struggling with a locked door: "Bang! Rattle! Bang! Rattle! Bang! Rattle!" As a specialist in sound, Earle should know that a person pulling on a fastened door doesn't create that noise.

There's no better salve to ease exasperation than truly fine writing. And Earle wrangles sentences together with the best of them. Following one of Doc's illegal procedures, for instance, "Graciela wrung out the washcloth and gently probed every fold and crevice between Doc's oaken-colored fingers, tracking down all hidden traces of blame by feel and excising them by means of gentle steady pressure and whispered incantations in Nahuatl."

This, of course, is a Western novel, an outlaw novel, and so where would it be without the final showdown?

As the title implies, somebody won't make it out of the book alive. But then, we already know we're in for some heartbreak. Thankfully, Hank's ghost is always hovering around. If he's not coming from the jukebox, the "hillbilly singer" is on the other end of the light wearing his big Stetson, cooing in his mischievous voice, helping to lead the way.

Don Waters is the author of the story collection Desert Gothic.

This review was originally published by the San Fransisco Chronicle.

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INDIGO: In Search of the Color that Seduced the World

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Jun 10, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Catherine E. McKinley
Bloomsbury
ISBN 978-1608195053
235 pages
$27

Reviewed by Sarah Halzack

Just as indigo dye leaves a deep, lasting stain on the fabric it touches, it has left a durable mark on the life of American author Catherine E. McKinley, who traveled across nine African countries to research its origins. "Indigo" is a memoir of her journey from bustling markets in Nigeria to camel rides in Niger to a funeral ceremony in Ghana.

McKinley pursued any lead to the pigment and the complex method of creating it. A Fulbright scholar, at first she hunted for indigo-dyed cloth for research, but soon she became obsessed with purchasing the finest examples for her own use. Fleeing an attempted military coup in the Ivory Coast, she refused to leave behind the cloths she had purchased, even though they weighed down her already heavy load. Ultimately, her fixation on indigo forced her to look inward. "Whose heritage was I collecting -- my own? That of my ancestors? ... I wondered about this intense passion in the midst of a violent, modern remaking of a nation."

McKinley sometimes makes her expertise too apparent; her descriptions of the dyeing process aren't always accessible to a reader unfamiliar with the topic. Still, her personal discoveries resonate, and her unique experiences provide a vivid snapshot of the cultures she encountered in Africa.

Sarah Halzack can be reached at halzacks(at symbol)washpost.com.

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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