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BOATING THE ATLANTIC Shortly after a family tragedy, Kim Petersen, her husband and two children sell their belongings, restore a catamaran and cross the Atlantic Ocean. With no boating experience, and a fear of water, Petersens trip was as much spiritual odyssey as travel. Her new book, Charting the Unknown, describes her journey of self-discovery as she travels the world with her young family aboard the catamaran Chrysalis.

BURMESE REFUGEES Mac MeClelland is a writer and editor at Mother Jones. In 2006 she worked along the Thai border with Karen refugees fleeing from Burma. Her new book For Us Surrender is Out of the Question: A Story from Burma's Never-Ending War is about her work with the people she met and their stories of survival. She'll be at Get Lost showing images and discussing her time with the Karen people.

If youre tired of rubbing shoulders with other tourists in the must-see spots that books are hounding you to visit, perhaps we could interest you in a trip to Chacabuco, Chile, the driest area in the western hemisphere and home to Pinochet's deadliest concentration camp. If that doesnt hit the spot, you might consider such attractions as Missoula, Montanas Testicle Festival, the premier venue to chow down on Rocky Mountain oysters, or Beijings Museum of Tap Water, where 40 real water taps are on display (and the water is unfit to drink). Not to mention genuine tourist horrors like Amsterdams Sexmuseum and Stonehenge. Catherine Price scours the world for places you can afford to miss, and carefully explains why youre better off without them. The time you save can be put to good advantage enjoying this book, which offers not only the opportunity to learn about misconceived attractions you never could have imagined, but also, strangely, an oblique way to think about the poetics (and anti-poetics) of place.
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Add Los Angeles to the list of infamous American cities of the 1920s. For all its clean-living, year-round-sunshine boosterism, the city's economic heart was a dark and dirty place. Big oil and a crime syndicate controlled the vice trades, funded politicians, and used the police as a private security force. Reform movements came to power but inevitably succumbed to payoffs and favors. Richard Rayner's tale of oil, Hollywood, murder, money and power reads like a Raymond Chandler novel. (Chandler himself, an oil executive in Los Angeles at the time, figures in the narrative.) Tales of corruption might be familiar, but the settings the Santa Monica Pier, the Doheny mansion, City Hall, the Los Angeles Times headquarters make this a uniquely Los Angeles tale.

For this project Friedlander, the foremost chronicler of the American vernacular landscape, criss-crossed the country in a rental car, documenting the views from his front, rear and side windows. Rather than impose formal compositions on the buildings, posters, parks, monuments and weird roadside objects, he manages to elicit and convey their own quirky, elusive rhythms. It makes sense that the interior of the car should become part of the landscape, since so much of the landscape was built around cars. The concept is simple, almost a gimmick, but the results transmute relentlessly mundane vistas into a constant source of surprise and delight, an unlikely adventure in the art of seeing.

Another Science Fiction is a stunning survey of space industry advertisements from an era in American history that oozed confidence. The impetus was the Soviet launching of the Sputnik satellite in 1957. The first advertisements, with graphics straight out of sci-fi novels, are anything but nave or kitsch. Megan Prelinger's essays reveal layers of intention in the messages. They solicited skilled engineers and establishing a firms credentials; their insertion of humans in the space ads coincided with a scientific debate on the efficacy of manned flights; the spare minimal graphics that arose at the end of the era reflected the emerging art and culture in America. Like all great archives, the space-age ads taken together tell parallel stories to the ones that the ad men and their clients intended.

What would you do if your loved one were suddenly replaced by a simulacrum? Dr. Leo Liebenstein flees from New York to Buenos Aires then down into the glacial regions of Patagonia in search of the "real Rema," the familiar counterpart to the uncanny double who seems to have taken his wife's place. Author Rivka Galchen, MD, weaves theories of (mis)perception, meteorology, and infinite universes into Leos quest to find his "disappeared" wifea term which Galchen troubles in the context of recent Argentinian history. Atmospheric Disturbances ultimately explores the simultaneously loving, paranoid and completely ordinary notion that the person you stay with is never identical to the person with whom you first fell in love.

She lives in a hut on a mound of dried chicken legs with severed hands for doorknobs and severed heads on the gateposts. She sometimes gives birth to frogs and spiders and sometimes devours her own daughter. She is the Slavic mythic figure Baba Yaga, the ultimate repository of societies deeply charged feelings about older women. Does she represent fear of female sexuality? Fear of death? Or just the scapegoating of women throughout history? Croatian author Ugresic spins themes and variations on every aspect of the myth, in a dazzling mixture of memoir, fable, satire, travel writing and folkloric scholarship. Her stories of older women in contemporary Eastern Europe are saturated with mythic overtones; yet she never allows us to forget the way in which women throughout history have had to struggle with and overcome the stigma of the myth.

Once again, Robert Service makes the interesting more thrilling, and the curious even more hilarious. In his new book Comrades! A History of World Communism, he attempts to sum up the origins and history of the world Communist movementthe first post-USSR analysis of its kind. Service ties a fascinating thread through the October Revolution, China, Cubaas well as the futile, but important Communist struggles in the U.S. and Western Europe. As is his style, asides and bits of information, like the fact that Khrushchev had to wear floatees because he couldnt swim, sometimes overshadow dates and statistics. Comrades! also includes full color photographs of nearly a century of pro- and anti-Communist propagandaworthy of a full-scale art book in and of itself.

Culture is Our Weapon is a non-sentimental look at the life in Brazil's favelas and focuses on the rise of drug and gang violence. The book is not an exploitative or tabloid-esque depiction of the futility of life for "the other." Rather, it focuses on how the NGO and baile funk group AfroReggae have repurposed the structures and hierarchies of the local gang culture to create a viable alternative for those whose entire lives are dictated by the criminal organizations. This isn't a fairy story with a happy ending, but the story of an ongoing struggle to demonstrate an alternative to those whose lives are entangled in the complicated web of power, violence and survival in these shanty towns. An essential and provocative read.

Another book on vanishing Detroit? Camilo Jose Vergara's brilliant 1999 book American Ruins already documented the de-urbanization of Detroit over a period of years. The Detroit in Andrew Moore's Detroit Disassembled seems more like battered remnants after the Flood rather than decay. An office carpeted in moss, a skeleton of a cat in a shuttered public library, school children in a landscape that might be New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward: Nature is reasserting itself in the urban landscape that was once industrial and densely populated. Still, Moore finds the urban pioneer or the last resident of an otherwise abandoned apartment building to remind us that this is, still, a city.

With all the elements of a great novel, it is surprising that no one has extensively documented the story of Henry Fords Fordlandia until now. Fords project, a rubber producing company town located deep in the Brazilian Amazon, was meant to supply parts for Ford automobiles. Henry Fords rational, Puritan vision transformed the jungle into a little bit of Dearborn, Michigan, albeit with tree plantations at its heart. The intensive plantings almost destroyed the trees. And Fordlandia's hospitals, golf courses and vocational schools were ill matched against an indigenous population with its own customs and habits. Grandin rescues Fordlandia and Ford's rubber project from its nearly forgotten past.

Now in Paperback! Home Ground is a massive collection of words that describe American geography, geology and water. Gathered by 45 writers, including poet Robert Hass, Gretel Ehrlich, Barbara Kingslover and Jon Krakauer, these words, listed in dictionary-fashion, help define our landscape: catena and baraboo, arroyo and moraine. The writers bring their distinctive literary styles and their regional backgrounds to explain the lay of the land. There are definitions of the lava formations in Hawaii, the dry creek beds in the Southwest, the barrier islands of the southeast and the bogs, bogans and bogholes of the Midwest and the East. The entries are illuminating. The writing, often citing literary sources, is lively and free of jargon. Barry Lopez makes the point in his introduction that these words and regional places names are endangered as fewer and fewer people live off of, and therefore know, the land. That alone makes Home Ground an important document.

Who is Crispin Salvador? Our narrator, who happens to be named Miguel Syjuco, was the last acquaintance to see him alive. We know that Crispin was one of the Philippines' literary giants whose writings stepped on the toes of the rich and powerful. Miguels is a Citizen Kane-like investigation, where stories open up and often contradicts other stories. The narrative ducks and weaves from New York to the Philippines, back and forth through 150 years of family histories to the narrators own fraught relationships. Syjuco's first novel, winner of the "Man Asian Literary Prize" is an ambitious work that hones in on the machinations of political power and society in the Philippines.

We will soon need to be learning more about Pakistan, whether we like it or not. One relatively painless way to begin is with this collection of elegantly crafted, interweaving short stories, all connected to the household of a feudal landowner, whose estate is being whittled away by the tides of history and his family's dissipation. The prose is delicate and precise, like the ceremonial patterns of courtesy that govern even the most intimate exchanges; while under the surface the narratives seethe with emotional violence, as the characters (ranging from jet-setters to servants to impoverished villagers) scheme and maneuver to gain or retain a precarious foothold on the social ladder. It is a dark canvas, illuminated by the author's generous empathy with his characters' struggle for some measure of security and emotional fulfillment within the increasingly chaotic social landscape of contemporary Pakistan.

This witty, daring, inventively structured novel is a diptych, juxtaposing two self-contained novellas that are mirror images of one another, forming a third in the readers mind. Both are set in cities of crumbling old-world palaces built on water. In the first, a hack journalist sent to cover the Venice Biennale is swept up in the brittle hedonist pleasures of the art world extravaganza. In the second a journalist (perhaps the same person; certainly a version of the same person) assigned to do a brief travel piece on Varanasi, misses his plane home, and gradually succumbs to the spiritual undertow. The writing is of the highest order: perceptive, surprising, often laugh-out-loud funny. It is a virtuosic fusion of wildly disparate tones, mixing allusions to Thomas Mann with up-to-the-minute slanginess, illuminating travel writing and a haunting yearning for transcendence.

Jake Silverstein moves to Marfa, Texas from New York City with the idea of becoming a roving eye; The plan is to start out writing news stories for a local paper, then somehow miraculously uncover a scoop that will transport him to the dashing world of The New Yorker. His big idea hits him as he is driving around the desert researching Victorian writer Ambrose Pierces mysterious final resting place. Its something in the landscape he is surrounded bythe paradox of the legacy of cattle ranching in a landscape that has always been scarred by endless drought. He quits his small town newspaper job to write his opus, but after six months of research discovers he has been scooped by an actual New Yorker reporter. He instantly abandons his West Texas existence for New Orleans. So begins an epic journey through the borderlands that separate America and Mexico. Silversteins droll self-deprecating voice transforms what could be another cliched look at the arid, mythic Southwest into something closer to a post-McSweeneys Roughing It. One gets a visceral feel for the landscape and the people that the writer encounters, (or constructs): from stoic cattle ranchers to modern snake oil salesmen, to an old man searching for his long lost sister, through to his own search for the devil along with a dead writers bones. As the subtitle suggests, his book falls somewhere in the grey area between memoir and novel in a most entertaining way. Perfect summer road trip reading.

Paris is a character, sometimes central but often incidental, in Peter Robb's Parisians. Paris is the setting for the historical figures whom Robb sometimes recovers from obscurity: Hitler so admired Paris architecture as a template for future German city planning, that he personally gave Albert Speer and his entourage a tour of the city after its capture; Henry Murger lived an impoverished life there before finding fame and fortune by writing a hit play, La Vie de Bohme. Robb's meticulous research, bringing to print mostly forgotten stories makes for fascinating story-telling.

When Marcel Proust died, all his possessions, including the final three unpublished volumes of In Search of Lost Time, went to his brother, Dr. Robert Proust. Family resentment and retribution led many of those possessions to the ash heap or to a local junkman. It was only through luck and the determination of a rare book collector and Proust devotee, Jacques Guerin, that much of Proust's estate was saved. Lorenza Foschini's investigation reads like a good Sebald novel: sexuality, infidelity, and wealth are as integral to the story as one mans passion for all things Proust. With the simple question how did Prousts overcoat end up in a box at the Muse Carnavalet Foschini tells a fantastic tale.

The animating spirit of Walter Benjamin presides over this innovative and revelatory collection of original essays that explore the patterns and rhythms of everyday life in the modern metropolis. Each essay conveys the endless making and unmaking of city life by focusing on an activity that typically eludes conscious attention. The essay on "potting" considers windowsill plants as a threshold between public and private space, by way of the cultural history of geraniums; "waiting" deals with the duty free shops at Heathrow in conjunction with Flaubert's Sentimental Education; "archiving" discusses the city as a memory machine, exposing and obscuring the traces of its history; "phoning" is an elegiac ode to the public telephone booth; "recycling" surveys the many uses of rubbish through the ages. There are sixteen essays in all, each interweaving the analytical and the experiential to evoke the city as a state of delirium so habitual as to be almost unnoticeable.

Over 350 stairways traverse San Francisco's 42 hills, linking diverse neighborhoods and offering inspiring vistas. Absorb the sights, scents, and sounds of San Francisco on 27 stairway walks. In this sixth edition of Stairway Walks in San Francisco, you'll find up-to-date architectural, historical, and horticultural information for each walk. Easy-to-follow maps correspond to lucid directions, including public transportation.

This book was initially marketed as another The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.The comparison doesnt ring true, despite having a Scandinavian author and murder-mystery undercurrents. It fits somewhere between Jeffrey Eugenides' Virgin Suicides and Tarjei Vesaas The Ice Palace. It is written in a dreamy fractured voice, which gives the setting an evocative atmosphere, perfectly capturing the early 70s drift away from the ideals of the 1960s. Eddie is the American girl who disappears and winds up drowned in a small resort town outside of Helsinki. She leaves behind a pile of books, a guitar and a record-your-own 7 made in Coney Island of her singing a Melanie song. It becomes a totem for two pre-adolescent girls, Doris and Sandra, whose close bond is the focus of most of the book. They play ritualistic games based on the missing American Girl, singing her song, and draping themselves in the abandoned silks from Sandras jet-setter mother. Fagerholm builds up different threads of the narrative, creating an all encompassing and consuming read. The impressionist non linear writing can get confusing, and some of the translation is a little clunky (Look What Theyve Done To My Song becomes Look Ma They Destroyed My Song, for example) but The American Girl is at once satisfying and open ended, creating as many mysteries as it solves.

Mary Beard leaves no pumice unturned and no ash unsifted as she explores what the ruins of Pompeii can teach us about everyday life in the Roman Empire. Beard, one of the foremost living classical scholars, is also a gifted storyteller, with a fine sense of humor and a wonderful instinct for the telling detail. The pleasure of this book lies not only in what she tells us about politics, religion, work and, yes, sex in the first century, but in the way she extrapolates from the evidence; for example, deducing the dietary and hygienic regimens of the inhabitants from the fossilized remains of tapeworms. She also entertainingly demolishes misguided assumption that has become "common knowledge." The book works on three levels: as a guidebook that profoundly enriches the experience of the site; as a casebook in archaeological method; and as a triumph of the historical imagination. It is the best single book that has ever been written on Pompeii.

Jumping between decades and revealing itself slowly, The Informers is Juan Gabriel Vasquez' first novel translated into English. What begins as a story of the falling out and rapprochement between the narrator and his father in present day Bogota, becomes background to historical events (both real and invented) during and after World War II in Colombia. Using the memoirs of a German-Jewish refugee friend of the narrators family we learn about the Colombian government's black lists of suspected German Nazi sympathizers. The Informers, at heart is a story about betrayal, hypocrisy and guilt and the effects on its various characters that last until the present. The 'informers' arent just those who gave names to the government, but spurned lovers, historians, story tellers and narrators. Not least of all was the Colombian government itself, which collected the names of thousands of suspected Nazi sympathizers on behalf of the U.S. government.

There have been a rather large selection in recent years of books on the so called art of walking. This one is written by an Englishman, and covers the cultural, historical and philosophical nature of walking. From Errol Flynn's use of an almost choreographed walk to navigate the dense streets of New York City in Gentleman Jim through to the way Tom Waits constructs songs around a good amble, this is an easy yet provocative read. The Islamic ritual walk, the hadj, and the patented teenage slouch are covered with equal depth. So too are the numerous dances that incorporate the word or act of walking. Sometimes books that are essentially ruminations on a cultural phenomenon and seeming (ahem) pedestrian activities such as walking can seem a little droll or even smug. Nicholson has a sharp wit and a sarcastic tone that keeps this fascinating volume both incisive and compelling.

Most histories of architecture treat great buildings as though they were timeless and unchanging. Edward Hollis presents another way of looking at them. In this riveting and vividly written book, he looks at buildings as living and evolving entities, transformed layer by layer, generation by generation, as people come to use them and think about them in different ways. The Parthenon, for example, was a temple, then a church, then a mosque, then a gunpowder storehouse, then a revolutionary symbol, and finally an endlessly reproduced tourist attraction. Notre Dame was rebuilt in the image of a 19th century fantasy of what the middle ages ought to look like; its present incarnation would be unrecognizable to its original builders. And so on, as theft, appropriation, simulation, misunderstandings and even prophesy leave their marks on the monuments that people build and inherit. The history of each building is narrated as a story (often beginning "Once upon a time"). The result is as entertaining as it is informative, and can change the way you look at architecture.

The extremely awkward, profoundly self-conscious characters in Paolo Giordanos debut novel are physically and psychically scarred by the traumatic incidents that open the book. But you are never quite sure whether claustrophobic family life might better explain the loneliness at the heart of the story. Mattia, a mathematical genius, retreats into calculus and geometric equations when in interpersonal settings. His classmate Alice is anorexic, unhappy and physically disabled. These damaged souls at the heart of the novel, find their only intimacy in their fragile friendship. More melancholic than dark, Giordanos characters are the twinned prime numbers he describes: extremely isolated and very rare. An oddly hopeful novel.

When The Story of the Night was published in 1996 Argentine president Carlos Menem's embrace of neo-liberal economic policy was just beginning. The novel is remarkable now, 13 years later, for how convincingly it describes the American covert agents and U.S. oilmen on the ground floor (oil-shares, anybody?) of globalization as it sweeps into Argentina in the late 1980s. But this is only part of the world in which the main character of the novel operates. The narrator's domestic and romantic liaisons, each with its disappointments and missed opportunities, frame the story. More acted upon by history than one of history's actors, he lives in unquestioning acceptance through the brutality of the dictatorship, the Falklands (Malvinas) War, the privatization of the Argentine economy and the onset of the AIDS crisis. Like a Caravaggio painting that suggests upheaval and scheming in a simple scene, Toibin captures human desire at a pivotal moment in a countrys history.

As the nominal head of city planning and infrastructure for New York from the 1920s through the 1960s, Robert Moses was responsible for the displacement of hundreds of thousands of New York residents. Although citizen groups became increasingly resistant to Moses' schemes, in the early 1950s he was still regarded as a selfless public servant by the media and much of the public. Anthony Flint's Wrestling with Moses recounts Jane Jacobs' public battles against Moses' plans to extend roadways through Washington Square, and later, Greenwich Village and much of SoHo. Jacobs, a Greenwich Village resident and a writer for Architectural Forum, had already written critically about urban redevelopment projects before Moses launched his lower Manhattan schemes. Over the course of the fights, Jacobs became a master strategist who knew how to use civil disobedience to persuade neighbors and power brokers to resist any compromise with Moses. She also wrote one of the great books on urban planning, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Wrestling with Moses is a great introduction to this well known struggle between two very different views of how cities should work and who gets to decide.