Reading about his journeys is like sitting down for a beer with a good friend: No one's in a hurry. He meanders through the Gulf Coast's industrial canals aboard the Delta Queen and combs Lake Superior's shores for the perfect smoked cisco.
In beautifully sculpted prose, he captures places in their details: "a cup of Cajun coffee dark and thick like potting soil." Often, it's the intangible that provides a snapshot. In Minnesota, "a traveler learns conversational patience because the difference between a pause and a conclusion can be about a day."
At his best, Least Heat-Moon approaches the sublime. In the Yucatan of Mexico, searching for the spirit of the Maya beneath the debris of tourism, he sees, "In rocks plain and carved, broken and entire, lay energy from what had long been Mayan, what will be Mayan, all of it attached to the earth and its fragments – some visible, much invisible, but none of it gone."
Here are reviews of five other new paperbacks:
Scribner, 320 pp., $16
We get the picture of 79-year-old Gloria Garrison in this novel's first line: "I am not one of those people who feel compelled to speak in smiley faces." Indeed not. And that may be why her family has little use for her.
But now she has a use for them – at least the three grandchildren (the ones she wrote out of her will), who are on their way to Santa Fe, N.M., at her beckoning. She plans to choose one of them to take up the reins of her $11 million-a-year enterprise, Glory Inc., a beauty makeover company.
Which will it be? There's Raquel, a Legal Aid lawyer; Matt, a public relations man for a New York baseball team; and Daisy, a story editor in Hollywood. It turns out that none of them wants anything to do with Grandma's business, and they really have nothing else to do with their weekend in New Mexico but argue.
But a visit to the company's headquarters opens the door to discussion. Is there reconciliation in sight?
Critics had mixed reactions to the novel. Kirkus Reviews found Gloria "not only unlikable, but unbearably boring" and dismissed the novel as "a painfully long yawn." But Library Journal said the book is "full of sharp observations" and that Isaacs' fans would enjoy her comic wit.
Publishers Weekly questioned the tidy ending but called this "a deliciously wicked tale of family dysfunction," saying that "time spent with this cheeky and unruly crew is anything but wasted."
Touchstone, 522 pp., $18
In this book subtitled "Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars," Eichenwald, an editor at Vanity Fair and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, traces in great detail the events of the 500 or so days following the Sept. 11 attacks, the period he views as the formative core on which the Bush administration based its decisions during the ensuing years.
His subtitle seems counter to his intentions as outlined in the Introduction: "Readers looking in these pages for my view of these events will no doubt be disappointed. I have little faith in opinion, even my own. Instead, this book is meant to be a dispassionate history of this crucial time." Code: Facts condemn, accusations don't.
The Bush administration as portrayed by Eichenwald spiraled into a panicked free fall, mistaking rumors and lies extracted under torture as truths, dismissing the concerns of skeptics and giving in to a quaking hysteria that spread far beyond the White House.
When it came to the decision to invade Iraq, one senses an eerie kind of wishful thinking, as if finding the bogeyman would vaporize the threat. Deputy National Security Advisor Paul Wolfowitz, when advised that there was no definitive link between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein, replied: "We'll find it. It's got to be there."
In his review for The New York Times, Thomas E. Ricks voiced frustration with Eichenwald's occasional lapse into Clancyesque histrionics: "The electronic timer on a concealed briefcase bomb flashed red, its digits counting down from five minutes. A small fan quietly whirred, generating a breath of air that could disperse enough sarin gas to kill everyone within several yards."
He was also puzzled by some basic errors. For example, Eichenwald refers to natives of Afghanistan as "Afghanis" (the currency of the country) instead of the correct term, "Afghans." (This appears to be corrected in the paperback edition.)
But, Ricks wrote, Eichenwald "brings home the fundamental rashness and recklessness of the American response to the Sept. 11 attack. Had our leaders abided by our Constitution, not only would they have better supported our values, they would have been more effective in responding to terrorism. That is the sad lesson of this book."
Algonquin, 264 pp., $15.95
Nonfiction author and NPR commentator Horn has been singing with the Choral Society of Grace Church in New York City for nearly 30 years. In this book subtitled "Finding Happiness Singing With Others," she explains what has kept her there for so long and why some 32 million adult Americans also find joy in choral singing.
"I've lived half a century now," she writes, "and you don't live this long without knowing some of life's sorrows. As long as I'm singing, though, it's as if I'm inhabiting another reality. I become temporarily suspended in a world where everything bad is bearable, and everything good feels possible."
This is more than a memoir. Horn traces the history of ensemble singing from the Gregorian chant of the Middles Ages to the present day, highlighting many of the most enduring choral works, such as Brahms' "A German Requiem" and Handel's "Messiah."
She also sprinkles in science and research highlighting important findings. Though the aesthetic pleasure music brings may be reason enough, participating in and learning music affects the body, staving off the effects of cognitive decline and aging, strengthening the brain's neural connections, countering the effects of many neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease, and lowering heart rate and blood pressure.
Publishers Weekly said that Horn "writes movingly about how singing about death and simply breathing together bring a transcendent feeling of harmonious belonging."
This Is How You Lose Her
Riverhead, 217 pp., $16
Yunior de las Casas returns in all but one of these electrifying stories. Yunior, with his "frowning I-had-a-lousy-Third-World-childhood-and-all-I-got-was-this-attitude eyes," has appeared in most of Diaz's short stories and was the narrator of "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Yunior is searching. Searching for the love of his absent father, searching for meaning in his life, searching for a different ending for his terminally ill brother, searching for a steadfast love; but mostly, he's searching for sex, lots of it, with as many different women as possible. This doesn't work very well; thus, the title. But Yunior never seems to learn, and somehow, the reader forgives him.
These stories are sharp, funny, deeply felt and unashamedly profane. Set in gritty New Jersey neighborhoods and crumbling barrios in the Dominican Republic, they capture life in all its vulgarity, tragedy, tenderness and beauty as seen through the eyes of a disaffected youth.
In his review for The Plain Dealer, John Repp said, "Diaz is one of our finest prose stylists, his sentences seamless, melodic, delightfully allusive. He works them as precious metals or musical phrases are worked: to make those rings and rhythms seem as if they've always existed."
Robin Marantz Henig and Samantha Henig
Penguin, 228 pp., $16
The subtitle of this mother-daughter collaboration sums it up: "Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck?" Are they stuck in "extended adolescence," as many believe? Living in their parents' basements, stalling on getting a "real" job, unwilling even to consider a job that doesn't start them at the top – all these behaviors, say some, are evidence that young adults just don't want to grow up and take responsibility.
Others say that youth are in "emerging adulthood," a process that, because of longer lifespans, no longer needs to happen quickly. There's no rush to marry, and many couples are having children at a much later age than was the norm in the past.
Robin Marantz Henig and Samantha Henig became interested in the topic when Robin wrote a piece for The New York Times Magazine in 2010.
Here, they concentrate on nine different issues (marriage, career, friendship, parenting, etc.), comparing the boomer generation with the millennial generation to see how different they really are.
Using anecdotal evidence and research findings, they conclude that there is indeed some new terrain being traveled by today's youth, but much is consistent with their parents' generation, albeit with both new challenges and new advantages.
Kirkus Reviews called this "an examination that escapes the dangers of overgeneralization to provide provocative information presented compellingly."