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Books: Which Side Were You On?	Books: Academics in Aspic
Off the Shelf	Chapter & Verse
Music: Alone at Last	Open Book: A Fusillade at Harvard

The Dictionary of Global Culture, edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah, professor of Afro-American studies and of philosophy, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., Du Bois professor of humanities (Knopf, $35). A fat reference work of great utility. Open the book at any point for interesting encounters. Thus, a concise account of the "Ramkhamhaeng incription" (a prized artifact of Thai culture) is followed by others on Raphael (the Renaissance painter), Rastafarianism (the Jamaican politico-religious movement), Maurice Ravel (the composer), Satyajit Ray (the Indian film director), and Ream Ker (a Cambodian epic poem).

Beverly Hills. Emily, 10, at the Peninsula Hotel, where she lived with her family for several months. From Fast Forward. Photograph by Lauren Greenfield.

Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood, photographs by Lauren Greenfield '87 (Knopf, $35). A brilliant young photographer portrays what it's like to grow up in Los Angeles, where the children of both the gang culture and show business are shaped by the overwhelming importance of image and celebrity. Along with her remarkable pictures, Greenfield supplies commentary, often unsettling, by her subjects.

Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back, by Jane Holtz Kay '60 (Crown, $27.50). The automobile has ravaged America's cities and landscape, and Kay calls for a revolution to reduce our dependency on the tyrant.

Suburbs under Siege: Race, Space, and Audacious Judges, by Charles M. Haar, LL.B. '44, Brandeis professor of law emeritus (Princeton University Press, $29.95). Haar argues that all people have a constitutional right to live in the suburbs. Very often, however, the urban poor can't leave squalid inner cities because of exclusionary suburban zoning regulations specifying the minimum acreage a homeowner must have. Few judges have challenged those regulations. Haar celebrates some who have.

Doo-Dah! Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture, by Ken Emerson '70 (Simon & Schuster, $30). A learned and well-crafted biography of Foster, who died a penniless alcoholic at 37. Emerson finds the roots of American popular music in the fusing of black and white influences in the Civil War era.

What It Means to Be a Libertarian, by Charles Murray '65 (Broadway Books, $20). Murray wants a federal government that is truly small: an executive branch cut to little more than the White House and the Departments of State, Defense, and Justice; federal codes pared to a few essential regulations; and a Congress with so little power that it need convene for only a few months each year.

Handwriting in America: A Cultural History, by Tamara Plakins Thornton '78 (Yale University Press, $30). A scholarly and engaging history of the shifting functions and meanings of handwriting in America from colonial times to the present. Thornton explores copybooks and the Palmer method, handwriting analysis, autograph collecting, definitions of manhood and womanhood, and our deepest concerns about self.

Searching for Everardo: A Story of Love, War, and the CIA in Guatemala, by Jennifer K. Harbury, J.D. '78 (Warner Books, $24). Harbury married a Guatemalan resistance leader who was captured, tortured, and killed under the orders of a general who later turned out to be a paid CIA informant. Her attempts to discover her husband's fate were reported in the September-October 1994 issue of this magazine ("Confronting a Culture of Lies," by Janet Hawkins). Now Harbury updates the story in a first-person narrative. Two governments lied to her, one of them her own. She is working with the United Nations Human Rights Commission to expose atrocities committed by the Guatemalan military and has filed a civil-rights suit against members of the CIA, State Department, and National Security Council.

Common Fire: Lives of Commitment in a Complex World, by Laurent A. Parks Daloz, Ed.D. '72, Cheryl H. Keen, Ed.D. '81, James P. Keen, Ed.D. '79, and Sharon Daloz Parks, Th.D. '80, fellow in the Kennedy School of Government (Beacon Press, $25). The authors look at more than a hundred people, from many walks of life, who live and work on behalf of the common good; they also offer practical recommendations for those who want to help others or themselves sustain lives of similar purpose.

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