If something called the American dream is still alive, it’s personified by the protagonist of the captivating The Monk of Mokha, Dave Eggers’ latest work of narrative nonfiction. In it, Eggers marshals the storytelling talent he displayed in Zeitoun, his 2009 account of a Syrian-American family devastated by Hurricane Katrina and inane bureaucracy, to explore the story of Mokhtar Alkhanshali, a young Yemeni American who must overcome civil war, terrorism and his own inexperience and self-doubt to pursue his singular vision of entrepreneurial success in the specialty coffee business.

In 2013, while employed as a doorman at a posh apartment building in San Francisco, 25-year-old Alkhanshali, who’d already demonstrated his superior salesman skills by dealing everything from Banana Republic clothing to Hondas, hatched a plan to revive the coffee business in his ancestral homeland. Eggers explains that although Ethiopia lays claim to the discovery of the coffee fruit, the first beans were brewed in Yemen, giving birth to the coffee known as “arabica.”

Alkhanshali’s audacious business model involved the promotion of the direct trading of rare coffee varietals to premium roasters. Ignoring a State Department travel warning, he left for Yemen amid U.S. drone strikes, the attacks of Houthi rebels and the constant threat of terrorism from al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.

In the final third of The Monk of Mokha, Eggers, who has been a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, describes Alkhanshali’s harrowing journey back to America, carrying suitcases packed with coffee beans whose quality he hopes will secure both his business’s future and the prosperity of his farmer clients. It’s a nail-biting account, with each checkpoint and interrogation posing a new peril.

Propelled by its engaging main character and his improbable determination, The Monk of Mokha, for all its foreign elements, is at its heart a satisfying, old-fashioned American success story.

This article was originally published in the February 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Max Boot’s The Road Not Taken is a page-turning story of a how a now largely forgotten figure could have turned the tide of the Vietnam War if someone in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had just listened to him.

Drawing deeply on previously unavailable archival materials, Boot deftly chronicles the life and career of Edward Lansdale, the CIA operative and Air Force officer who allegedly was the model for Alden Pyle in The Quiet American by Graham Greene. Tracing Lansdale’s sheltered childhood and youth, Boot portrays a young man fascinated by the perceived romance of Southeast Asia. Later, in his short-lived career in advertising, Lansdale developed his trademark knack for honesty, insolence and an ability to see others as equals—qualities that would lay the foundation of his successful covert work in the Philippines and Vietnam.

During the United State’s involvement in the Vietnam War, Lansdale, working as a CIA operative, argued that the U.S. could operate most effectively not by increasing firepower but by making Saigon’s government more “accountable, legitimate, and popular to the people it aspired to serve.” Boot sums up Lansdale’s policy of friendly persuasion to win “hearts and minds” with three L’s—Look: understand how the foreign society works and don’t impose outside ideas that won’t translate to the society; Like: become a sympathetic friend to the leaders of the society; Listen: hear out the leaders’ ideas.

Boot’s mesmerizing, complex biography and cultural history not only recovers Lansdale and his foreign policy strategies but also illustrates the ways that those strategies might be effective in dealing with various military conflicts today.

Maybe you never expected to read biographical analyses of Shirley Temple and Bill Gates in the same book, but the more you think about it, the more it makes sense. It certainly did to Ann Hulbert, author of Off the Charts.

Hulbert, who previously covered a century of child-rearing advice in Raising America, turns her sights to the intriguing phenomenon of early genius. In Off the Charts, she peers into the formative years of 15 individuals, combining lively biographical sketches with serious analysis of the factors that contributed to their ascendancy in the public eye. Most of these prodigies we know, while some—such as precocious novelist Barbara Newhall Follett—have been virtually lost to history, but all offer important lessons.

Not surprisingly, those lessons tend to circle back to the prodigies’ parents—who run the gamut from free-range advocate to prison warden without the charm—and in many ways the book is as much about the parents as it is about their progenies. Wisely, Hulbert downplays judging the children’s genius and lets the facts—and often the prodigies—speak for themselves.

Rest assured, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to rearing a genius. And even the most seemingly well-adjusted prodigies don’t exactly breeze through adolescence. The “hidden lessons” are there in plain sight, but many of them are impossible to avoid.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Ann Hulbert about Off the Charts.

This article was originally published in the January 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.