Even if you think you’re above such distinctions, we all have a rough idea of what someone means when they say “red state” or “blue state.” A red-stater stops at Dunkin’ Donuts for coffee on the way to Wal-Mart and listens to Rush Limbaugh for entertainment; her blue counterpart is downing a $3 Starbucks macchiato, cranking NPR and, of course, heading to Whole Foods on an arugula run. There may be kernels of truth to these caricatures, but they don’t tell the whole story. Who are we, really?

Journalist Dante Chinni and political geographer James Gimpel spent two years crossing and re-crossing the country to answer that question, and the result is Our Patchwork Nation. Their collaboration focused on the 3,141 counties in the U.S. and found 12 community types with enough demographic common ground to categorize. Military Bastions, for example, are located near military bases, generate mid-range pay and are full of soldiers, vets and their families. Their financial stability is threatened by our current cycle of long deployments; no soldiers means fewer patrons at local businesses, from the gas pump to the strip club, and the families left behind tend to spend conservatively. Evangelical Epicenters are full of young families who are very active in church life; their income tends to be less than the national average, but they’re not as concerned about keeping up with the Joneses as with home and family. Service Worker centers rely on tourist dollars to stay afloat; employees live paycheck to paycheck and tend to be uninsured. A slow season or personal emergency can quickly throw residents into chaos.

The surprises revealed by this analysis are numerous: Evangelical Epicenters have some of the best schools around, but the schools have very little religious influence because the range of different sects jockeying for social position tend to cancel each other out. Military Bastions, which lean to the right politically, nevertheless prefer NPR to conservative talk radio, because NPR features international news relevant to followers of the wars. Perhaps the best news of all comes despite the many differences these 12 types have: When surveyed, all of them overwhelmingly believe that America is still a place where you will get ahead if you work hard. As Chinni puts it, “The United States is, measurably, a nation of optimists,” adding, “There are worse things to have as a foundation.” For a new, and nuanced, look at how we’re living today, Our Patchwork Nation is vital reading.

In one of the world’s most famous television commercials, hundreds of teenagers of diverse backgrounds dance and sway on a sunny hillside as they belt out a ballad about teaching the world to sing in peace and harmony. Each young person is holding a bottle of Coke, the “real thing,” promising in his or her earnest way that if only everyone in the world would drink Coke, violence would cease and peace would prevail. Ever since 1886, when John Pemberton stumbled upon the secret formula for the soft drink that would become known as Coca-Cola, the company that eventually grew out of his success has obscured the shady medicinal origins of the drink and zealously designed ads that focus not on its ingredients but on what the customer thinks it represents. Coke has spent billions of dollars to present an image of wholesomeness and harmony cherished by millions of people around the world.

Yet, as award-winning magazine writer Michael Blanding points out in his provocative and far-reaching investigative book, The Coke Machine, all is not well in the House of Coke. The pristine images of peace and harmony promoted by the company have been shattered by accusations that the company has depleted water supplies in India, made schoolchildren fat in the U.S., supported murder as it sought to destroy unions in Guatemala and deceived consumers around the world by marketing tap water as purified water under its Dasani brand. For example, in the Kerala region in India, Coke not only used up fresh water supplies in its production process, it also produced solid waste that it distributed to local farmers as fertilizer. When the fields treated by this fertilizer began to lie fallow, and when farm animals that drank water polluted by this waste began to die, Indian scientists discovered that Coke’s solid waste contained four times the tolerable limit of cadmium, which can cause prostate and kidney cancer.

In shocking detail, Blanding uncovers Coke’s numerous transgressions against humanity and nature. Although many groups have protested Coke’s presence in their countries and various legal actions have been brought against Coke, the company has managed to slither out of the grip of any legal injunctions. It’s very unlikely that Coke will ever change its practices until its bottom line is threatened by binding legal consequences and there is a sustained public campaign that threatens its brand images. Blanding’s thoroughly detailed, stimulating and challenging study will have many readers saying, “Give me a Pepsi.”
 

In 2001, Philip Kearney took a leave of absence from his job as a district attorney in San Francisco to serve as a war crimes prosecutor for the United Nations in Kosovo. Although he knew next to nothing about international laws of war or the way they manifested themselves within the diverse legal systems of other countries, his sense of adventure led him to accept the assignment—albeit with some trepidation for his own safety. He arrived in Pristina, a bleak and dangerous city where the animosities between Kosovo’s Albanians and Serbians were still explosive and such justice as there was tended to be frontier justice. The UN was there to bring order, openness and fairness to judicial proceedings. It was, as Kearney recounts in Under the Blue Flag, the most rigorous kind of on-the-job training.

Complicated cases were dropped in his lap at the last minute. He had to work through translators and under the protection of armed bodyguards. Moreover, he was left to conduct his own investigations with only a minimum of support personnel. The courtroom practices gave him much less latitude than American courts to aggressively prosecute cases.

Despite these setbacks, Kearney soon became obsessed with seeing justice done. His passion grew in no small part from face-to-face contacts with tragic victims—women sold into sex slavery, broken men who had survived brutal prison camps, survivors of villages virtually eradicated by ethnic cleansing. After his six-month term ended, Kearney was so impassioned by his cause that he enlisted for another term, a decision that both imperiled his regular job and further strained his marriage.
Without being didactic, Kearney inserts enough history into his narrative to clarify the fiendishly complex Kosovo situation to a degree that news stories seldom do. The chief value of this book, however, is not its specificity, but its demonstration that without a transparent, balanced and politically impervious legal system there can be no hope for justice.

Edward Morris writes from Nashville.

The residents of Clarkston, Georgia (population: 7,100; 13 miles east of Atlanta), are the involuntary participants in a tricky sociological experiment. Take a small, conservative suburb, resettle refugees from more than 50 trouble-plagued countries in its low-rent apartment complexes, and see what happens. Initial misunderstanding and tension are inevitable. But then what? Regardless of locale, teenage boys want to make friends and play games. If they’re from outside the United States, they’re likely to gravitate to soccer, that most international of sports. So it is in Clarkston, where an energetic young Jordanian woman, Luma Mufleh, has created and coached a somewhat rackety youth team called the Fugees (“re-fugees”).

In Outcasts United, New York Times reporter Warren St. John (Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer) follows Mufleh and her team of Africans, Arabs, Eastern Europeans, etc., through their 2006 season. He uses it as an effective framework for exploring the internal globalization of the United States, as the players learn to live with each other, more affluent teams, and the town’s sometimes-resentful American-born residents.

The Fugees are actually three teams, split by age into under-13s, under-15s and under-17s. The older boys are more self-sufficient, so St. John focuses on the first two groups. During the course of the season, one struggles mightily, while one becomes more cohesive. Mufleh, dedicated, tough, occasionally rigid, has her own stumbles, but overall provides a remarkable degree of support to traumatized boys who have known little but dislocation and discrimination.

St. John interweaves the games with the backstories of several players. Though they start in different countries, their stories seem tragically similar. We learn about the mothers who have brought their families out of ethnic massacres to refugee camps, then to the alleged promised land of the U.S. They find themselves working night shifts in hotels and poultry plants while worrying that their children are losing their traditional values in crime-ridden neighborhoods. One of the book’s strengths is its honesty. The outcome is not all positive. Progress is fitful. Apparent allies renege on promises. Even talented players lose games. Yet, somehow, they persevere. Clarkston adapts.
 

Hooman Majd’s aim in The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran is to demonstrate that his native country is not the monolithic society depicted by the Bush administration and essentially regurgitated by the American press. While he describes a population molded and imprinted by incessant religious practices and understandably suspicious of the West, Majd also takes readers into fashionable parties where men and women converse easily on equal footing and where the officially forbidden liquor flows freely. Then there are the pious households of the common folk, in which men spend their days smoking an opium derivative called "shir’e" and watching the alluring secular images pumped in from Dubai via satellite television.

Majd is particularly well suited to reveal the inner workings of Iranian society. Born in Tehran, the son of a diplomat for the Shah who was deposed by the 1979 Islamic revolution, he is also the grandson of a revered ayatollah and a close relative of former Iranian President Seyyed Mohammad Khatami. Educated in England, America and other diplomatic outposts, Majd eventually settled in the U.S., where he still lives. His connections to Iran were such that he was chosen to accompany Khatami on his 2005 U.S. tour and to serve as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s interpreter at the United Nations in 2006 and 2007. Most of Majd’s accounts and observations here stem from his extended visits to his home country in 2004, 2005 and 2007, during which time he sampled, without substantial restriction, the popular mood at all class levels.

Majd makes much of the fact that political criticism is open and generally tolerated and that the government is inclined to let its citizens conduct their lives as they wish – as long as they do so within their own homes and at private gatherings. But he doesn’t paint too pretty a picture of a system that’s still under the command of a few powerful men who are essentially accountable only to their peers. The public executions, usually hanging the unfortunates from a crane, are matter-of-fact, brutal and blithely accepted by the populace. Still, Majd makes the case that outsiders will be best served by knowing the people they aspire to cower, control or bargain with.

RELATED CONTENT

Majd’s trailer for the book:

For a moment, set aside consideration of the well-known humanitarian crises of recent years in Lebanon, Iraq, Colombia, Darfur and Zimbabwe, and contemplate northern Uganda. A rebel militia called the Lord’s Resistance Army has kidnapped 20,000 children from that region in the last two decades to swell its ranks. Until a ceasefire in 2006, an estimated 40,000 children left their homes every night to gather at public meeting points, seeking safety in numbers.

Did you know that? Probably not. The international system for helping the oppressed is what humanitarian activist Jan Egeland calls an “immoral lottery.” Some get attention and aid; others might as well be invisible. Egeland thinks it’s a lousy system that needs to be overhauled. He makes his case with strong effect in A Billion Lives: An Eyewitness Report from the Frontlines of Humanity, his memoir of his tenure from 2003-2006 as the United Nations’ top emergency relief official.

Egeland, a Norwegian steeped in his country’s tradition of unaligned social activism, literally risked his life to negotiate with rebel leaders in Uganda, with some modest success. It’s what he’s always done, during his time at the UN, Amnesty International and the Norwegian Red Cross: He parachutes into horrendous crises, unflinchingly confronts all sides and usually manages to alleviate the suffering. But he knows better than anyone that he seldom makes much long-term difference.

As Egeland takes us along on his UN journeys to Latin America, the South Pacific tsunami zone, the Middle East and Africa, he is an equal opportunity critic. The U.S., he says, is generous with emergency money for natural disasters, but miserly with development aid. The leaders of developing nations, the “South,” too often refuse to take responsibility in their own regions. China pretends it’s still a beleaguered underdog rather than the rich superpower it is. Time and time again, both sides in conflicts are intransigent and incompetent, content to see innocents suffer rather than compromise their hard-line positions.

It’s a sad picture, but Egeland has some hope. We have all the tools for coherent multilateralism, he argues in his final prescriptive chapter. We just need the political will and the compassion.

Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

There’s a new entry among hot self-help topics. In his latest book, Who’s Your City?, Richard Florida (The Rise of the Creative Class) makes a strong case for place being just as relevant and crucial to our well-being as finding the perfect mate or achieving the ideal weight. Where we choose to live, he writes, “can determine the income we earn, the people we meet, the friends we make, the partners we choose, and the options available to our children and families. . . . In many ways, it is a prerequisite to everything else.”
So, where to go? Boston? Chicago? Austin? San Francisco? Center city, suburbs or outlying areas? As Florida points out, different areas have different personalities just as we do—see chapter 11 to discover which of the “Big Five” personality categories you fall into. But a psychological fit is not enough. Not surprisingly then, some cities and regions show up in several slots on his guides to the “Best Places” to live according to a person’s life stage and situation. Whether you are male, female, heterosexual, gay or lesbian, or whether you are single, a mid-career professional, married with or without children, or looking to retire, when things go awry in life, Florida stresses that it is easier to put things back together when there are job opportunities and social opportunities for dating or just hanging out.
Who’s Your City? is well-documented with statistics, maps and charts for the scholarly. But Florida’s down-to-earth writing and 10-step plan for choosing the place that fits best will help make deciding where to settle a most enjoyable endeavor.
Linda Stankard is a real estate agent in New York.