Crackling with the author’s edgy wit and wisdom, Caitlin Flanagan’s To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife is a collection of essays examining the key trends, issues and stereotypes surrounding today’s wives and mothers. Through reports on topics like nannies, white weddings and the demands of housekeeping, she traces the evolution of the maternal role in American society. Contrasting the past specifically the 1950s with the present, she provides unique insights into the domestic arts and how our culture’s perception of them has changed.

In Drudges and Celebrities: The New Housekeeping, an ironic examination of Martha Stewart and the packaging of the perfect household, Flanagan writes, almost any project Stewart cooks up is less daunting than the one it is meant to replace: keeping a family together, under one roof, home. Throughout the book, she mourns the passing of traditional domesticity, wherein the measure of a home was found in the woman who ran it. A frequent contributor to The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, Flanagan is herself a mother and a wife, and she brings experience and intimacy to these essays. Flustered mothers and frustrated wives will find just what they need here: a little camaraderie.

Not so fast, Mr. Brokaw. They won World War II, but just what did your greatest generation do in the years after they returned home to end racial discrimination, diversify and democratize the campus and the workplace, extend political rights to women and gays, protect the environment, curb military adventurism and hold government accountable for its duplicity and mistakes? Leonard Steinhorn, who teaches communications at American University, has had enough of this giddy adulation of World War II vets and the media’s tendency to hold them up as personal and civic role models. Steinhorn argues quite persuasively in The Greater Generation that it is the baby boomers, particularly the ones born just after World War II, whose monumental good works have moved this country closest to its founding ideals, even as they were being mocked and denigrated. The far right routinely depicts boomers as self-indulgent hypocrites, all style and no moral or intellectual substance. Quite the opposite, says Steinhorn. Empowered by their vast numbers and network of like-minded peers, [boomers] became a generation unafraid to examine the precepts on which society and their identity stood. . . . Boomers began to challenge old assumptions, modify outmoded laws, modernize personal and institutional relationships, and change the social values that guide the way we live and act toward one another. Instead of reading doom into recent conservative political victories, Steinhorn sees them as the last gasps of a foiled generation that is dying out. He maintains that the best evidence that boomers have won the cultural war is that even the most conservative politicians have to cloak themselves in boomer rhetoric to survive. Whatever their private views, he says, they dare not be openly racist, sexist, homophobic or environmentally insensitive. (They have talk-show surrogates for that.) While lauding the boomers, Steinhorn says they have more to do before they shuffle off into oblivion continuing the fight for a better environment, promoting greater integration of races and cultures, defending and extending the particular interests of older women, insisting on more transparency from government and not least demanding suitable recognition for their own contributions.

If it’s ever made into the movie for which it’s already been purchased, Storming the Court may do as much to romanticize lawyers as All The President’s Men did to glamorize journalists. The book tells how Yale law professor Harold H. Koh, a handful of his students and a few fellow lawyers repeatedly went to court against the administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton to gain the right to provide legal services to a group of Haitian refugees imprisoned in 1992 at Guantanamo Bay.

Thousands of people had fled Haiti following the 1991 military overthrow of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Some of these the U.S. granted asylum, but most were sent back or confined at Guantanamo. Eventually, the Coast Guard began intercepting the refugees on the high seas and, contrary to the United Nations Refugee Convention of 1951, returning them without the benefit of review.

Author Brandt Goldstein was himself a law student at Yale while all this was going on, but he was not one of the activists. Relying on multiple interviews with the principal players, court documents and contemporary news accounts, he spins out a fast-paced and cinematically vivid thriller. Besides covering the seesaw court actions and the behind-the-scenes struggles accompanying them, Goldstein also presents the concurrent story of Yvonne Pascal, an Aristide supporter who has had to escape without her husband and children and who ends up at the Guantanamo prison camp leading a hunger strike.

Goldstein portrays Koh and his students as impassioned idealists who must take their chances and lumps in a world of harsh and uncaring politics. One of their adversaries is the ubiquitous Kenneth Starr, then Bush’s solicitor general. Koh and company expect the government to be more compliant on the issue of the Haitians once Clinton comes to power. But it isn’t. The little band of advocates win the immediate goal of freeing this particular group of prisoners, including the heroic Pascal. But they fail to set the precedent that due process shall apply to Guantanamo as more recent cases have demonstrated. Still, this is a tale that warms the heart even as it clenches the jaws.

<b>Life lessons for Father’s Day</b> Tom Mathews’ <b>Our Fathers’ War: Growing Up in the Shadow of the Greatest Generation</b>, is a moving look at the struggles between combat veterans of World War II and their sons. Mathews breaks through the unwritten code of silence to reveal the emotional turmoil of these veterans and shows how their experiences altered their views of life, family and their role as fathers. The book is an emotional tour of traumatic pasts and strained relationships (few more so than Mathews’ own fractured connection with his father, a veteran of the 10th Mountain Division’s bloody Italy campaign). For the civilian, it is a rare window into the shocking hell of war, confessed by men who descended into it and returned, wounded in body, mind and soul, unable and unwilling to explain their experiences to those they should be closest to. To read this book is to understand that the sacrifices of war don’t always end when the combat does, and that even victory can leave scars that cross generations.

<i>Howard Shirley is a son and a father.</i>

Water and oil: two valuable natural resources in Iraq. They are elements that have led to civil war and foreign invasion over the centuries, defining the fractious history of that country. William R. Polk makes this point in convincing fashion in Understanding Iraq: The Whole Sweep of Iraqi History, from Genghis Khan’s Monguls to the Ottoman Turks to the British Mandate to the American Occupation, a detailed examination of the country from its tranquil origins to its tumultuous present-day situation.

In ancient times, when Iraq was known as Mesopotamia, its greatest resource was water, as supplied by the intersecting Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Nomadic tribes migrated to this area, known as the Fertile Crescent, establishing roots and hastening the development of civilization. But eventually the tribes fought over property and power, setting a theme of upheaval that would continue throughout Iraq’s history. When the tribes weren’t warring amongst themselves, they were fighting invaders the likes of Genghis Khan’s Mongols and the Ottoman Turks, each seeking to extract the natural treasures of the land.

In the early 20th century, British imperialists, needing oil to fuel the Industrial Revolution, discovered Iraq was situated above the largest oil reservoir in the world. Even when Iraqis took back their country through revolution in 1958, factions continued to fight. And when they were later united by a heavy-handed dictator named Saddam Hussein, he used the oil to amass great wealth and power and to fund wars with neighboring nations.

Today, Iraq is occupied by the U.S. in what President Bush calls an effort to replace dictatorship with democracy. Polk thinks the occupation still has a lot to do with oil, and his analysis is written with authority, given that he has been studying Iraq for 50 years and has visited the country dozens of times. For anyone seeking an intelligent perspective on the current state of affairs in Iraq, his book is required reading. John T. Slania is a journalism professor at Loyola University in Chicago.

<b>The collapse of Enron’s house of cards</b> Surely at some time in its tawdry history, Enron or one of its myriad corporate affiliates must have produced, developed or delivered some product or service to someone who wanted it. But from reading Kurt Eichenwald’s absorbing account of the rise and fall of the Houston-based energy company, one is likely to conclude that the sole mission of its top executives was to find quasi-legal ways of collecting money through stock sales and loans and keeping as much as possible for themselves. The chief players in this boardroom (and bedroom) drama are by now legendary: company founder Kenneth Lay, former CEO Jeffrey Skilling and ex-CFO Andrew Fastow. Fastow and his wife have been sentenced to prison; Lay and Skilling are awaiting trial.

Although Enron’s story is more convoluted than a Medici revenge plot, Eichenwald, who covered the scandal for the <i>New York Times</i>, spins out the essential facts in quick, colorful scenes. He recreates the dialogue of the principal characters as convincingly as if he had been at their elbows taking notes. However, some of the scams Fastow devised to enrich himself are almost beyond understanding, a factor that helps explain why it took so long for this house of cards to tumble.

Eichenwald, author of the the 2000 bestseller <i>The Informant</i>, describes Enron as a triumph of concept over principle. Once an executive got an idea for a business deal no matter how far-fetched it was the next step was to bend the law, industry regulations and accounting principles to conform to that vision. By 1998, Eichenwald writes, This was a company . . . where the only impediment to pursuing a new business was initiative. The usual controls expense limits, financing constraints vanished. Of the many vivid scenes in the book, these two linger: on April 7, 1999, Lay announces that his company has pledged $100 million to name the new Houston Astros ballpark Enron Field. On Dec. 2, 2001, a paralegal in a Houston law office clicks the submit button to file papers to declare Enron officially bankrupt.

Timothy Garton Ash believes that “If we are free, we can work with other free people toward a free world.” He understands that freedom means different things to different people and that democracy is not an end in itself. Instead, it is “a means to higher ends,” ends about which people may disagree. Such an ambitious goal requires the right combination of realism and idealism. Garton Ash is not an out-of-touch thinker. He is Director of the European Studies Centre at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. As a historian and writer he is probably best known for his reporting from Eastern Europe and his writings about the fall of Communist regimes in Poland and Czechoslovakia. In Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West, Ash astutely analyzes foreign policy strategies and decisions by the U.S. and Great Britain and various European nations. Despite America’s recent differences with France and Germany, Garton Ash emphasizes that the U.S. and the European Union do agree on basic issues. He considers it folly for E.U. countries to attempt to become superpowers; instead arguing that it is in the world’s best interest to “bring Europe and America as close together as possible. . . . [T]he human race has no chance of making a free world without the combined efforts of its two largest conglomerates of the rich and free.” He even considers Britain and France giving up their individual seats in the U.N. Security Council in favor of a single E.U. seat.

Garton Ash draws on an impressive variety of sources, including history, conversations with world leaders and his own observations from years of work in Europe and the U.S. He is keenly aware that for the first time in history the world has the resources to seriously address world deprivation. The disappearance of natural resources and the environment is our biggest challenge, Garton Ash argues. But freedom is an essential key for people to work together to attack these problems.

Garton Ash believes that political leaders do not have all of the answers (“It is vital that we all appreciate this simple truth about our rulers: half the time they really don’t know what they’re doing”) and he advocates strong citizen action. His passion for and authoritative command of his subject make this a stimulating and inspiring book.