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.

As architectural critic for the New Yorker, Paul Goldberger has followed plans for rebuilding the World Trade Center site since early 2002. It is what he calls the most challenging urban-design problem of the 21st century. Goldberger provides the fascinating backstory of the design process in the engrossing Up From Zero: Politics, Architecture, and the Rebuilding of New York.

The WTC project, already surrounded by the conflicting forces of political power, money, and architecture and planning, was made even more difficult, he says, by the still-fresh memory of the attacks and the cultural significance of the destroyed towers. But Minoru Yamasaki’s towers weren’t always so beloved, explains Goldberger, commenting on our changing relationship to architecture and how structures once hated think Eiffel Tower eventually become accepted parts of the landscape. Given the towers’ ascendance to landmark status, it is perhaps easy to understand why some people felt they should be rebuilt.

To others, who felt that building anything on the site amounted to sacrilege, restoring the towers was tantamount to pretending September 11 never happened. The challenge facing architects and the powers that be The Port Authority, developer Larry Silverstein, mayors Giuliani and later Bloomberg, Governor Pataki, etc. was that of balancing a fitting memorial with the replacement of a significant amount of commercial real estate while working it all into a neighborhood plan for lower Manhattan. Goldberger not only goes behind the scenes of the planning process, he provides mini-profiles of people like Daniel Libeskind, David Childs, Rafael Vi–oly, Santiago Calatrava and Maya Lin and describes their work in terms accessible to the lay reader. He chronicles the give-and-take that led to the selection of Libeskind’s overall plan, the modifications by Silverstein-associated architect Childs and the incorporation of Michael Arad’s Reflecting Absence memorial.

Up From Zero provides a clear, evenhanded exploration of the attempt to present a powerful statement of resilience and remembrance through aesthetics. Pulitzer Prize winner Goldberg also sets the stage for the continuing drama associated with the WTC site: just weeks after the Freedom Tower groundbreaking this summer, master plan architect Libeskind sued Silverstein for unpaid fees.

In her stimulating and, for some, controversial book The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments, historian Gertrude Himmelfarb seeks to reclaim the Enlightenment from French thinkers such as Voltaire and Diderot and restore it to the British, where it began. The French have acknowledged their debt to Newton and Locke, but these thinkers did not significantly influence those of Himmelfarb’s British Enlightenment. She focuses instead on moral philosophers such as the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, Edward Gibbon and others. The emphasis in France was on reason, while in England these thinkers were more concerned with the social virtues of compassion, benevolence and sympathy. In America, religion was an ally, not an enemy. Himmelfarb makes a convincing case for redefining the Enlightenment, making it both more British and more inclusive by welcoming figures such as John Wesley and Edmund Burke. In Britain the moral philosophers were reformists, but not subversive, while in France, reason became the ideology to challenge religion, the church and other institutions.

Burke wrote of the commonality of human nature in numerous works. Wesley believed that Christianity was essentially a social religion, and Methodist preachers engaged in a variety of humanitarian endeavors that were practical expressions of the ideas of the moral philosophers. In America, political liberty was the primary concern. As Himmelfarb points out, it was on slavery that the politics of liberty dramatically clashed with the sociology of virtue. The Roads to Modernity is a thoughtful and wide-ranging discussion of an important period in the history of ideas. Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and frequent contributor to BookPage.

<B>Talkin’ bout his Baby Boom generation</B> Because they grew up in an age in which media particularly network television connected them with a common diet of images and attitudes, members of the Baby Boom are more aware of themselves as a distinct group than any preceding generation. They are more self-absorbed, too, Steve Gillon contends in <B>Boomer Nation: The Largest and Richest Generation Ever, and How It Changed America</B> (Free Press, $27.50, 384 pages, ISBN 0743229479). A former Yale and Oxford professor and currently a professor of history at the University of Oklahoma, the author includes within this much-anatomized populace those who were born between 1946 and 1964 a horde that now accounts for 39 percent of Americans over the age of 18 and 29 percent of the total population.

Gillon, who also hosts the weekly public affairs show <I>History Center</I> on A&andE’s History Channel, weaves his study around representative Boomers. They are Bobby Muller, a severely wounded vet who helped found the Vietnam Veterans of America advocacy group; Fran Visco, a Philadelphia lawyer who turned her own battle with breast cancer into a national crusade; Elizabeth Platter-Zyberk, an architect with strong ideas of how communities should be designed for social good; Marshall Herskovitz, co-creator of the Boomer-based TV series, "thirtysomething"; Alberta Haile Wilson, a black activist turned religious fundamentalist turned teacher; and Donny Deutsch, whose advertising agency excelled at speaking the language of his generation. Raised amid rising national prosperity and the mood of self-confidence it nurtured, Boomers display certain common values, according to Gillon, among which are a sense of entitlement, willingness to experiment, distrust of authority, self-reliance, internal motivation, idealism and a preference for doing things their own way. When these values were brought to bear in the 1960s and ’70s, they helped achieve civil rights for minorities and women, create greater social and economic justice and end the Vietnam War. But, the author argues, these impulses were not always progressive. They also gave rise, in many instances, to religious fundamentalism and fiscal conservatism, both logical extensions of the group’s deeply entrenched go-your-own-way ethic. "The Boomer ascendancy," Gillon writes, "contributed to the shattering of the New Deal coalition, the end of the solid Democratic South, and the rise of ticket-splitting independents." As Gillon traces the six Boomers through their life trajectories, he examines how family, school, jobs and media converged to shape their outlook and how this outlook, in turn, has forced them to assess their own degree of worth and success. Predictably, some major contradictions emerge. "Baby Boomers want less government," he says, "but they also want Washington to find jobs for everyone who wants to work. They want government to do more for the poor, but not expand welfare. They want it all: new social programs, lower taxes, and a balanced budget. The gap between what they expect of government and what they are willing to pay for it mirrors what they expect of themselves compared to what they achieve." On June 13, A&andE will broadcast its documentary version of <B>Boomer Nation</B>, a program that also features Gillon’s six representative Boomers. The film will begin with the pivotal question, "Where were you on November 22, 1963," a reference, of course, to the day President Kennedy was assassinated. While many Boomers are close to retirement, they are still vital enough, rich enough and determined enough, Gillon shows, to affect the nation’s social policies for years to come. <I>Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.</I>

In their critique of modern society, conservatives tend to cite two points as self-evident: amorality is rampant, and it’s all the liberals’ fault. That picture, argues David Callahan, isn’t so simple. While the right sounds its alarm over, say, teen sex and socialized medicine, it’s equally valid to see the transgressions of corporate tycoons, doped-up athletes and doctors shilling for dubious medications as signs of moral decay a decay made especially reprehensible in that it exploits the weak and is driven by greed.

In The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Do Well, Callahan makes his case by piling on story after story of selfishness exercised from boardrooms to classrooms. These examples from overaged Little Leaguer Felipe Almonte to Sears mechanics who doctored automotive diagnoses become more depressing with each passing page. Why is it that we know so much about these scoundrels and so little about those who lead less predatory lives? The answer is even more sobering: in uncertain times, many of us feel secret fascination and envy for those who rip off the system. In fact, Callahan writes about his subjects with a kind of sympathy because, as he sees it, they are victims as much as perpetrators of the system, no different at heart from kids who download rather than buy their music because, first, it’s free and, second, they know that some record executives have earned more in one good year than they’ll probably see in a lifetime.

When we get, as we inevitably must, to questions of how to deal with all this, the author suggests steps that even he admits seem inadequate. “Be the chump who files an honest tax return . . . who gives your friends a hard time for cheating on their taxes,” he writes, and you can almost hear the apology that such nostrums are doomed even as they are uttered. For in the end, The Cheating Culture persuades us of the permanence, as well as the gravity, of this problem.

The American Myth tells us that anyone who works hard and lives sensibly can achieve financial well being in the United States. Those who fail have only themselves to blame. The American Anti-Myth tells us the opposite: poverty is the fault of society. The poor face a rigid system that makes it close to impossible for them to rise.

Writer David K. Shipler identifies those two competing visions in The Working Poor: Invisible in America and proceeds to demolish both. He persuasively demonstrates through scores of compelling examples that the real answer is “all of the above.” The system is rigged, and people make terrible decisions. The common problems low wages, poor health care and housing, bad education, clueless parenting, sexual abuse, addictions are interlocking, creating what Shipler calls “the destructive synergy of many hardships.” Shipler, a former New York Times reporter, approaches the topic like the journalist he is, with profiles of a wide range of people struggling to get by. The tales of their lives are heartbreaking. Take Caroline from New Hampshire, a hard-working striver trying to support a learning-disabled daughter who was molested by her father. With little education, overwhelming burdens and a need for instant gratification, she moves from one dead-end job to another. Claudio, an illegal immigrant from Mexico working in the farm fields of North Carolina, lives with his wife in a cinderblock camp; together the couple is paid a total of $40 a day after deductions for “expenses.” They owe $2,300 to the “coyote” who smuggled them here, and have a sick 14-month old at home. Most of Working Poor is descriptive, but Shipler has a strong point of view, and his last chapter offers provocative prescriptions. His “holistic remedies” would include minimum wage rates that vary by region, sophisticated job training, a radical change in school funding and universal health insurance. Not everyone will agree. But at the least, his well-researched book should make the working poor a little less invisible. Anne Bartlett is a journalist who lives in South Florida.

Two intriguing new books one by an outspoken African-American journalist and another by an equally candid civil rights activist offer starkly different views on race relations in America. The End of Blackness by Debra Dickerson and Quitting America by Randall Robinson explore the many ways in which African-Americans have been maligned, discriminated against and mistreated. However, Dickerson and Robinson disagree strongly on who or what is responsible for the plight of African Americans and what should be done to change it.

Dickerson, a former Air Force intelligence officer and a Harvard Law grad, is a journalist known for her bluntness, particularly on issues of race and gender. In a critically acclaimed memoir, An American Story (2000), she revealed her own circuitous route to success as a black woman and accepted responsibility for most of her personal and professional failings. In The End of Blackness: Returning the Souls of Black Folk to Their Rightful Owners, Dickerson argues that some African Americans are so mired in past wrongs done to them that they are unwilling and/or unable to move forward and work to improve their status. “Blacks simply do not know who and how to be absent oppression,” Dickerson writes in characteristically straightforward fashion. “To cease invoking racism and reveling in its continuance is to lose the power to haunt whites, the one tattered possession they’ll fight for while their true freedom molders unclaimed. It is to lose the power to define themselves as the opposite of something evil, rather than on their own terms.” For Dickerson, the solution is in self-reliance, with African Americans working to free themselves from what constrains and limits them, focusing on the future rather than the past. She urges African Americans to look inside in order to find the answers to problems on the outside, never defining themselves solely on the basis of race. As for the expected backlash her ideas will bring from fellow African Americans, Dickerson says she would welcome the opportunity to debate her critics.

Randall Robinson takes an equally caustic approach to espousing his views about race, but reaches a dramatically different conclusion. In Quitting America: The Departure of a Black Man from His Native Land, Robinson explains why he lost hope and literally “quit” the U.S. Disgusted, aggravated and burnt out, Robinson left the country and relocated to the Caribbean island of St. Kitts where his wife was born.

For Robinson, the decision to leave was the culmination of years of resentment toward his treatment as a black man and civil rights advocate in America. Experiences such as being forced to sit at the back of the bus and being denied courteous service at a restaurant or department store contributed to his rage. He angrily tells stories about his protest marches, hunger strikes and political rallies through the years most of which were fruitless, his cries for change falling on deaf ears.

Robinson provides many sobering and grim statistics about injustice and inequality in America. “In a country that just squandered more than two hundred billion dollars on a war of dubious legality, forty-three million Americans sixteen percent of the population are without health care insurance,” he writes. “One in four blacks, including those who need health care insurance most, the poorest, are wholly unprotected.” Quitting America is a sharp contrast to Robinson’s 2002 book, The Reckoning: What Blacks Owe to Each Other, in which he encourages African-Americans to speak out and support each other in eradicating crime and poverty from urban America. At this point, Robinson has simply given up on America and believes that the only way for people of color to thrive and succeed is to vacate this country for greener, or perhaps, blacker, and friendlier pastures elsewhere.

Glenn Townes is a journalist based in New Jersey.