Conceding that the term “amateur” means different things to different people, in his book Bunch of Amateurs Jack Hitt nonetheless singles out particular examples of that breed—those characterized by curiosity, open-mindedness and self-confidence—and shows how they have functioned in such disparate fields of study as ornithology, astronomy, genetics, robotics, archaeology and history. “Amateurs are more likely to see what is actually there,” he asserts, “because there’s no money, no power, no prestige (at least not immediately) attached to anything else. Amateurs mainly just want to know.”

To set the stage for his amateur vs. professional faceoff, Hitt devotes a chapter to America’s most exemplary novice, Benjamin Franklin, and his prissy, think-inside-the-box nemesis, John Adams. (Never one to shy away from reductionism, Hitt calls Adams “the Yosemite Sam of the founding fathers.”) Both men were in Paris in 1778 to drum up French support for America in the war against Britain. Franklin, who tended to wing it when it came to diplomatic relations, was a living affront to all the traditional formulations Adams held dear. But he was also an infinitely more effective emissary.

Hitt demonstrates these competing approaches in a series of profiles. His method is to “hang out” with especially provocative amateurs, describe their personalities and assess their processes for discovering truth or utility. There’s Meredith Patterson, for example, who cobbles together a home laboratory and homemade ingredients to study DNA; John Dobson, a “ninety-two-year-old hippie” whose obsession is teaching other amateur astronomers how to grind large telescope lenses in order to better view the universe; and the ever-enthusiastic David Barron, who contends—and not without reason—that certain stone structures in southeastern Connecticut were built 1,500 years ago by Irish monks.

Fascinating though Hitt’s profiles are, they merely serve as entry points to his more extensive discussions of the subjects they’re obsessed with. He goes into great detail about the search for a living specimen of the ivory-billed woodpecker and how the professional ornithologists were just as prone to embrace flimsy evidence as amateurs often are. The same holds true in his discussion of the discovery of the remains of the “Kennewick man” in 1996 and the subsequent effort to establish that he was Caucasian, an exercise in wish-fulfillment to which even credentialed professionals were not immune.

Hitt doesn’t really develop a cohesive thesis here on the nature and value of amateurism, nor does he argue persuasively that it is a distinctly American phenomenon, as he suggests at the outset. But he does illustrate with striking specificity that the road to knowing is cluttered with hazards, the chief of which are our own desires and preconceptions.

As Americans struggle to survive and prosper in today’s shifting and far-flung economy, they find themselves tugged farther and farther away from the supportive embrace of family and community. Under these conditions, functions that used to be performed personally or “in house,” so to speak—such as finding a mate, bearing and raising children, holding a marriage together and taking care of the elderly—have been “outsourced” to for-profit businesses.

This is the landscape Arlie Russell Hochschild explores in a study that takes her from the office of a “love coach” in Southern California to a ritzy gated community near Minneapolis and from the baby mills of India that specialize in “wombs for rent” to sterile nursing homes in Massachusetts. She illustrates the pervasiveness of outsourcing by following the life cycle from courtship to birth to death and personalizes her account by comparing these modern customs with those she witnessed as a child while visiting her grandparents’ farm in Maine.

To a degree, this is a chronicle of people with too much money to spend. How else to explain the flourishing of such pricey but nonessential trades as Internet dating services, wedding planners, surrogate mothers, kiddie chauffeurs, potty trainers, birthday party producers, “nameologists” (who help couples find the “right names” for their babies), parenting evaluation services and “wantologists” (who aid the confused in distinguishing between what they think they want and what they really want)? But Hochschild gives the people who use these services—and those who offer them—their full say, allowing them to explain their actions in their own words. Whether one is convinced by their reasoning is another matter.

It is only near the end of the book that Hochschild makes it clear that she views profligate outsourcing as an unfortunate triumph of marketing over common sense and social needs. “It’s become common,” she says, “to hear that the market can do no wrong and the government—at least its civilian parts—can do no right, and to hear little mention of community at all. Curiously, many who press for a greater expansion of the free market, gutting of regulations, cuts in social services, are the same people who call for stronger family values. What’s invisible to them is how much market values distort family values.” In attempting to buy happiness perfectly packaged and off the shelf, Hochschild argues, “What escapes us is the process of getting there—and the appreciation we attach to the small details of it.”

In America, the car has long been associated with freedom: the open road, the ability to come and go as you please. Getting a driver’s license is one of the hallmarks of teenage life, a chance to legally drink from the frothy cup of adult pleasures.

Travel writer Taras Grescoe has a less starry-eyed view. In Straphanger, he paints cars as a force of destruction. The lifestyle created by cars—freeways, parking lots and suburbs—has eaten up land and stripped our continent of its character, turning towns and cities into glorified driveways. Cars destroy the environment and lives (each year, worldwide, they kill 1.2 million people), while cutting us off from human interaction by “pav[ing] over so much of what was authentic and vital in our cities.”

Life independent of cars exists, and in Straphanger Grescoe travels the world to prove it. He rides subways in New York, Tokyo and Paris. He hops on Bogotá’s famed bus rapid transit system TransMilenio, a key part of the city’s revitalization, and survives a testy crowd on a Philadelphia bus. These colorful anecdotes amuse us and, more importantly, show us that a city that invests in mass transit also invests in itself. Paris’ urban integrity, the one that inspires dreamers worldwide, would have been destroyed had it not been for its métro. Now that bicycles are the main mode of transportation in Copenhagen, street life thrives. Bike lanes, Grescoe notes, provide a way to grasp the city’s layout that’s absent in New York or London. Plus, you don’t have to go the gym.

The statistical and historical nuggets Grescoe unearths lend credence to his grievances against cars. After World War II, public policy favoring the car-friendly suburbs made buying homes there a no-brainer, while America’s freeway program frequently targeted urban ethnic enclaves for development, destroying long-established communities and erecting highways in their place. And Phoenix, a city built around freeways and suburbs, is in free-fall after the real estate market crash.

These aren’t the musings of a rail snob or some desk-bound pundit. With Straphanger, Grescoe has fashioned a cogent, spirited call-to-arms that is also a practical, insightful handbook for change. By not blindly worshipping one of the icons of individuality, we may save generations from serious trouble.

Indian land makes up about 2.3 percent of the land in the United States, and the Indian population in the US is slightly over two million. And yet, as novelist David Treuer wryly observes in his sobering yet quietly redemptive book, Rez Life, in spite of how involved Indians have been in America's business, most people will go a lifetime without ever knowing an Indian or spending time on an Indian reservation.

There are roughly 310 Indian reservations in the United States, but not all of the 564 federally recognized tribes have reservations. All Indian reservations have signs that welcome travelers, offering acknowledgment that the lands the drivers are about to enter is different from the lands through which they have been traveling. Such signs exist in more than 30 states, and you can see them in areas as diverse as the rocks of the Badlands, the suburbs of Green Bay and the sprays of Niagara Falls. Twelve reservations are larger than the state of Rhode Island, and nine are large than Delaware.

As Treuer points out, most people think of life on the reservation as harsh, violent, drug-infested, alcohol-fueled, poor and short. This story of reservation life is often accompanied by a version of history that lays the blame on Anglo-Americans and their despicable treatment of Native Americans.

Treuer's elegant chronicle of the lives and stories of individuals on his own reservation, Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota, chips away at the stony structures that embed these views of the reservation in the American consciousness. We meet, for example, Red Lake Nation conservation officer Charley Grolla, who is deeply devoted to protecting the waters and the land on the reservation from outsiders who would encroach upon and destroy it. And we meet Sean Fahrlander, an excellent ricer who can fillet a walleye faster than anyone Treuer knows. Fahrlander continues to fish on the land he has called home all his life, in spite of the state government's attempts now and then to challenge the treaty that the Ojibwe have with the state of Minnesota.

Treuer convincingly and affectionately captures reservation life in order to demonstrate that the reservations are more than scars, tears and blood. Through his stories, he affirms that there is beauty, pride and love in Indian life and on Indian reservations.

“If you go back far enough,” Megan Smolenyak points out in her latest book, Hey, America, Your Roots Are Showing, “we’re all cousins.” In fact, “mathematically, we all have millions of cousins.” That’s a lot of connections to wade through before even taking into consideration grandparents, parents, siblings, friends and long-lost loves!

Still, the exact nature of those connections often date back to pre-documented times, so while some hereditary mysteries may never be solved, Smolenyak, the former chief family historian for Ancestry.com and the author of five other books, including Who Do You Think You Are?, is renowned for her success at genealogical sleuthing. From tracing Barack Obama’s roots to the small town of Moneygall, Ireland, to lifting an obscure slave boy’s story to front-page news when she revealed his intricate connection to both Strom Thurmond and Al Sharpton, Smolenyak has a proven track record of unearthing ancestral secrets and solving perplexing problems. Working closely with the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, which strives to recover, identify and bury soldiers from any conflict, she has helped solve cases from WWI, WWII, Korea and Southeast Asia.

She shares her complex investigative adventures in a straightforward, evidence-driven manner that allows readers to feel the excitement of being hot on the trail, the disappointment of a dead end and the ultimate thrill of a new discovery. Whether it’s an old case, such as the story of Annie Moore, considered the first to arrive at Ellis Island, or one of current import, such as tracing First Lady Michelle Obama’s roots, Smolenyak attributes a large measure of her success to hands-on research. Everything apparently is not on the internet: “Countless insights to our collective past remain hidden in local, underfunded repositories, and even in our sophisticated twenty-first century, the only way to find these treasures is to get in the car or hop on a plane and do some intensive digging.” That intensive digging even turned up a puzzling question regarding her own family tree: Who fathered her uncle? The genetic impossibility of it being the man she knew as her grandfather has sent her on a DNA quest of personal proportions!

With provocative chapter titles like “Skeletons in the Turret” and “Paralyzed Prostitute,” Hey, America, Your Roots Are Showing is a page-turner that simultaneously informs, intrigues and leaves you wanting more!

Learn five things you didn’t know about your DNA on The Book Case.

When journalist Tracie McMillan covered a cooking class run by a youth services agency in New York City, she got to know one of the teenage students. Vanessa, who liked fruits and vegetables, knew that she should eat better. But eating healthy was so expensive, and Burger King was so close.

McMillan, who has written about food, poverty and the politics of both for publications such as the New York Times and Harper’s Magazine, got curious. Why can’t everyone get access to the same food? To answer that and other nagging questions, she spent months away from her cozy life as a Brooklyn-based writer. Going undercover, she picked peaches and cut garlic in the California heat, stocked produce at a Walmart outside of Detroit and did prep work at a Brooklyn Applebee’s, a pleasant job that had an unfortunate ending. Each time, McMillan lived off the scant wages she earned.

Those first-person experiences, along with a heaping portion of facts and figures, are presented in The American Way of Eating. Readers may wish McMillan had stuck to either a straight-ahead investigation or a wide-eyed memoir—the “real life” approach sometimes overwhelms the objectives—but there’s still plenty of meat to chew on. Convenience cooking (e.g., microwave meals) isn’t just bad for you, it’s more expensive than making the meal from scratch; most farm workers, a vocation that can start as early as age 12, typically live in overcrowded housing. In many cities, writes McMillan, Walmart has “little incentive” to drop prices because it’s the “biggest game in town.”

What sticks with you about The American Way of Eating isn’t the statistics or the overriding theme of how hard it is to get quality produce—especially if you are overworked and underpaid. It’s that McMillan puts a face on a largely anonymous process. Everything we eat has a story, and it usually involves some kind of woe—from the garlic cutter in a constant uphill battle to reach minimum wage to the server at Applebee’s who’s juggling a baby and college courses with her shifts. McMillan’s covert journey on this less-than-glamorous path reveals that the various laborers involved in our meals pay a higher price than we can imagine—an issue that may even rival the importance of Americans getting fresh, healthful food.

Maybe you lack the instinct for self-promotion. Maybe you can’t muster your employer’s rah-rah-rah-sis-boom-bah attitude. Maybe you’d rather stay home and read a novel instead of going out to the party of the year. So? Something’s the matter with you, and you should feel ashamed, right?

Wrong, says Susan Cain, author of Quiet, a vigorous, brainy and highly engaging defense of introversion. A self-proclaimed introvert herself, Cain examines in the first part of her book how our one-time “Culture of Character,” which gave roughly balanced respect to the positive characteristics of both introverts and extroverts, shifted to our contemporary “Culture of Personality,” a culture of marketing and self-marketing that almost exclusively (and to our peril) favors the risk-takers, the quick-decision-makers: in short, the extroverts.

Drawing on cultural histories and fascinating recent research in psychology and brain-function science, Cain challenges such misconceptions as “the myth of charismatic leadership,” the utility of group brainstorming and the idea that introversion is the result of bad parenting instead of an innate personality characteristic. “Probably the most common—and damaging— misunderstanding about personality types is that introverts are antisocial and extroverts are pro-social,” she writes. “But as we’ve seen, neither formulation is correct; introverts and extroverts are differently social.” In the final section of her book, she offers sensible advice on strategies that introverts can use to succeed in a society that operates within a value system she calls the “Extrovert Ideal”—without betraying their essential selves.

Cain enlivens her discussion with road trips and case studies. She skeptically enrolls in a seminar given by Tony Robbins, who is probably the extrovert ideal incarnate. She visits students and professors at Harvard Business School and Asian-American students in Silicon Valley. She cites the experiences of Rosa Parks and Mohandas Gandhi. She interviews husbands and wives, parents and children.

Cain says her “primary concern is the age-old dichotomy between the ‘man of action’ and the ‘man of contemplation,’ and how we could improve the world if only there was a greater balance of power between the two types.” Hers is surely an argument worth talking about.

Both proportionately and absolutely, more people in industrialized countries are living alone today than ever before, Eric Klinenberg asserts. This has been made possible, he says, by four primary factors: the massive entrance of women into the workplace; urbanization, which allows “singletons” to form interest-oriented social relationships to replace or supplement traditional family links; the spread and improvement in mass communications that both entertain and enable people to keep in touch with each other; and longer life spans.

Klinenberg is a professor of sociology at New York University and editor of the Public Culture journal. In probing this subject, he leavens his copious array of statistics with dozens of anecdotes about individuals who live alone either by choice or by circumstance. In many cases, having a place of one’s own to retreat to is an unalloyed benefit, a step in the direction of self-determination and personal freedom; in others, it is a lonely and often perilous existence, the grim solitude before the grave.

Klinenberg doesn’t take sides. Having established the contours and likely continuation of this demographic trend, his focus is on its social and political implications. What does it mean for municipal planning? For single women and men who eventually may want to marry and/or have children? For old people who have lost their mates and/or the ability to care for themselves? For the environment? As with most situations in which there are competing interests, there is no one solution that satisfies all.

America, though a vigorous participant in this trend, is not at the forefront of it. According to Klinenberg’s figures, more than half of American adults are single and one out of every seven of these live alone—a total of around 35 million. The proportion is greater in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, where from 40 to 45 percent of adults live alone. Some of the most imaginative planning appears to be taking place in Sweden, where dwelling complexes and mixed communities have been designed to accommodate and socially enrich singletons of every age, from college students to seniors.

Given this phenomenon, what are we to do about it, if anything? Klinenberg concludes Going Solo with this proposition: “What if, instead of indulging the social reformer’s fantasy that we would all just be better off together, we accepted the fact that living alone is a fundamental feature of modern societies and we simply did more to shield those who go solo from the main hazards of the condition?” This book is a catalog of possibilities.

Since 1934, more than 100,000 brides have traveled to a store at the end of a tired-looking block on Main Street in Fowler, Michigan, in search of the perfect wedding dress. Occupying a former bank building, Becker’s Bridal stocks more than 2,500 wedding dresses, a “blizzard of white” squeezed tightly onto three floors of crowded racks. On the second floor, in the former bank vault, sits a room where floor-to-ceiling mirrors cover each wall. In this “Magic Room,” brides stand atop a tiled, circular pedestal in soft lighting as they reflect on the moments that have led them to this place and finally decide on which dress might be the one.

When best-selling author Jeffrey Zaslow (The Girls From Ames) visits the store, his fascination with the lives of its customers catches fire. Weaving the stories of the women who built and nurtured the store with those of several brides-to-be, he captures the powerful allure of Becker’s and the hope and optimism that women bring with them to the Magic Room. Among others, we meet Danielle DeVoe, a social worker whose challenging family life led her from a young age to dream of the power and magic of love, and Julie Wieber, standing on the pedestal for the second time, accompanied by her daughters and recalling through tears the memory of her late first husband, Jeff.

The present owner, Shelley Becker, has been looking into the 90-year-old mirror in the front of the store since she was a little girl; it reminds her of her grandmother, Eva Becker, who ran the store with a firm hand. When she looks into the mirror, she also wonders about the lives of the brides who have stood in front of it. Whose marriages have dissolved? Whose have grown richer as the years have progressed? She wonders if her own daughter, who now works there with her, will join the long line of Becker women who have run the store.

In The Magic Room, Zaslow captures the joy, hope, love and magic in the hearts of these women, and in the hearts and lives of the Becker family, who have made it possible for generations of young women to experience the magical moment of becoming a bride.

The prospect of middle age, a period with no universally established timeframe, is shrouded in clichéd assumptions. Around age 40, it seems as if Americans are legally required to lose their way. Everyone is a gray hair away from buying sports cars, dumping their spouses or dyeing their hair. Middle age is a years-long punchline, but why? And is there any truth to this unraveling?

More than an exhaustive history, Patricia Cohen’s In Our Prime illuminates an evasive truth: Middle age is an ever-evolving concept. What once was debilitating is now empowering. There are innumerable benefits to being over the hill. “Middle age can bring undiscovered passions, profound satisfactions, and newfound creativity,” Cohen writes. “It is a time of extravagant possibilities.”

The concept of middle age originally developed as a byproduct of the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor, a time management pioneer who “roped modern man to the clock” starting in the 1880s. Taylor’s workplace doctrine of breaking tasks down into individual parts trickled down to “psychologists, educators, and doctors [who] dissected a single life into separate phases: childhood, adolescence, middle, and old age.” Of course, the glittery promise of youth became the most desirable phase, a notion supported by a “burgeoning marketplace [that] was able to exploit the fascination with the body. . . . A cult of youth seized the popular imagination after World War I and has kept a grip on it ever since.”

According to Cohen, the theories and research that freed middle age from its death sentence-like associations didn’t take shape until the 1950s. Researcher Bernice L. Neugarten recalls that in the early 1950s students in her graduate course “were amazed at the idea that no one developed throughout life.” As it turns out, people do evolve over time. The “world’s largest study on middle age,” spearheaded by Bert Brim, dispelled the typical notions of midlife crisis when results were released in 1999. Menopause was no big deal; an empty nest provided parents with independence, not grief.

Things are still not perfect. What Cohen deems the Midlife Industrial Complex is bent on creating conditions for men and women to fix through surgery or cosmetics. But what remains clear throughout Cohen’s fascinating work is that the middle years should be anticipated and savored. In Our Prime will inspire a lot of people to enjoy middle age—and save countless trips to Porsche dealerships.

That tragedy may befall us regardless of how sensibly we conduct our lives is a reality almost too unsettling to contemplate. So we instinctively try to rationalize random catastrophes. It is this need to find a cause for every horrifying happening that gives rise to Tom Zoellner’s A Safeway in Arizona, which examines the circumstances leading up to (although not necessarily responsible for) the January 8, 2011, massacre near Tucson that left six people dead and U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords gravely wounded with a bullet through her brain.

Zoellner is a longtime friend of Giffords, whom he met when he was reporting for the Arizona Republic and she was beginning her first term in the Arizona House of Representatives. After leaving the newspaper, Zoellner campaigned for Giffords in her successful runs for Congress. He wonders here if there is something about his home state that inspired and enabled 22-year-old Jared Loughner to clash so violently with Giffords that chilly morning at the Safeway supermarket. Did it have something to do with Arizona’s institutionalized enthusiasm for guns, the apocalyptic rants of its politicians, its economic “starvation” of publicly funded mental health services—or could it be attributed solely to Loughner’s paranoia?

While Zoellner arrives at no single and satisfying explanation of why the shooting occurred, he does provide an insider’s view of Arizona’s peculiar appeal to people eager to re-invent themselves (among them Giffords’ grandfather, a Lithuanian Jew who changed his name from Akiba Hornstein to Gif Giffords and then made a fortune selling tires). Zoellner also dwells on the tendency of Arizonans to insulate themselves from each other instead of striving to form cohesive communities. And he spotlights such disruptive, larger-than-life personalities as Joe Arpaio, the hard-nosed, publicity-seeking sheriff of Maricopa County; Tucson talk-show provocateur Jon Justice; and Russell Pearce, the author of Arizona’s draconian anti-immigration law. (Pearce was voted out of office in a special election after this book went to press.)

Compelling as his probing of the Giffords shooting is, Zoellner’s greatest service here is illuminating the darkest corners of this sun-drenched seedbed of rugged individualism.

People concerned for the welfare of children born and raised within the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Days Saints will take small comfort in knowing that the church’s pedophile leader, 55-year-old Warren Jeffs, was recently sentenced to life imprisonment in Texas. While Jeffs’ conviction should halt forever his preying on young girls and his banishment of teenage boys who might have competed with him for underage “wives,” he still leaves behind the theological mechanism and eager disciples to perpetuate this sad saga of child abuse committed in the name of God. Besides being victims of sexual depredations, FLDS children were, and are, denied access to education and cultural awareness that would enable them to function independently of the church.

Among the dozens of wives Jeffs took during his nine-year reign were some as young as 12 years old. Other child brides were conferred on Jeffs’ favorite lieutenants, many of whom were also middle-aged or older. So strong was Jeffs’ authority that fathers and mothers seeking his goodwill enthusiastically surrendered their daughters to him. Anyone who resisted or hesitated to comply with his draconian, ever-changing rules ran the risk of being driven from the community and having his or her family taken away.

In Prophet’s Prey, Sam Brower, a private detective and member of the mainstream Mormon church—a very distinct entity from its fundamentalist offshoot—all but sputters with outrage as he recounts Jeffs’ increasingly flagrant offenses. Brower began investigating the FLDS after a trip to its headquarters on the Utah/Arizona border in 2004. There he found a closed, clannish and menacing society designed solely to perpetuate an us-vs.-them mentality. State and local law enforcement agencies tended to look the other way. From that point on, he began compiling evidence of Jeffs’ offenses and their effects on his followers. Occasionally, Brower worked in league with author Jon Krakauer, who had already written about two murderous fundamentalist Mormon brothers in his book Under the Banner of Heaven and provides the foreword here.

Although his focus is on Jeffs, Brower’s narrative makes it clear that as long as government officials are overly solicitous of religious practices—no matter how vicious and antisocial they are—children and childishly naive adults will always suffer.

When a series of anthrax-filled letters appeared in the U.S. right after the unimaginable tragedy of September 11, the powers that be were misinformed and easily swayed. In American Anthrax, noted anthrax expert Jeanne Guillemin takes a step back and examines the personal problems and bureaucratic missteps lost in the cloud of fear and panic. It’s a riveting—and sometimes frightening—read.

Guillemin expresses her key points simply, allowing for a grimacing page-turner. Decision-makers were in foreign territory. For example, after anthrax was first reported at the Brentwood postal facility in Washington, D.C., the building remained open for days. Employee weren’t tested for anthrax until October 18, a week after the suspicious letter arrived. As the concern over biological warfare mounted, the federal government pushed for mass smallpox vaccination, even though the Dryvax vaccine had serious side effects. There was widespread misunderstanding over how much anthrax was harmful and the origin of the material inside the letters.

Regarding the latter, key experts convinced influential figures that the anthrax was from a foreign source, a completely false assertion. Both parties got what they wanted: Along with unlikely doomsday scenarios, the U.S. got an excuse to invade Iraq. And civilian biodefense research and development became a profitable business, as its federal budget line surged from $271 million in 2001 to $3.74 billion in 2003.

Meanwhile, Bruce Ivins, a microbiologist at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, became the FBI’s top suspect behind the fatal letters. But it took years for investigators to zero in on him, mainly because testing methods had to improve and too many people overlooked Ivins’ bizarre pattern of behavior.

There was no satisfying resolution to the anthrax scare. Ivins committed suicide in 2008, before any suspicions could be confirmed in court, and the government’s approach to bioterrorism, Guillemin says, remains misguided. It’s still “fixated on the idea of foreign bioterrorism—almost as if no greater threat to national health exists,” which stops us from seeking “more positive policies.” Guillemin’s wonderful book provides some clarity so that we can avoid making the same mistakes twice. After all, the room for error fits inside a casket.