Of all the tough jobs that Gabriel Thompson did while he was researching his book on immigrant labor, the toughest was not the most physically demanding. Picking lettuce and cutting up chickens were exhausting and dull, but not nearly as discouraging as the verbal abuse and disrespectful treatment he faced while he hauled plants at a wholesale flower business.

Luckily for him, it didn’t last long: He was fired for smiling too much. His good cheer unnerved his supervisors. Such are the indignities of low-wage work in the United States.

In Working in the Shadows, Thompson, a labor union researcher and freelance journalist, shows us what it’s really like to be an undocumented immigrant worker, employed in jobs that most Americans can’t or won’t do.

To that end, he spent two months each working undercover in the farm fields of Yuma, Arizona, a poultry plant in Russellville, Alabama, and the delivery trade in New York City. In every case, prospective employers were baffled that any non-Latino would want such awful work. He wouldn’t last long, they told him—and indeed, he struggled, even though he’s young, healthy and motivated. Although his sympathies clearly lie with the workers, Thompson recounts his experiences dispassionately, fairly and with considerable wry humor about his own failings. He never did become much of a lettuce picker.

Thompson found wage and safety rule violations, aggressive anti-union campaigns and lackadaisical government oversight. But he also encountered some decent companies and a majority of workers who regard employment in the U.S., however life-shortening and underpaid, as a vast improvement over Latin America.

In every job, he was treated with consideration by fellow workers, Latino immigrants and native-born Americans, in what he calls “a strong ethos of cooperation.” Even American workers at the poultry plant (there were none at the other workplaces) who complained in the abstract about illegal immigrants got along well with Latinos on a personal level. Thompson’s experiences were heartening about human nature, if not about what he sees as employer exploitation.

Thompson believes the solution isn’t any intellectual mystery, just immigration reform and labor organizing. He acknowledges that those goals will be hard to accomplish—but perhaps not nearly as hard as years killing chickens on the overnight shift.

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

During the years they were held hostage by leftist guerrillas in the Colombian jungle, American military contractors Marc Gonsalves, Thomas Howes and Keith Stansell would talk about selling the rights to their story to moviemaker Oliver Stone if they ever got out alive. But the chronicle of their captivity has more the feel of a John Huston movie, with its mix of tragedy, intrigue, black comedy and, ultimately, heroism.

The three men were employees of a Northrop Grumman subsidiary, assigned to flights over the jungle to spot cocaine laboratories. Their plane crashed in early 2003, and they were quickly captured by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia’s (FARC) guerrilla army. In Law of the Jungle, longtime Latin America newspaper correspondent John Otis weaves their story with the misadventures of a group of Colombian soldiers sent to rescue them and the wider context of Colombia’s long struggle with political violence, corruption and drug trafficking.

Few emerge with much credit in this even-handed book: American corporations ignore warnings about aircraft problems; U.S. officials in Washington distracted by the Iraq war pay little attention to the hostages’ plight; Colombian government and military officials are alternately inept and criminal; the guerrillas are brutal and staggeringly ignorant. Through it all, the hostages endure. Some of the book’s most fascinating passages describe their lives in jungle camps, where they were held with politicians, soldiers and police officers who had also been kidnapped. The only prisoner who managed to escape was a police officer who provided information that led to a breakthrough for rescue efforts.

Despite years of neglect and setbacks, the outcome was a triumph. The hostages were rescued in mid-2008 by a bold Colombian intelligence trick, carried out almost flawlessly and recounted by Otis with verve. By then, Oliver Stone had publicly called the FARC “heroic,” though he said the kidnappings went “too far.”

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

The Salwen family lived the American Dream. Fast-track careers afforded parents Kevin and Joan a beautiful home, luxury cars, world travel and private school educations for their teenage children, Hannah and Joseph. In their affluent neighborhood, new was better and more was the norm. But one day, witnessing the sharp social contrast between a homeless man and a man driving a Mercedes, Hannah experienced a profound “aha” moment that sparked a family dialogue—one that ultimately led the Salwens to sell their Atlanta McMansion and commit half the proceeds to a worthy charity.

The resulting book, The Power of Half, is a poignant story with a powerful message about creating a new family standard that involves giving rather than taking. With today’s economic concerns, the Salwens’ book is not only timely but truly inspiring. The idea of “the power of half” is simply a point of measure to help people to gauge their giving efforts. Ideally, readers will come away from this work with a realization that we all have something to give. Whether one contributes money, time or talent, the effort is its own reward.

Through a unique roundtable dynamic that gave each family member an equal say in all project decisions, it’s clear the Salwens did more than talk the talk. They walked the walk. The Power of Half reveals some remarkable life lessons, including working templates that serve to better ourselves and the world. For this family, the effects of their project were surprisingly twofold. In choosing to help the plight of villages in Africa, the Salwens not only transformed the lives of others, but in the process they experienced several powerful transformations of their own.

The tandem writing team of father and daughter emphatically reinforces the concept of family working together. The generational blend of thoughts, ideas and energies, moving towards a common goal, is undoubtedly a mighty force. This thought-provoking read compels us to appreciate what we have. More importantly, it is an affirmation of life’s true worth, realized in our sense of self, in our commitment to family and in our efforts to leave a positive imprint on the world. The message is truly empowering.

Carol Davala is a freelance writer in Lake Wales, Florida, where, inspired by The Power of Half, she contributes to knitting projects for the charitable WarmUpAmerica organization.

The crucial matters of civilization, contends Ted Conover in The Routes of Man, invariably occur on and alongside roads, be they ground-based pathways or navigable rivers. Here is where cities are built, commerce conducted, cultures mingled, empires extended and invaders admitted. Just about every good thing a road enables is matched by something bad; the same route that conveys one’s goods to market can just as swiftly bring back disease and political disruption, or it can create a momentarily bustling economy at the expense of scarce natural resources.

To demonstrate the more particular consequences of modern roads, Conover invites the reader to accompany him on sometimes long and frequently hazardous journeys through Peru, the Himalayas, East Africa, the West Bank, China, Lagos and Nigeria. In Lagos, he hangs out with an ambulance crew stationed beside an incredibly clogged and robber-infested freeway. In China, he joins a rally of newly minted car enthusiasts for a weeklong excursion from Beijing to Hubei province. In the Himalayas, he trudges with villagers along the frozen river that is their only winter outlet to the outside world.

Conover rides “shotgun” in the West Bank with both Palestinian residents and the Israeli soldiers who patrol and monitor the region’s roads. Ubiquitous and maddeningly arbitrary in their operation, the soldiers’ checkpoints are an unrelenting source of frustration and humiliation to the Palestinians: “Most permit both vehicles and pedestrians to pass, but some allow only pedestrians. Some close at dusk and open at dawn. . . . Some allow anything to pass once the soldiers have left for the night. And some change the rules from day to day.”

Although the narrative occasionally gets bogged down in what appears to be detail for its own sake, The Routes of Man is an absorbing read. Conover may not reach any grand conclusions about the future of roads, but he does illuminate the myriad functions of these vital but underappreciated structures—not the least of which is their symbolic importance to the human race, which is constantly on the move. 

Save for our popular culture and our fast food, there is little that the United States exports anymore. But move over Miley, Madonna and McDonald’s: America’s newest export is madness. At least, that’s the thesis of Ethan Watters’ Crazy Like Us.

Watters argues that Americans are as overbearing and influential in their treatment of mental health as they are with their other major exports. “In teaching the rest of the world to think like us,” he writes, “we have been, for better and worse, homogenizing the way the world goes mad.” More specifically, American-born psychoses like depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia are being taught to people in foreign countries. And because American drug companies stand to make billions from treating these worldwide maladies, they are encouraging this behavior.

Watters argues that because of cultural, religious and other historical differences, a one-size-fits-all approach to mental health treatment doesn’t work: “Cross-cultural researchers and anthropologists . . . have shown that the experience of mental illness cannot be separated from culture.” He supports his position with detailed case studies in which Western doctors failed in their treatment of mental health disorders in foreign countries. And from his research, he makes some eyebrow-raising allegations, such as that in Hong Kong, teenagers began suffering from anorexia after Western experts started raising awareness of the disorder. He also posits that when Western crisis counselors swooped in to treat the PTSD they expected after a tsunami devastated a portion of Sri Lanka, in some cases they actually caused local communities more distress.

The major defect of Crazy Like Us is that it doesn’t spend enough time acknowledging that perhaps in some cases, the lessons Americans are teaching foreign nations about mental health treatment might actually be worthwhile. For instance, do Third World countries with no concept of mental disorders benefit in any way when Western doctors provide treatment? Still, the provocative thesis and the exhaustive research behind Watters’ examples makes Crazy Like Usworthy of consideration as we grapple to understand the impact of globalization—even if it is just a state of mind.

John T. Slania is a journalism professor at Loyola University in Chicago.

The stories we tell ourselves about what is true in our lives have tremendous power, especially when those stories involve what we eat. We humans have strong convictions about food—many of these formed from memories ranging from sublime to scary—that are woven closely into our families and lives, affecting our choices about the foods we crave, purchase and consume. “We are made of stories. . . . Stories establish narratives, and stories establish rules,” writes novelist Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated) in his first nonfiction book, Eating Animals, an idiosyncratic exploration of meat: what it actually is (and isn’t); how it is farmed in modern America; and the economic, social and environmental implications of eating it.

As a college student, Foer had no strong allegiance to any one diet manifesto. An on-again, off-again vegetarian, he maintained a diet of “unconscious inconsistency.” He admits sheepishly that he “just ate what was available or tasty, what seemed natural, sensible or healthy—what was there to explain?” It was not until he became a father that Foer perceived a lack of morality and responsibility inherent in his ongoing dietary vacillation. Now that he was responsible for nurturing and nourishing his son, what stories and lessons would he truly want to transmit to his children?

Two tales, of boyhood meals past and imagined future repasts with his wife and son, serve as bookends for Foer’s horrifically enlightening, thought-provoking examination of how farmed animals—hogs, chickens and cows—are bred, raised, distributed and consumed in our nation. Under cover of darkness, he sneaks into a chicken CAFO (aka “concentrated animal feeding operation”) to observe firsthand its hellish confines. He interviews farmers, like Bill and Nicollette Niman, who are trying to raise animals for consumption with kindness and conscience. He allows a multitude of voices to speak—CAFO workers, animal rights activists, farmers, scientists and literary figures—in order to build a case for conscious and ethical food consumption.

Foer employs an adroit blend of storytelling, philosophical reflection and rigorous investigative journalism to illustrate “how our food choices impact the ecology of our planet and the lives of its animals,” and to persuade us toward unflinching self-examination in how we choose our nourishment. He admirably presents fact and science, while pricking the reader’s conscience by recounting his own probing questions about dietary choice and moral acceptability. Eating Animals is “an argument for vegetarianism, but it’s also an argument for another, wiser animal agriculture and more honorable omnivory.”

America, the author believes, has made a choice between basing its meals around harvest or slaughter. And, collectively, we have chosen slaughter. Even using the most humane practices, consuming meat is a social act of war, of aggression. This is, he says, “the truest version of our story of eating animals.” Can we, Foer asks, tell another story instead? For the future of our race and of our fragile and heated planet, the question is timely and well worth any painful self-interrogation.

Alison Hood writes from Marin County, California.

RELATED CONTENT
Read an interview with Foer for Eating Animals.

Though Bonnie Tsui grew up in suburban Long Island, Chinatown was the epicenter of her Chinese-American life. Chinatown was where her grandparents worked and shopped for groceries, where her extended family celebrated weddings and christenings, and where, as an adult, she ate lunch and studied Chinese. Now Tsui has written American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods, an engaging exploration of Chinatown’s history and culture.

Although the book includes hand-drawn maps, this is not your standard tourist guide. Tsui looks beyond the gift shops and dim sum restaurants to see Chinatown through the eyes of its residents. She talks to scholars and shop owners, activists and immigrants, even teens. The result is a sharply drawn portrait of five Chinatowns—and of Chinatown as it has been writ large in the American imagination.

In San Francisco, Tsui learns that Chinatown’s “authentic” architecture was designed after the 1906 earthquake by white architects hired by Chinese merchants to make Chinatown more appealing to prejudiced white Americans. New York’s Chinatown was an economic powerhouse, employing recent immigrants and longtime residents in New York’s garment and restaurant industries. The Los Angeles Chinatown grew up hand-in-hand with Hollywood: its residents were hired for all kinds of Asian movie roles, and the image of Chinatown as mysterious, exotic and dangerous emerged from the silver screen as much as anywhere else. In Honolulu, where cultural mixing is the norm, Chinatown is pan-Asian, or, in the local vernacular, “kapakahi, Hawaiian for all mixed up.” A developer built Las Vegas’ Chinatown in the 1990s as a commercial enterprise—but it has since evolved into a real community.

These diverse Chinatowns also have many commonalities. Chinatown has always been a meeting point for tourism and ordinary life. Indeed, American Chinatown helps us understand how Chinatown—complex, conflicted and buffeted by the same forces of globalization, commercialization and gentrification that are transforming the rest of the country—is itself profoundly American.

Rebecca Steinitz is a writer in Arlington, Massachusetts.

The massacre at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, followed the usual media trajectory: first a flurry of fact-starved news bulletins; then a procession of eye-witness interviews, crime-scene photos and somber analyses; and, finally, the crystallization of the tragedy into a few memorable mythic figures and events.

To the degree that people remember Columbine at all, they are likely to recall that the two students who did the killings in that Colorado community—Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold—were “outsiders” given to wearing black trench coats and intent on avenging themselves against those who had bullied them, particularly the school jocks. And they both suffered from bad parenting.

None of this is true. Both boys were intelligent, industrious, socially involved, generally well liked and more apt to bully than be bullied. They came from prosperous but not opulent two-parent homes, and their parents were attentive and supportive without being overly indulgent. The boys wore dusters, not trench coats, on the last day of their lives—not for dramatic effect but to conceal their weapons.
Within a span of 49 minutes, the young assassins slaughtered 15 people, including themselves. It wasn’t an act committed in rage: they had planned the assault for months. Nor were there specific targets in mind. If Harris had had his way, he would have obliterated everyone in the school (and the world); Klebold simply wanted to die.

Dave Cullen—whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon and other publications—began his coverage of the massacre the day it occurred. He’s stayed with the story ever since, fleshing out the actions and motives of the central characters, observing the effects the carnage had on the community, chronicling the ongoing failures of law enforcement and pinpointing flaws of the media. His writing has the immediacy and starkness of a documentary.

Cullen was aided mightily in his research by the abundant detritus of hate Harris and Klebold left behind to make sure the world appreciated the depth of their discontent. They spoke from the grave through journals and videotapes that did not become available to the public until long after the furor had subsided. In addition, there are more than 30,000 pages of evidence compiled by the police.
The one mystery Cullen fails to solve in Columbine—and he acknowledges as much—is why Harris and Klebold acted as they did. What was the source of Harris’ rage and Klebold’s despair? Cullen is convinced that Harris was a classic psychopath. But that only labels, it doesn’t explain. Cullen does demonstrate, however, that there were ample signs of Harris’ escalating malevolence that the police never acted on. For reasons both emotional and legal, neither set of parents has been open with the press, and the testimony they were finally persuaded to give in 2003 in private has been sealed by a judge until 2027.

As full and as fascinating as it is, Columbine is a deeply unsettling book because it confirms our worst fear: that evil can arise without apparent cause and strike without provocation.

Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.

If Seth Godin has anything to say about it, we're going to toss aside the "born leader" concept once and for all and embrace the notion that leadership is the product of a conscious decision, not a birthright. Of course, businesspeople have by now recognized, if not embraced, new ways of forging connections via the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Craigslist. But in Tribes: We Need You To Lead Us, Godin exhorts readers to think bigger, to move beyond these tools and wake up to the opportunities inherent in the "tribes" that are forming and growing every day. Tribes can be big (Grateful Dead followers, Mac aficionados) or small (teams of programmers, knitting groups), but no matter their size, they are in need of leaders. Godin provides case studies about various tribes and their leaders, noting: "The explosion in tribes, groups, covens, and circles of interest means that anyone who wants to make a difference can."

Although Tribes can be repetitive, Godin's straightforward, encouraging voice is appealing – and surely has something to do with his long list of bestsellers, including Permission Marketing and Purple Cow. His enthusiasm for the tribes concept rings true, as does his hope that readers will realize "The power is here. The only thing holding you back is your own fear." It's a good point, and for readers who are ready to accept the messages of this book (people who are tired of the status quo, wondering what comes next and able to shake off criticism from less enlightened peers or bosses), this volume likely will serve as an impetus to lead a tribe and, who knows, maybe even change the world.

What's it about?
At some unspecified point in the future of our planet, the human race has been entirely wiped out. But there is still hope for life on Earth: Aliens have arrived and are sifting through the ruined remains of our societies, trying to figure out who we were, how we lived, what we believed . . . and just possibly, how to bring us back. Jon Stewart and his “Daily Show” crew have put together a guide to Earth in order to help these aliens understand us better. From birth announcements to the rituals surrounding death, from money to government to the length of time we were willing to wait for a baked potato, Earth: The Book covers the most important aspects of human history and culture with pictures, graphs, flowcharts, lists, quotes and more, in an attempt to convince the aliens that we are worth resurrecting.

Bestseller formula:
Snarky, irreverent humor + colorful website-style graphics

Favorite lines:
This is the genetic code for the mischievous twinkle behind George Clooney’s eyes. If you replicate nothing else, replicate this.

Worth the hype?
Absolutely! You'll get a kick out of Earth if you enjoy Stewart’s brand of humor.