When asked why she wanted to become an American citizen, Jessica Mitford nearly answered that the US Communist Party wouldn't admit her otherwise... Now that Maureen Dowd and Candace Bushnell are thought to represent the summa of scribbled chick wit, don't you owe it to yourself to hear the clanging of real ovaries of steel? Mitford isn't as well known in this country as she ought to be -- and this despite her being the author of a devastating take-down of our corrupt funeral industry, a work of radical reportage that would have put a disgusted smile on the face of Upton Sinclair. Yet the surreal historical ubiquity of the Mitford clan surely reinvents the stale cliché, "stranger than fiction." Jessica herself became the niece-in-law of Winston Churchill; one sister (a species of relation she had in excess) married the leader of Anglo fascism Oswald Mosely; another attempted suicide out of terminal lovesickness for Adolph Hitler, whose assassination Jessica had been plotting. Like all good memoirs, Hons and Rebels contains a few pills of righteousness and bathos, but these are fast dissolved in the carbonation of an ironic, moving-right-along English style. (Only the pen of Evelyn Waugh could have apocryphally rendered some of these surreal tales of high modernism.) Thanks to a wonderful new imprint, courtesy of The New York Review of Books and dedicated to the re-minting of old classics, "Decca" regains her place next to Dorothy Parker and Mary McCarthy as one of the last century's muckraking Minervas with whom it simply was not done to fuck. --MW

Ranges from the Big Bang through Alexander the Great, tearing through cosmology, biology, paleontology and ancient history with equal verve and cheekiness. The footnotes are both illustrated and surprisingly thorough. A pleasant way to learn for the ignorant, and a scream for people who already know their Pluto from their Plato. --ND It is difficult to convey how profoundly Robert Alter's new translation changes the Book of Genesis. Sometimes differing from previous translations by something as simple as a sprinkling of conjunctions and some new commas, the rhythm of some of the most important mythological literature in wold history has been greatly improved. This is a bible you can read on a flight -- I did. At last, biblical books produced by a scholar with respect for the Hebrew's meaning and sound, for the beauties of written English, and unbeholden to doctrinal concerns, and with good footnotes. Best of all, it's in a high-quality hardcover Amazon is selling for a third off, possibly because the G-d of Abraham is meddling with the HTML. --ND Blur has always been the British band that follows in the tradition of the Kinks and Queen, namely, managing to sound archly ironic at home and in America, not. ("Song 2," their biggest US hit, is understood as hilarious Nirvana parody in Britain. In America, it's played at halftime.) Parklife is eleven years old now and has only gotten better with age, roaming wildly over genres and moods rife with melodies and wit of equal sharpness. -- ND

When a dearly beloved alternative band breaks up ("Moooorrrrisssey! You fuckin' bitch! Let's work it out!"), three forces collude to do something that lurks somewhere between beneficient and evil. Lawyers, labels and aging ex-members of the band put out the C-sides, the missing tracks. In the case of Frank Black and the Pixies, the results are more on the beneficient side of the ledger, thanks largely to the efforts of Jeff Price and SpinArt records (which, I should probably confess, are both friends of the family). If you don't know the Pixies, get to know the Pixies. If you already love 'em, then you probably own this and should buy a second copy for your little brother or hip Eastern European penpal who's still only on Echo and the Bunnymen. Never-before-released tracks include "Rock A My Soul," "Here Comes Your Man" and "Oh, There's My Mind." --MW Chemistry, which is sometimes more important than a sense of humor, would be nothing without formulae. A deadpan Associated Press style and a taste for absurdity is really all it takes, yet how criminal that "really" seems in the last clause. No publication -- not the National Lampoon when it was either national or a lampoon, not Spy, not Punch, certainly not Radar -- has proven this consistently ridiculous and sharp, which I suppose are two qualities one would expect from a state known for its Cheeseheads and its cheddar. "Baby Can Feel Daddy Kicking." "Wiffle Ball Stand Pitches Perfect Game at Special Olympics*." "Kerry Appoints Younger Self as Running-Mate." "Cheney Returns to Camp Crystal Lake." "Osama Bin Laden Found Inside Each of Us." It was a year conducive to magical thinking, and Joan Didion isn't the only one to have got up to the stuff. -- MW *Not a headline in this collection, but one of my favorites.

It's hard to believe this record was made in 1977 UK, when nobody was making good rock music, other than the Clash and this short alcoholic Scot stealing his name from Presley and his corrective lenses from Buddy Holly. Oh -- and his lyrical sensibility from Bob Dylan, and his anger management deficiency from The Who. One of the convincingly pissed-off and splenetic records ever made. --ND From the man who did for Larry Summers what Clarence Darrow did for all chimpkind, this circa 2002 book is an worthwhile introduction to congnitive neuroscience and the implications of its latest findings. While Pinker's forays into philosophical history and epistemology are a mixed bag, his explications of human behavior and politics ring true, and his prose is excellent. --ND See other featured Amazon products. A young jihadist thug with a small but devoted following in Jordan's Suwaqa Prison, in the late 1990's, asserts his territoriality in the face of a more experienced inmate, who holds schismatic views from the one true monotheism of Salafist Sunni Islam. The latter is caught by the former reading a classic work of Western literature -- one highly relevant to the punitive condition -- and the next day finds himself the recipient of a childishly scrawled note, in semi-literate Arabic, which warns of both the metaphysical and physical hazards of absorbing any more of "Dofeesky." Thus the clash of civilizations in perhaps its starkest and most revealing form. The composer of the note is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the man responsible for the assassination of US ambassador Laurence Foley, the recent bombing of hotels in Amman, and the deaths of untold civilians of all religious denominations, and innumerable coalition and native military personnel in Iraq. From an exceptionally unexceptional adolescence in Zarqa (the Palestinian refugee town in Jordan whence he took his nom de guerre), to his day-late-and-a-dinar-short rendezvous with the mujahideen in the Soviet-Afghan war, to his eager enlistment as a partially rogue lieutenant in Osama's organization, Zarqawi managed to become the deadliest jihadist on the planet. Yet the very qualities which have allowed him to do so -- a hapless disregard for winning "hearts and minds" amid universal slaughter of Shi'ites and Sufis and even fellow Sunnis -- might also quicken his inevitable failure. Brisard writes what is essentially an expanded and data-heavy magazine profile, but for anyone interested in the current unpleasantness in Mesopotamia, or a rare and hopeful glimpse at the seething mediocrity that moves the other side of the war on terror, this book is unavoidable. -- MW See other featured Amazon products.

Anyone with a nodding acquaintance with this website knows that the Partisan Review and the history of the Trotskyist left is something of a small obsession of mine. Well, Alan Wald's book is quite simply the best scholarly study I've read on the subject. He brilliantly encompasses every distinct but inter-related groupuscule of New York intellectuals, the mostly Jewish and mostly cosmopolitan men and women responsible for revitalizing American culture in the thirties and forties. To flip through to the index is to tell off a gold-mine curriculum of American Studies: Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, James Burnham, Philip Rahv, Edmund Wilson, Max Schachtman. That Wald is a confirmed Marxist and argues from the position of a stoic but disappointed disciple of the radical tradition only enriches this penetrating critique of what Harold Rosenberg memorably dubbed the "herd of independent minds." Though Wald doesn't succumb to "more in sorrow than anger" platitudes of the purist; he generously attributes a cocktail of motives -- ranging from genuine ideological disaffection to sheer opportunism -- that aided the creeping conservatism of former advocates of social revolution who later became "born again" Reaganites, cold warriors and neoconservatives. Susan Sontag may be best remembered for equating communism with fascism, but it's not until you've heard her described as "Norman Podhoretz with a human face" that you truly appreciate the bile and vindictiveness of the anti-Stalinist faction fight. --MW