Short Takes

100 Ways America Is Screwing Up the World
By John Tirman
HarperPerennial, 288 pp. , paperback, $13.95

Surely Americans have given the world some things we can be unambiguously proud of (the Bill of Rights? Ray Charles? iced tea?). John Tirman admits there are a few. His purpose here, though, is to expose the top 100 plagues that our government, industry, and culture have loosed upon the world.

First on his hit list is climate change, a double-whammy sin of both commission and omission whose worldwide death-dealing effects may already be largely beyond remedy. Following fast on its heels comes everything from television to T-shirts, most US foreign policy since Hiroshima, fast food, Paris Hilton, and the God squad whose selective puritanism trumps pragmatism and principle alike. Lest anyone think that Tirman's critique sounds partisan, note, for example, at No. 40 the two-headed ambition monster he calls ``Billary."

Tirman is no freelance curmudgeon blogging his way to catharsis. As director of MIT's Center for International Studies, he can be assumed to know what he's talking about when he says that for a supposedly good country, we do some powerfully bad things. His criticism may strike flag-waving patriots as downright un-American. But as Howard Zinn notes in his foreword to the book, patriotism requires allegiance to the values for which our nation claims to stand.

The City Is a Rising Tide
By Rebecca Lee
Simon & Schuster, 200 pp., $21

Justine Laxness, heroine of this intriguing debut novel, is the self-anointed patron saint of pipe dreams. At 37 but with a lot of growing up still to do, Justine creatively manages the finances of a tiny charitable foundation, the pie-in-the-sky brainchild of a family friend named Peter.

Justine hopes to do well by doing good, since she harbors an unrequited passion for Peter, who, she believes, can't help but love her if her efforts enable his project to take flight. Peter, however, still sees Justine as the little girl he first knew when she was living with her missionary parents in Beijing and he was a young diplomat in love with her Chinese nanny. When Justine's former boyfriend, a poet turned filmmaker, reappears in need of backing for an impossible scheme of his own, Justine thinks she sees a way to make everybody's wishes come true. She is sadly self-deceived.

The author, Rebecca Lee, has a satirist's grasp of the nuances of idealism. She also has an imaginative sense of place, whether evoking New York in the booming '90s or Mao's Beijing not as material locations but each as a unique state of mind.

The Things Between Us
By Lee Montgomery
Free Press, 222 pp., $23

Most families have a black sheep. Lee Montgomery's had a black hole -- her mother, a frustrated performer and a prodigious drunk. (``How do you explain," Montgomery asks rhetorically, ``that your mother drinks gin and tonics for breakfast?") So imagine Montgomery's surprise, years after tearing herself loose from her mother's destructive orbit, to be called home to the family's acreage not far from Boston to mount a death watch -- not for her Mumzy, much the worse for wear though she be, but for her tight-lipped father, always something of a cipher to his children.

Laughing and crying, bickering and reminiscing, the author and her siblings rallied round Big Dad during his long losing campaign against cancer, intimately nursing a parent who had rarely touched them and learning to express feelings that had never been given voice in their emotionally repressed Yankee household.

Montgomery describes the ad hoc medical education, the cabin fever, as well as the cascading mood swings that attend such crises -- part family reunion, part mass nervous breakdown. Her memoir of a belatedly dutiful daughter, harrowing and inevitably heartbreaking, also manages to be scathingly funny.

Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton.