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My Three Fathers: And the Elegant Deceptions of My Mother, Susan Mary Alsop
By William S. Patten
PublicAffairs, 379 pp., illustrated, $27.95
When, more earnestly than wisely, William Patten plucked his formidable mother from her Washington, D.C., town house and installed her in an upscale drunk tank, she retaliated by calling him a bastard - in the most literal sense. His father, she informed her middle-aged son, was not the late William Sr. but her erstwhile lover, the dashing Englishman Duff Cooper, confidant to kings and prime ministers.
Susan Mary Jay was born into the old American aristocracy in the last days of the Gilded Age. A descendant of eminences and diplomats dating back to John Jay, this cerebral beauty - Vogue model, author, political salonnière - was as much at home in Paris or Rome as in Oyster Bay or Bar Harbor. When her husband died at 51, she married one of their crowd, journalist and kingmaker Joseph Alsop, providing cover for his homosexuality while he provided the powerful connections that, along with her rarefied breeding, made her a Georgetown hostess with glamour and clout.
Away at boarding school for much of his youth, Patten resorts to letters and outside sources to reconstruct his complex family tree, a gilt-edged lineage studded with impressive names, though he seems slightly stunned as only a man can be who suddenly doesn't recognize the face in the mirror.
The Sand Castle
By Rita Mae Brown
Grove, 112 pp., $18.95
The mark of a pro is the ability to make something out of seemingly not much at all. This novella by Rita Mae Brown, author of "Rubyfruit Jungle," among numerous other titles, is barely longer than a short story, but it speaks volumes about the presumably autobiographical Hunsenmeir clan.
One summer day in 1952 the two sisters Julia and Louise, known as Juts and Wheezie, are driving down to the Maryland shore for their annual day at the beach, where they plan to build a sand castle, a tradition that Wheezie at least takes seriously, to judge from the well-equipped toolkit she has packed. The women bicker with a familiarity born from years of affectionate sibling rivalry, seeming scarcely older than the two youngsters in the backseat - Juts's daughter Nickel, the retrospective narrator, and Wheezie's grandson Leroy, who is shortly to have an unfortunate encounter with a crab.
Darker notes begin to sound a subtle counterpoint to the lazy banter, explaining why Leroy seems so anxious and why Wheezie has lately got religion, as the story builds to a quietly devastating postscript.
Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam
By Mark Levine
Three Rivers, 296 pp., paperback, $13.95
Metallica fans in the Maghreb? Headbangers in headscarves? This isn't the Islamic world of the nightly news, acknowledges musician and Middle East scholar Mark Levine in this most unexpected cultural travelogue. He tracks down local rock musicians and jams with bands both above- and underground, from Morocco (home to polyglot "Morockan roll") to Pakistan, where "Sufi rock" offers Muslim youth an ecstatic alternative to oppressive fundamentalism.
You don't have to be up to date on the heavy metal scene to find Levine's observations intriguing. Unlike their working-class Western counterparts, Islam's courageous rockers come from the cosmopolitan, educated classes. When they complain of cultural imperialism, they don't mean Guns N' Roses but rather the dire influence of Saudi Arabia. Their music is a scream of protest against the hatred, violence, and decay that have seized their countries and stolen their futures. "We play heavy metal because our lives are heavy metal," says one musician. But there is also idealism, a call to a revived Islam that creates rather than destroys.
Music alone can't conquer tyranny, and Levine knows it, but as his evocation of the Czech "Velvet Revolution" suggests, it can live to dance on tyranny's grave.
Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton. 
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
