The books of summer

FIFTY YEARS ago this summer, the United States hosted an unlikely visitor from abroad: Nikita Khrushchev, on a rollicking three-leg tour of America in all its capitalistic glory. Most people remember Khrushchev's visits chiefly for his shoe-banging tirade at the United Nations the following fall, but Peter Carlson, a former staff writer for the Washington Post, dug deep in the archives to produce "K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude" (Public Affairs). The linked sketches of Khrushy's boozy, mercurial meanderings through New York, Hollywood, and the Iowa State Fair are jaw-dropping in an era of stage-managed diplomacy. Well beyond travelogue, the book is also a portrait of a more naive, optimistic nation in the heat of the nuclear age.

Whether driving to work or heading to the shore on summer weekends, Americans spend lots of time in their cars - much of it bemoaning the habits of other drivers. Writer Tom Vanderbilt plumbs the psychology and sociology of driving in "Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)" (Knopf). When people get behind the wheel, he observes, "We are navigating through a legal system, we are becoming social actors in a spontaneous setting, we are processing a bewildering amount of information, we are constantly making predictions and calculations and on-the-fly judgments of risk and reward." Vanderbilt's readers learn, among other things, that roads that look dangerous have fewer accidents than those that seem safe, that the least corrupt countries have the lowest crash rates, and that people don't drive nearly as well as they think they do. This includes you.

Wells Tower's tales of the downwardly mobile may not qualify as beach reading. But as indelible portraits of beached lives - a carnival worker in his early 30s "has a face like a paper bag smoothed flat by a dirty palm" - the stories in "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) mark the arrival of a bold new voice. In his dazzling debut, Tower explores familiar territory - the family, in various states of dissolution and clumsy reconciliation - with cool precision, wit, and leaps of imagination. At their best, his stories approach the quality of alchemy, prompting the reader to ask: From where did he conjure this?

Michael Pollan began his bestseller "The Omnivore's Dilemma" with a simple question: "What's for dinner?" By the end of that muckraking book, readers may have felt that, unless they lived within 10 miles of a free-range organic farm, nothing was safe, or savory, and the question became more a plaintive "What can we eat?" So Pollan wrote a sequel, "In Defense of Food" (Penguin Press), which covers much of the same ground but accentuates the positive. Turns out there is plenty to eat, so long as the eaters come armed with this witty, provocative guide.

Meanwhile, you can feel good this summer about that hamburger sizzling on the grill, since it comes recommended by almost 2 million years of natural history. In "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human" (Basic Books), Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham offers his theory on how man evolved from apelike creatures, who survived on a bulky raw diet, into Homo erectus, who knew the value of a hot meal. Eating cooked roots and meat, he argues, provided extra energy, safer and more diverse foods, predictable supply, and fireside meals - all indicators of enhanced survival. And our ancestors, he argues, were chowing down on cooked food more than a million years before many archeologists contend. It seems cooking historian Michael Symons was on to something when he wrote, a decade ago, that "cooking is the missing link."

Amid a global economic crisis, it's important to remember that some regions of the world are still much worse off than others. Dambisa Moyo's brief polemic "Dead Aid" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is sharpening the discussion about how sub-Saharan Africa might gain a modicum of prosperity. Moyo, a Zambia native with a doctorate in economics, argues pointedly that a steady flow of grants and low-interest loans from industrial democracies and institutions such as the World Bank has undermined, not helped, poor Africans. Some of her alternatives seem troubling; for instance, Moyo mostly defends China's all-business, no-moralizing willingness to make investments in African countries - including ones ruled by odious regimes. Even so, her provocative book underscores the need to see the continent's problems through the eyes of Africans - and to consider the unintended consequences of policies that make sense to well-meaning Western donors.

As in the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, Iran and Israel have been conducting a shadow war through their security services. "The Secret War with Iran" by Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman (Free Press) recounts a rich portion of that story, drawn from interviews with some 300 intelligence sources. Here are back stories to the nuclear proliferation ring operated by Pakistan's A.Q. Khan; the covert connections between Iran and Al Qaeda; the terrorist networks operating in Bosnia; and the assassination of Hezbollah's terrorist master Imad Moughniyah in his car, in downtown Damascus, in front of Syria's secret police headquarters. Bergman writes that it was not his intention to depict this history as a series of Israeli failures "but that is largely the way it has turned out."

In "A Quiet Adjustment" (W.W. Norton), Benjamin Markovits puts the reader into the short-lived and disastrously unhappy marriage of 19th-century poet and legendary bad boy Lord Byron. The moth that flew too close to his flame is the intelligent Annabella Milbanke, from whose perspective Markovits writes this, the second in his trilogy of historical novels about Byron. The title refers to the legal terms of their separation after Annabella discovers the depths of her husband's weakness for drink and infatuation with his half-sister. Part of the appeal of the book is the author's uncanny mastery of 19th-century discourse and customs.

A reader doesn't have to know about the 2005 scandal at Milton Academy to be moved by Anita Shreve's new novel, "Testimony" (Little, Brown), but comparisons are unavoidable. At a prestigious New England prep school, lives come unraveled after a group of star athletes are caught on a videotape having sex with a 14-year-old girl. Masterfully, Shreve tells the story in the voice and point of view of several characters, including the headmaster, students who are by turns arrogant and remorseful, the parents, and the not-entirely innocent victim. As ever, Shreve keeps the tension high as she explores one of her favorite themes: the consequences of betrayal. In Shreve's world, there is nothing casual about the repercussions of casual sex.

There is much for Boston Red Sox fans to savor in "The Yankee Years" by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci (Doubleday). While its publisher describes it as "the definitive story of a dynasty," it is actually the definitive story of how a dynasty became an ex-dynasty. The book documents a high level of dysfunction from top management to top players - and some terrible business decisions. The blow-by-blow on Game 7 of the 2003 American League Championship Series is painful reading. Still, according to the authors, Aaron Boone's home run marked "the last magical moment of the Torre Era." The Sox have dominated ever since. That's what we call a happy ending.