Shelf Life
Needled and Dimed
Righteous Dopefiend, U. of California Press, $24.95.
Anthropologist Bourgois and photographer Schonberg spent more than a decade observing two dozen middle-aged addicts in San Francisco. The title is a phrase these marginalized people wear "with ambivalent pride" after having "subordinated everything in their lives—shelter, sustenance, and family—to injecting heroin." The authors conclude their harrowing portrayal of this way of life with policy recommendations, including a heroin prescription program delivered by treatment programs that they think would be a "magic-bullet solution" for the copious suffering they witnessed.
NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children, Twelve, $24.99.
Reporting on leading-edge research in child development, neuroscience and motivational psychology, the authors pull the bottom Jenga block out from under a towering number of assumptions modern parents hold about child-rearing. Leading with Stanford professor Carol Dweck's findings about "the inverse power of praise," NurtureShock addresses such topics as kids' alarming sleep deficits, the futility of early-childhood testing, the uses of teen rebellion, and how efforts to teach truthfulness often produce more accomplished liars.
My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture, Cornell U. Press, $24.95.
Sentences and the paper they're written on may be black and white, but most questions regarding student plagiarism have shades of gray. Should plagiarism be treated as a crime or a moral failing or an educational deficit? If the rules about intellectual property are in flux, can a "no copying" rule still be inviolable? Can students who feel pressure to succeed at all costs grok their professors' notions of academic purity? Blum, an anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame, draws on extensive student interviews in this nuanced examination of academic honesty.
Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing, ; Yale U. Press, $27.50.
Everyone expected Isaac Rosenfeld to become one of the great American novelists, including his friend Saul Bellow. Professor of Jewish culture and history Zipperstein examines Rosenfeld's life, which managed to combine the intellectual and the tawdry until he died of a heart attack at 38. The critical acclaim given the young author dissipated until he became "a ready, all too obvious metaphor for the cruelties and unpredictability of a writer's life."
Of Bees and Mist, Simon & Schuster, $25.
Meridia, born to a mother who repeatedly forgets her existence and a father who appears to despise her, finds her soul mate in Daniel. Then things really get harsh. First-time novelist Setiawan, a Chinese son reared in Indonesia and the United States, creates a fable-laden world in which magic is as enveloping as mist and as combative as the bees commanded by Meridia's harridan of a mother-in-law.
Abigail & John: Portrait of a Marriage, William Morrow, $26.99.
A senior scholar at the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research, Gelles offers a concise but exhaustive dual biography of America's first "power couple." John and Abigail Adams—"The Steel and the Magnet" in a formulation taken from one of John's courtship letters—were married for 54 remarkably compatible and productive years, and the dailiness of this account transports readers to an era suffused with duty, peril and divine providence.
'There's a rich guy out there for everyone. After all, they often circle back once or twice for new brides.'
— in Smart Girls Marry Money: How Women Have Been Duped into the Romantic Dream—and How They're Paying For It; Running Press, $17.95
