BANANAS: HOW THE UNITED FRUIT COMPANY SHAPED THE WORLD By Peter Chapman Canongate / 240 pages / $24
Writing a positive history of the United Fruit Co. is a lot like writing a happy book about the Vietnam War. Yet that's what Financial Times reporter Peter Chapman tries to do with Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World. Chapman's colorful yarn describes a company founded by well-meaning pioneers -- swashbucklers and showmen, who knew a good publicity stunt when they saw one. The company's one small mistake was its tendency to subvert Latin American governments. A reader can well appreciate the effort to write a history of this powerful company, but the saga of United Fruit is more fraught than Chapman's book might suggest.
Los Angeles Times
GUSHER OF LIES: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence By Robert Bryce Basic Books / 371 pages / $27
After motherhood and apple pie, energy independence probably qualifies as the most popular political slogan in the land. It is, as they say, a no-brainer. Robert Bryce agrees: You have to have no brain to think it is possible or even desirable.
In Gusher of Lies, Bryce, a freelance journalist specializing in energy issues, mounts a savage attack on the concept of energy independence and the most popular technologies currently being promoted to achieve it. Ethanol? A scam. Wind power? Sheer fantasy. Solar power? Think again.
With all the gusto of a hunter clubbing baby seals, Bruce goes after one cherished green belief after another, but he is an equal-opportunity smiter. Having kicked the props from under every green technology in sight, he goes after the political right. The current administration and its neoconservative allies, he argues, have made energy independence part of the war on terror, a moral and tactical blunder.
Bryce favors a slashing, ad hominem style of attack that can undercut his credibility. Fortunately, the book steers back to the high road at the end, when the hard-nosed Bryce reveals himself as something of a visionary and perhaps even a revolutionary.
New York Times News Service
A BRIEF HISTORY OF ANXIETY: YOURS AND MINE By Patricia Pearson Bloomsbury / 198 pages / $24
The subtitle of Patricia Pearson's fifth book, A Brief History of Anxiety: Yours and Mine, is where the true pleasure of this narrative, first-person account of the crippling disorder lies. Pearson's persuasive powers lie in her willingness to implicate herself. Neither psychiatrist nor historian, she plunks down her own insecurities and phobias and nervous breakdowns on the examination table and picks through them with the most precise instrument she has at her disposal: her own gimlet eye.
Using her experiences as both a mother and daughter, Pearson, a writer for USA Today who lives in Toronto, delivers this concise account of one of the world's most common afflictions. Over nine swift chapters focused on themes including childhood, workplace and treatment, the book unfolds as a satisfying compilation of memoir, history and journalism.
Newsday