The Book Beat's blog

While reporting on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Dan Baum started pondering a complex question: Why were New Orleans residents so devoted to their city, one of the most corrupt and poverty-stricken in the United States?

Baum's new book "Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans," tries to answer that question by telling the stories of nine New Orleans residents both before and after Katrina upended their lives. And for the most part, it succeeds.

It's hard to resist a book that starts like this: "It's okay with me if you hate karaoke. But ask yourself: Do you really want to be like Don Henley?"

That's how Brian Raftery opens his 2008 book "Don't Stop Believin': How Karaoke Conquered the World and Changed My Life." And those two sentences set the tone for a delightful exploration — part memoir, part cultural history — of Raftery's obsession with karaoke.

When Dana Canedy first met First Sgt. Charles Monroe King, she was immediately attracted to him — but she worried that they were too different to build a relationship together.

Time proved them wrong, and they began a deeply loving relationship that ended much too soon when he was killed in Iraq.

On paper, Dave Zeltserman's 2008 novel "Small Crimes" has all the ingredients for a classic noir novel: A crooked cop trying unsuccessfully to mend his ways, an even-more-corrupt sheriff and a district attorney out to avenge himself on the cop, who maimed him eight years ago.

But "Small Crimes" lacks the spice that would make it sing. The result: A pale imitation of the real thing.

When I first saw the movie "Dead Man Walking" in 1996, I was so overwhelmed that I walked out of the theater in a daze, and it took me about 10 minutes to shake that feeling and return to earth.

The same feeling gripped me this morning when I finished re-reading Sister Helen Prejean's 1993 book "Dead Man Walking," which inspired the movie.

  Like many police procedurals, Richard Price's 2008 novel "Lush Life" begins with a homicide and follows the police as they interview possible suspects, chase down leads and try to pry details out of their informants.

In 1963, Esquire magazine staffers Robert Benton and David Newman were working on a movie treatment based on the lives of two 1930s gangsters, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. They had no previous movie-writing experience, but they were hoping they could use their treatment to attract famous French director Francois Truffaut to direct the film.

Despite several books promising to dispel some of the secrecy that surrounds the U.S. Supreme Court, the court retains some of its air of mystery -- and consequently, much of its influence.

Author Jeffrey Toobin's 2007 book "The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court," is one of the most recent books to shed some light on the court's workings. And for my money, it's one of the best.

The publishing world is overrun with memoirs written by recovering addicts, alcoholics, and those who suffered from dysfunctional childhoods. So how does a journalist tell his story of addiction and recovery without falling prey to the same cliches that plague so many other memoirs on the same subject?

By re-reporting his own life.

When it comes to fighting the war on terror, throw the rulebook out the window.

In a nutshell, that was the Bush administration's legal response to the challenges presented by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to Jane Mayer's new book "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals." Mayer charts, in devastating detail, the steps that led the Bush administration to seek unlimited presidential power and steamroll over constitutional protections in pursuing a shadowy band of terrorists.