Azadeh Moaveni grew up in San Jose, an American girl with Iranian parents. As an adult, she moved to Iran, hoping to find out how Iranian she really was. In the midst of the mass demonstrations that took place in Tehran at the turn of the millennium, Moaveni explored the politics, passions, and cultural life of her hyphenated heritage. Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran is about that exploration.

Maman, as she calls her embattled émigré mother, had a tough time adjusting to many of the norms of American society. Madonna, dating, and the mall exemplified all that she found crass. At the same time, she became a quintessential Bay Area personality, eating organic, bouncing from one religion to the next, simultaneously celebrating the freedom of modern life and lamenting its emptiness. A born iconoclast, Maman both defended the Iranian revolution of 1979 and despised it. Moaveni's father, an ardent atheist, bitterly condemned all things Islamic and encouraged his young daughter to forgo learning Farsi. Despite her family's nuanced relationship to the revolution, San Jose's non-Iranian majority continued to cast a cold eye on her heritage, associating it with hostage-taking and blunt anti-Americanism.

During college Moaveni discovered how much she "resented" her own identity and all the icy stares that it had engendered. The discovery motivated her to learn more about the history and culture of Iran and, finally, to go there. By dint of her Iranian parentage, she was able to enter the country when other American journalists were forbidden, and the bulk of the book records her adventures as a writer in Tehran.

Moaveni's insight remains powerful throughout. As a young journalist, she immediately sees how the restrictive sexual norms of the Islamic Republic had the effect of sexualizing every interaction. She empathizes with her family, those who left Iran and those who stayed, generously sketching their struggles to retain dignity and self-respect. Most important, she unpacks her own nostalgia, finding the romantic notions of Iran that had been stashed away in her psyche and drawing them out for an honest examination. Moaveni's look at identity as a contingent, individual, and profoundly human experience is welcome. And now that the U.S. government has started to rattle its sabers again, her levelheaded account of life on the other side is both tonic and necessary. (Matthew Shechmeister)

In 1987, Oral Lee Brown stepped into a classroom at an East Oakland elementary school and whimsically promised 23 first graders that she'd pay their way through college. In The Promise: How One Woman Made Good on Her Extraordinary Pact to Send a Classroom of First-Graders to College, Brown reflects on how she fulfilled her pact with those kids. The Promise is one of the more engaging books on urban education today, and readers will forgive its sometimes preachy tone and outdated information on SATs and college applications. Brown's faith in higher-ed-as-a-way-out-of-the-ghetto is a little limiting, but these kids' experiences show that blind faith is sometimes necessary in desperate situations. Brown comes from the old-school mind-set of tough love, believing that undisciplined kids could use a good ole "whupping" sometimes. Not everyone can be a Ms. Brown and have the rapport and trust she has with kids, but everyone can do something. She offers practical, didactic lessons to parents who are clueless as to how to save money for college. She shows that kids need advice on topics beyond academics, such as balancing a checkbook, avoiding credit card debt, and setting that damn alarm, if they want to succeed.

The book is, perhaps, too focused on her "babies," leaving readers wondering about her personal struggles to maintain her promise of saving $10,000 a year on a $45,000 salary and the demise of her marriage, which she mentions in passing. What she does have is the satisfaction of seeing all 23 of the original class graduate from high school, 19 attend college, and 3 enroll in graduate school. The Oral Lee Brown Foundation now "adopts" a new class of first graders every four years. The story is all too relevant in these times of declining monies for public education, state takeovers, high-stakes testing, and an increasingly competitive job market. All of it leaves you wondering, why can't all kids be Oral B. kids? As Brown states most aptly in her book: "I'd like to see the foundation disappear," meaning that the onus should fall on our public institutions, not on one woman's dream. All proceeds of book sales go toward the foundation. (Momo Chang)

"If we must compare him, despite his fierce singularity ... to situate him on the literary map ... I see only James Joyce." Thus Michel Leiris's after-words are condensed to a fair blurb for Pablo Picasso's prose poem collection, The Burial of Count Orgaz. Leiris is, however, comparing Picasso to the Joyce of Finnegan's Wake, a work Christopher Isherwood, among others, admired but pronounced unreadable, at least as a plotted novel. As poems, Picasso's diary-entry creations float as discrete verbal entities, exempt from narrative expectations. The unpunctuated streams of consciousness contain vivid imagery that juxtaposes the strange and mundane. Nevertheless, the writing has a logorrheic, white-noise quality that too often begs to be called plain old verbal diarrhea. This failing often mars surrealist literature born of André Breton's automatic-writing techniques. Oddly enough, however, considering his poems' resemblance to surrealist writing, Picasso condemns those techniques: "I don't put much stock in spontaneous expressions of the unconscious and it would be stupid to think that one can provoke them at will." Instead, he "wanted to prepare ... a palette of words, as if I were dealing with colors. All these words were weighed, filtered and appraised." One wonders, skeptically, at that considered recipe, after reading Orgaz straight through.

Yet such reading is the only way to be enchanted by the bits that do enchant: passages that indeed read like verbal equivalents of a Picasso painting, or sensual avalanches like this:

... risky eyes riveted to eagles' hands unfastened flowers colors strewn over fabric hiding most of the room serving as common hall in lieu of rendez-vous and reunion of geometric shapes arriving drunk pale and disheveled on time

It would be almost impossible to edit these poems without mutilating them. Readers with a penchant for unusual prose poems are advised to read in small doses, savoring or skimming as desired. (Alexandra Yurkovsky)

In Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins uses his life story to offer readers a new way of understanding how the United States attained and maintains its global empire. The book is a tell-all by someone who played a pivotal role in deliberately inducing third-world governments to serve U.S. interests instead of those of their people. But he says the process was neither a conspiracy by American oligarchs nor the inevitable by-product of capitalism's march to globalization.

After considering going to work for the U.S. National Security Agency, Perkins served in the Peace Corps in Ecuador in the late 1960s, where, he said, he was profiled, recruited, and later trained to become an "economic hit man." That term refers to those who work for international consulting firms to develop overly optimistic economic studies of developing countries, urging them to incur huge international loans for infrastructure and resource extraction. These loans enrich the powerful and give U.S. corporations footholds in those countries but saddle the masses with debts they'll never be able to repay, thus making the countries subservient to U.S. interests. Through the 1970s, Perkins worked on projects in Indonesia, Panama, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Colombia, and other geopolitical hot spots for the consulting firm MAIN (and by proxy, for the World Bank, the National Security Agency, and American contractors like Bechtel and Halliburton). But he became increasingly disillusioned as the United States moved toward its turning-point year, 1980, when the system he helped create was validated by the U.S. presidential election in which Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter.

"A president whose greatest goal was world peace and who was dedicated to reducing U.S. dependence on oil was replaced by a man who believed that the United States' rightful place was at the top of a world pyramid held up by military muscle, and that controlling oil fields wherever they existed was part of our Manifest Destiny," Perkins writes. "A president who installed solar panels on White House roofs was replaced by one who, immediately upon occupying the Oval Office, had them removed."

Perkins's subtle approach to creating empire was replaced by a more overt one as Reagan and the "jackals," as Perkins calls Central Intelligence Agency operatives, took over. Within eight months of Reagan's taking office, the two Latin American leaders who were most defiant of U.S. empire – Ecuador's president Jaime Roldos and Panamanian president Omar Torrijos – died in unexplained plane crashes that Perkins and much of Latin America believed were CIA assassinations. "Despite world reaction," Perkins notes, "the news hardly made the U.S. press."

Since then, the U.S. empire has gotten more crass and overt, even as it's become less separable from and disguised by the march toward "globalization." The entire economic system that Americans routinely push causes oil wars, exploitation of workers and the environment, and a growing divide between rich and poor. We have come to see it as inevitable, not a conscious choice by those in power. Even the term "economic hit man" seems strange and outdated in the world that men like Perkins have passed down to the next generation of bankers, economists, consultants, contractors, MBAs, soldiers, and others who routinely work to stretch American influence. It is less a conspiracy than an unquestioning belief that growth is necessarily good, even if the growth rarely trickles down to those on the bottom, particularly in the countries we exploit to maintain our standard of living.

So, after many false starts, Perkins was finally convinced by the 9/11 attacks to tell his tale. "I made my decision to stop procrastinating," he writes, "to finish finally what I had started so many times over all those years, to come clean, to confess – to write the words in this book." (Steven T. Jones)