Hungry Planet: What the World Eats

By Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio. Material World Books and Ten Speed Press, 288 pages, $40.

Hot off the presses and hard to read without snacking, Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio's Hungry Planet: What the World Eats takes readers on a grand culinary voyage through our modern world. Menzel, a photographer, and D'Aluisio, a writer, visited 30 families in 24 countries and photographed them at home with a week's worth of their typical food. What unfolds is a textured travelogue about the politics of food and an evocative look at the confluence of globalism, cuisine, and culture. A lushly illustrated anthropological study, Hungry Planet chronicles the eating habits and favorite recipes of subjects as diverse as Bhutanese farmers, Sudanese refugees, and American office workers. Interwoven with the photos are essays on obesity and sustainability and national statistics on meat consumption, the availability of edible resources, and life-expectancy rates.

Surrounded by a cornucopia of stylishly staged store-bought groceries and homegrown meat and produce, the aggregated family portraits can look like paid product placements for multinational corporations. It's impossible to ignore the worldwide reach of processed food. Coca-Cola, Nescafé, and Kraft cheese are ubiquitous, turning up in the first world and developing nations alike. Although a few families don't have access to packaged provisions, the portraits suggest it's just a matter of time. Diluting and replacing native cooking and culture, globalization does indeed go for the gut, but we're enjoying it too much to mourn the loss. Rising affluence in regions such as eastern Europe and Asia means that items once fetishized as unimaginable luxuries, like chocolate bars and Western-style burger restaurants, are now within reach for more and more people. Populations that used to worry about getting enough to eat now fret about health problems resulting from regular consumption of junk food.

As in Material World, a photo essay on the possessions of statistically "average" families around the globe, the authors show a knack here for capturing the rich details of people's lives. An aboriginal woman from Australia's rural outback chafes at city living but remains enthralled by her modern refrigerator. In remote coastal Greenland, Inuit children mimic rock stars from MTV while their father hunts for seals. Standing alone, the text wanders close to being too moralistic at times, but the intimate photos keep the book human and, more important, accessible. Everyone can identify with this book, because we all eat. And to visualize one's own weekly food supply is an exercise that is fascinating, and, perhaps, a little uncomfortable. (Beth Kohn)

Yes Man

By Danny Wallace. Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 388 pages, $21.

Danny Wallace's Yes Man is one of those rare books that actually has the potential to change your life. Wallace is a quirky Brit who periodically indulges in what his ex-girlfriend calls "stupid boy projects" – generally pub bets that turn into interesting social experiments with hilarious and unforeseen consequences. In his last book, Join Me, a bestseller in Britain, he decided to gather a following, accidentally became a cult leader, and lead his "joinees" to perform random acts of kindness. This time round he makes a seemingly silly pact with himself to say "Yes!" to any and all invitations and suggestions that come his way for an entire year; this is where things get interesting. After spending too much time staying at home, Danny decides it's time to open himself to the world and sets off on a series of adventures that include meeting the world's only hypnotic dog, winning (and quickly losing) $45,000, and finding himself with way too many credit cards. ("You have been specially selected for a new type of credit card!" "Yes!").

The premise of the book is deceptively simple, but what starts as a stupid idea becomes a genuine investigation of openness and the human spirit – and for Wallace, a way of life. By putting his life in fate's hands, he acts a little bit like Luke Rhinehart's "Dice Man," but while the Dice Man explores the darker side of chance, Danny is an unabashedly positive man who gives himself only one possible option: saying yes. What adds to the pleasure of reading Yes Man is knowing that this genuinely amusing and cheerful story, with all its twists, original characters, and its wonderful ending, actually happened. Read his story, and most likely you'll find yourself becoming a yes man too. (David Moisl)

The Wild Creatures: Collected Stories of Sam D'Allesandro

Edited by Kevin Killian. Suspect Thoughts Press, 160 pages, $12.95 (paper).

Sam D'Allesandro, author of the short-story collection The Wild Creatures, was born in 1956 and died of AIDS in 1988 at the age of 32. Kevin Killian, the collection's editor and D'Allesandro's friend and collaborator, only learned his real name – Richard Anderson – after his funeral. On the scene for San Francisco's 1980s writing renaissance, D'Allesandro was a presence at the Small Press Traffic workshops that served as a "laboratory for New Narrative," as the writer Bob Glück put it. This republication of work from a lesser-known writer of that time is an insight into that heady era in San Francisco's queer literary community. The Wild Creatures includes the stories D'Allesandro published in his lifetime, along with several more Killian extracted and worked up from manuscripts and notebooks. One story-sketch, "Travels with My Mother," was transcribed by Dodie Bellamy from an audiotape D'Allesandro recorded a couple of months before his death. The rawness of some of its material means that The Wild Creatures is an inconsistently satisfying read. That rawness, though, gives glimpses into the mechanisms that make his stories work.

And some stories work like charms. They read like unselfconscious letters to lucky intimates from a brilliant personality. The stories, all first-person narratives, explore queer and unconventional desire and the fragmented manifestation of identity – central subjects of New Narrative. Unlike in most New Narrative writing, some of D'Allesandro's narrators describe their own desires with an exhilarating absence of shame. "The truth of the matter is I like to be beaten and fucked like a dog" is the opening line of "Walking to the Ocean"; and that story's gusto doesn't falter. These "shameless" stories (another is "Electrical Type of Thing") are sharp and fun, but also a little alienating in their seamless confidence.

When anxiety is included and described, the writing is most compelling. In "Giovanni's Apartment," the narrator gets completely consumed by a relationship that starts with being picked up by a stranger on the street. "I'm now thirty days old, all a continuation of that first night – hot bath, dream without end, big fat death of the outside world. He used sex as a means of communicating. I need sex as a way to get into heaven. I didn't know exactly what I wanted, and what I need I got." At his best, D'Allesandro's writing has a poetic brevity that shoots right to a reader's bloodstream. (Masha Gutkin)

All Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated

By Nell Bernstein. New Press, 288 pages, $25.95.

Children of the incarcerated, Bay Area journalist Nell Bernstein says, are the invisible victims of American crime and punishment. In her new book, All Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated, Bernstein examines the criminal justice system from a child's perspective. Then she lets the kids she interviewed explain the series of events that starts when police arrest a parent and comes to dominate a child's self-image and a child's lasting notion of family.

The burgeoning prison population tells of this country's failed experience with tough-on-crime legislation, laws that have encouraged aggressive policing in inner-city neighborhoods, and lengthy, mandatory prison sentences for people convicted of a felony. Last month the federal Justice Department reported that nearly seven million adults are now serving time behind bars, are on probation, or are on parole. This puts the population of current and recent inmates ahead of that of Massachusetts and of all but 12 US states. If these folks were all from California, the largest state in the land, the group would represent one resident out of every five. What's been missing until now was an account of all the children who've been left to grapple with life's cold reality once their parents were locked up miles away in a cell.

Bernstein approaches her subject with a remarkable sense of hope, considering the heartache she makes you feel when she describes families being split up by the law. Why? Because by the time the cops get involved, Bernstein says, many children already understand that something has to change. "They really sort of schooled me in the need for intervention in their lives," she told the Bay Guardian in a recent interview.

All Alone in the World will surprise critics of the criminal justice system who view policing and prisons only as part of the problem. Bernstein reveals them to be central to the solution. "Arrest, reimagined," she writes, "could be an opportunity to make the vulnerable child, and her family, visible; to make a bad situation better rather than worse." (Matthew Hirsch)

Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War

By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. South End Press, 300 pages, $18 (paper).

Far from being a bygone era in a dusty history book, the contra war of the 1980s is very much alive. Its architects are shaping foreign policy today, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz notes in her third historical memoir, Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, and lessons learned from that era inform today's struggles against US imperialism, government lies, and the corporate media's collusion. The contra war provides a prologue to our current neoconservative-dominated Beltway; indeed, the list of American actors in the Iran-contra arms deal, such as John Poindexter, Elliott Abrams, Otto Reich, and John Negroponte, serves as a who's who list of dubious characters hired by the Bush administration. In Blood on the Border, Dunbar-Ortiz raises larger questions about how movements organize to fight injustices like those encountered in the contra war: through diplomacy and policy recommendations, academia, and nonviolent direct action. Despite her work on behalf of indigenous people's rights through academia and diplomacy, Dunbar-Ortiz has great doubts about its efficacy.

"My radical 1970s self believed that all of this diplomacy was ultimately a kind of treason," she writes, "since I was essentially organizing tribal planners to work within the capitalist system, or indigenous leaders to work inside the United Nations."

Additionally, her book examines the contra war from a new angle. She focuses specifically on how the Miskitu Indians were placed in the cross fire by the CIA so that the United States could accuse the Sandinistas of massacring the Indians. Dunbar-Ortiz, whose mother is part Native American, has been actively working for indigenous people's rights since the early 1970s. The book begins with a chronicle of this work, thereby imbedding the contra war in larger questions of colonialism and imperialism.

To be sure, Dunbar-Ortiz's politics, writings, and activism are decidedly anti-imperialist and reflect her heritage as a descendant of radical labor organizers and Native Americans. "Although most US citizens, and indeed the rest of the world, view the US War of Independence as the first example of resistance to colonialism," she writes, "Native Americans know better. They see the United States as imperialist from its founding." (Christina Gerhardt)