COUSINS AND STRANGERS: AMERICA, BRITAIN, AND EUROPE IN A NEW CENTURY

By Chris Patten

Times Books

309 pages

$26

It would not necessarily be a better world if more politicians followed Chris Patten's lead in the writing of witty books on geopolitics — Patten's latest, an alluring blend of memoir, analysis, and nostrum, is titled Cousins and Strangers: America, Britain, and Europe in a New Century — but there would certainly be more material at hand for brilliant dinnertime conversations at the tables of the high and mighty. Students of recent history will recall that Patten served as the last British governor of Hong Kong; in 1997, at the return of sovereignty to China, he took his ceremonial departure aboard the royal yacht Britannia. But before that gig, he was chairman of Britain's Conservative Party, and it is as a conservative that he addresses himself to the strange behavior of America under the Bush government. Because "international law conserves order," he notes, "conservatives should be its greatest admirers and advocates." Yet today, despite a putatively conservative administration, "America is seen more and more to contravene the principles it enjoins others to follow," Patten writes. "It appears too often to obdure its own ethos, to repudiate its own history." Patten's explanation is not American self-interest — our energy policies in particular he sees as being "not only selfish but foolish and self-destructive" — but "really is all about America being able to get away with it," whether "it" is torture, warmongering, ignoring environmental catastrophe, or bullying allies.

"We fought terrorism in the United Kingdom," Patten notes at the book's poignant, eloquent close. "We knew that democracies had to fight terrorism with one hand tied behind our backs, because that was the only way in the long run we would win, because to act otherwise was to obliterate the moral gap between the state and the terrorists, because to behave like the terrorists was to deny all that we thought we were and wished to be. And who stood for all that most resolutely, proudly, persuasively, openly in the world? America. But perhaps that was then." And now? Not a paradise lost, maybe, but something valuable and honorable all the same. (Paul Reidinger)

HARLEM OF THE WEST: THE SAN FRANCISCO FILLMORE JAZZ ERA

By Elizabeth Pepin and Lewis Watts

Chronicle Books

192 pages

$27.50 (paper)

Driving down Fillmore Street in the mid-1970s, one could see block after block of vacant lots, not unlike those of Hiroshima after the bomb. Small groups of middle-aged African American men gathered on corners, bringing folding chairs and card tables to play dominoes or poker. The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency may have wiped out the neighborhood, but it couldn't keep all the old neighbors away.

A decade earlier, however, the 20 blocks that comprised the heart of the Fillmore District bustled with commerce and culture. B.B. King passed through the Fillmore Auditorium every December before Bill Graham ever laid eyes on the place. T-Bone Walker held court at the Blue Mirror and Charles Brown in the lounge of the Booker T. Washington Hotel. Jazz players of local and national renown jammed at Jimbo's Bop City from 2 to 6 a.m., and those with enough remaining stamina made a short trek to Jack's Tavern, where the action continued till midmorning.

The Fillmore, according to Willie Brown, who moved there from Texas in 1951, "had to be the closest thing to Harlem outside of New York." The former mayor is one of a handful of nonmusicians who recall the area's glory days in the '40s, '50s, and '60s for Harlem of the West coauthors Elizabeth Pipin and Lewis Watts. The bulk of the fascinating text consists of interviews with such musicians as Eddie Alley, Federico Cervantes, Sugar Pie DeSanto, John Handy, Frank Jackson, Earl Watkins, and Bobbie Webb. The authors' documentation of this neglected era of Bay Area cultural history is long overdue, but, sadly, the book is riddled with errors, especially in the spelling of names. A careful editor could easily have looked up the correct spellings of such celebrities as singers Billy Eckstine, Carmen McRae, and Sarah Vaughan and boxer Joe Louis.

The vibrancy of the Fillmore's musical past is best represented by more than 200 black-and-white photographs of nightclubs, performers, and patrons gathered from various collections and restored by Watts, but the captions are frequently flawed. Such recognizable faces as those of Ray Bryant, Mercer Ellington, and Roy Milton go unidentified. And Earl Grant is pictured "on piano," when, in fact, it's obviously an organ he's playing. Input from someone more familiar with the music and musicians might have improved the authors' noble, if somewhat naive, effort. (Lee Hildebrand)

HOMEWRECKER: AN ADULTERY ANTHOLOGY

Edited by Daphne Gottlieb

Soft Skull Press

170 pages

$13 (paper)

"No one wants to read a book where only good happens," says one cheater in "The Sixteen Parts," by Maggie Greene, the finest of the 26 heartbreakers in Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader, edited by San Francisco's slam poetess Daphne Gottlieb. Since sirens sang from Grecian cays, bedding down with someone other than one's avowed has been one of literature's standard dramatic devices. Gottlieb's introduction to Homewrecker suggests it may be time to explore how fidelity isn't working in our society. "If cheating is as rampant as even the moderate statistics suggest, it strikes me as odd that we're still blaming the 'homewrecker' rather than questioning the system. What would it look like if we prized honesty and love instead of pair fidelity?"

Unfortunately, some of the selections in "the world's first literary anthology about sneaking and cheating" are as banal as bad sex, but a quarter of the way through, Homewrecker takes a remarkable turn toward the divine with Lenelle Moïse's "Cuck(h)olding a Stranger." This Haitian American, self-described "culturally hyphenated pomosexual poet" offers a rhythmic, captivating story of betrayal between races that pulses like the rapid heartbeat of the teenage character who treads in taboo territory.

Gottlieb's sensibility steers us clear of the standard-bearers. This isn't the average white, middle-class, married man boning his best friend's wife, whom Raymond Carver and John Updike delivered for the last generation. A great diversity of characters seduces, yet Gottlieb's editing prevents this from becoming a tome of paraphilia.

Lolita reworked as a 15-year-old platinum blond boy. Lesbian love that makes a straight girl go bi. The overprivileged astride the underappreciated, the underprivileged bereft as ever, Gottlieb has managed to gather an eclectic harem of philandery, further illuminating how rampantly cheating figures into all the ways humans are driven to love one another. Stephen Elliott's failed relationship with a dominatrix is one of the best entries, for he's a master of the stripped-down, first-person victim voice that is so abundantly abused elsewhere in this collection. In the end he matches his lover's betrayal with one of his own: " 'It's just notes,' I say. 'It doesn't mean anything.' 'Why does it say chapter six on the top, then?' "

One of the problems of topical anthologies is that the reader already knows where every story will eventually go. Cris Mazza's "Change the World" opens with the five-year marriage of Marcy and Kurt, thrifty liberal types who gain enough sympathy in the first two pages to elicit groans of impending doom. This seems a token bone, and Gottlieb avoids it in the rest of the anthology by proffering indiscretions beyond adultery, illuminating many other places where our cheating can be cached — in religion, race, and the stereotypes of sex and gender. "I am a married woman having an affair with a married man behind my Jewish husband's back. What kind of Catholic do you think I am? I'm human, like everyone else," states the mother in Gina Frangello's "Stalking God."

Neal Pollack's short and somewhat glib tale is one of the few cheerful, oops-I-fucked-up-a-marriage voices in the anthology (he writes for Vanity Fair), and the only one that will make you laugh out loud. The echoing sentiment here is that affairs occur, succeed, and continue to linger in our relationships because they are the antirelationships. They are the spark and spike in the otherwise flat line of life. Gottlieb has given us more than a romp in the juicy pulp of playing around. There is a deep questioning of our devotion to the hallowed institution of marriage, the roles of the lover and the beloved, and the necessary evil of laying another. If you have a suspicious mind and a jealous heart, steer clear of this anthology of adultery — reading about infidelity is sure to ignite all your insecurities. But if you've always had that white-picket-fence vision of the future, give Homewrecker a read. Your dreams may start to stray. (Amanda Witherell)