Scanning the Bookshelf

It's been many years since Neil Sheehan's ambitious, haunting rendering of the Vietnam War, "A Bright Shining Lie," won a Pulitzer and a National Book Award, yet he's Johnny on the spot with his timing on "A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon" (Random House, 534 pages, $32). That "ultimate weapon" is the intercontinental ballistic missile, and, as I was writing this, President Obama arm-wrestled the United Nations to get on board with his campaign to create a "world without nuclear weapons" and then ratcheted up the pressure on Iran by exposing a secret nuclear facility.

Oddly enough, Schriever would likely have been in the prez's corner: The Air Force officer intended ICBMs to be used solely as a deterrent to nuclear incineration. This is living history, with ramifications still being played out. One man can make a difference:

"... Gardner and Schriever had decided they had to make an end run around the Air Force and Department of Defense bureaucracies ... They had to reach President Eisenhower and convince him to underwrite the project with his personal support."

Sometimes, little people (figuratively speaking) can amount to a hill of beans. Schriever and his allies took on some Serious Players (crazed Gen. Curtis LeMay, for example) and bested them. Mutually assured destruction never looked so good.

Craig Ferguson's "American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot" (Harper, 268 pages, $25.99) also was years in the making, but in his case, the delay was due to, well, life.

His life. After all, he had to live at least enough of it to get the material for this surprisingly engrossing celebrity memoir. Ferguson, an able funnyman and host of "The Late Late Show," can turn a pretty decent phrase as he mines his hardscrabble beginnings in Glasgow, career struggles, drinking woes and more. The memoir is funny — he can't help it — yet moving, thoughtful.

"I am the child of two parents and two countries. My mother gave me the blue in my eyes and my father gave me grit. Scotland made me what I am and America let me be it."

For Ferguson, "becoming an American was not a geographical or even political decision. It was a philosophical and emotional one, based on a belief in reason and fairness of opportunity."

Hear hear!

Rich Benjamin boldly goes where no black man has ever gone before in "Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America" (Hyperion, 354 pages, $24.99).

At least that's the theory, but to be honest, Benjamin's odyssey seems dated, no matter what stats he brings to the table about the nationwide increase in overwhelmingly white communities.

But, no matter, it's a fun ride, largely because Benjamin so cheerfully inserts himself in all sorts of places, starting with his faux search to buy a home in "Utah's Dixie" — St. George — to his immersion in a white suburb in racially diverse Atlanta. He doesn't take himself seriously — "Oh, how the retired old ladies of Dixie are sweet as taffy to me!" — even when he's rubbing shoulders at a retreat for the religious arm of Aryan Nations. He's enjoying his "studies" and doesn't look down at anybody, no matter how misguided he may feel they are; he shares drinks, smokes, poker, you name it, with all sorts of white folks, and lives to tell the tale.

Jimmy Santiago Baca sets his first novel, "A Glass of Water" (Grove Press, 215 pages, $23), in a brutally different slice of America, the migrant camps of the Southwest.

Baca is a terrific poet with major literary cred as well as a terrifically fierce writer with major street cred; he taught himself to read and write during his time in a maximum-security prison for drug possession. "Glass" is a tale of two brothers, but Baca's hand is omnipresent. Here, a character, Casimiro, thinks:

"I remember the first time the American dream took hold of me.

"Its toddler's feet grew into my boots, its shoulders and arms stretched into my broadening shirt, it was enchanted using my brown eyes to see with. I was unable to contain my willingness to challenge myself to improve my life. I came without a passport, unknown. No birth certificate, green card, or anything else to label or pin me down."

Those who don't remember the past are, well, you know. As Louis Begley makes clear as crystal in "Why the Dreyfuss Affair Matters" (Yale University Press, 249 pages, $24), the infamous 1894 perversion of justice that split France into two warring camps all too often echoes the battle over the detainees in Guantanamo today.

Military tribunals. Civil liberties. National security. Secret evidence. National trauma. Secret trials. "Special" laws. Solitary confinement. Whistleblowers. Journalists. The list goes on and on.

Dreyfuss' trial, conviction and imprisonment — built on a foundation of lies, anti-Semitism and rabid nationalism — and the battle to clear him and the national divisions it created, which lasted decades, are a twisted, layered tale. Begley, a lawyer for 45 years and a masterful, award-winning novelist ("About Schmidt," "Matters of Honor"), distills it in compelling, clean prose.

He also eloquently makes the case for the rule of law. In America. It's horrifying that he has to do so.

To find out more about Martin Zimmerman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM