Scanning the Bookshelf

Just about everyone can recite chapter and verse about the importance of oil and its impact on politics and the environment. But there's another scarce commodity that has even greater significance for the world — one that Californians in particular cannot afford to ignore — that Steven Solomon epically covers in "Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization" (Harper, 596 pages, $27).

Solomon, a longtime journalist, TV and radio commentator and author ("The Confidence Game"), delivers a fresh history of the world filtered through a focus on freshwater. It's a harsh, cruel world: Civilizations rise and fall, wars are fought and fought again, haves have prosperity and have-nots have misery — all because of this indispensable, irreplaceable resource.

"Water" is thorough, as history and as a primer for topics ranging from climate change to national security, from food to public health. There's way more at stake than whether or not people are allowed to water their lawn on alternate days; "Water" is an important book on an important topic.

Well, that was a bit of a downer beginning, eh? Brace yourself: "We've Got Issues."

Just ask Judith Warner. The New York Times columnist and best-selling author ("Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety") takes issue with, as her subtitle puts it, "Children and Parents in the Age of Medication" (Riverhead, 319 pages, $25.96).

ADHD. Bipolar. Asperger's. OCD. We've all seen the headlines and TV movie of the week, and quite a few of us share the conventional wisdom that doctors and parents are drugging and pathologizing perfectly normal kids. As did Warner when she started working on this book in 2004: "I was one of the many people who regarded [these ailments] as 'fashionable maladies' of questionable reality."

Further, "I really believed then that psychiatry was a sinister profession. That psychiatrists medicated kids for expediency. ..."

She's changed her mind, but retains a journalist's skepticism; "Issues" does not sugarcoat any of the issues involved with the state of mental health care for our most vulnerable population.

"Issues" has the personal touch Warner brings to her newspaper column; she spends as much time chronicling the real pain of children and parents as she does investigating Big Pharma, health care reform and more.

Enough with harsh reality, already! Let's take a turn toward ... harsh fiction.

Ron Rash ("Serena") delivers compelling bleakness in "Burning Bright" (Ecco, 205 pages, $22.99), a collection of powerful short stories set in the hardscrabble towns of Appalachia. A sample, from "Back of Beyond," about a pawnshop owner whose clientele, including his nephew, are lowlifes:

"By noon he'd had twenty customers and almost all were meth addicts. Parson didn't need to look at them to know. The odor of it came in the door with them, in their hair, their clothes, a sour ammonia smell like cat piss. Snow fell steady now and his business began slacking off, even the manic needs of the addicted deferring to the weather."

Inside look at the art of sausage-making:

The publicist for "True Confections" (Shaye Areheart Books, 274 pages, $22) slipped a small see-through bag of candy into the envelope with Katharine Weber's latest novel. Abba-Zaba! Big Hunk! It worked — it caught my eye.

Not that Weber's name and cred wasn't enough to do that — but on some days, it's a blizzard of books, good books, and it is easy enough to miss solid possibilities for the column. Abba-Zaba to the rescue!

Weber's resume includes such works as "Triangle" and "Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear" that made many "best of" lists in the years they were published; she's written reviews, essays and short fiction for everyone from Redbook to The New Yorker.

"True Confections" starts with an affidavit, wherein Alice Tatnall Ziplinsky does "hereby certify, swear or affirm, and declare that I am competent to give the following declarations concerning the history of Zip's Candies." Alice's tale is an immigrant story about families, business, the Holocaust, racism, love and betrayal — and that just touches on some of the themes.

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.

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