It's a national obsession. No, that's not strong enough: It's a national addiction. And Ellen Ruppel Shell believes it is killing us.

The "it"? Our fixation on low price. As Ruppel Shell argues in "Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture" (Penguin Press, 296 pages, $25.95), our lust for the bargain has distorted the economy, sucked us into ever-deepening debt and, ultimately, lowered our standard of living. Even as "wage stagnation and growing debt made discounting all the more compelling," the "discounts don't compensate for the staggering and rising costs of essentials — housing, education and health care. A terrific deal on tube socks does not keep foreclosure and bankruptcy at bay. Nor will it sustain us."

Nor, she writes, is it just us; our decisions impact the lives of hundreds of millions around the globe, in everything from environmental degradation to impoverished lives.

"Cheap" is full of solid, well-written reporting as the Atlantic correspondent travels the globe and uncovers startling links and anecdotes (you might never eat shrimp again). Ruppel Shell examines the psychology, the politics and the personal ("In a market awash in increasingly similar — even identical — goods, price is the ultimate arbiter; the lower, the better. I know this because I live it.") behind "our Faustian pact with bargains."

Heaven help me, I can't help looking it up: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders all offer discounts on "Cheap."

Lauren Weber takes a different tack with "In Cheap We Trust: The Story of a Misunderstood American Virtue" (Little, Brown and Co., 310 pages, $24.99) but she and Ruppel Shell would nonetheless have a lot to chat about at Starbucks.

Weber, like Ruppel Shell a journalist, offers a history of the United States through the lens of frugality, ranging from Ben Franklin's maxims to John Maynard Keynes' writing on thrift and today's ongoing recession (it's ongoing, I don't care what Ben Bernanke says).

Weber and Ruppel Shell find common ground, both advocating thoughtfulness about how we live and the ramifications of our economic decisions and skepticism about consumer culture. But Weber sees being cheap more as a tool, as a means to self-sufficiency and independence. I'd love to sit in on that coffee-shop conversation.

Life can be cruel and twisted in soooo many ways! Just ask Frank Bruni. After a lifetime of battling his ballooning weight with diets, pills, fasting, purging — heck, let's just say it: The man had an eating disorder — Bruni, a star reporter at the New York Times, is offered a star job at said newspaper: restaurant critic.

Can he resist? Of course not. Could you?

And it's hard to resist "Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater" (Penguin Press, 354 pages, $25.95), his sometimes startling memoir of life in the food lane, starting with a childhood passion for good eats, nurtured by his family's hearty Italian fare, and continuing to his job, where "going off the rails would be too costly.

"... I didn't want to go to a job-related dinner worrying about how much I'd consumed already. And if there was a dish or two that I particularly liked, I wanted to be able to allow myself more than a few extra bites without having to fear that I was being reckless."

Great, just what I needed: Proof I did near everything wrong raising my son. Too late for me, but Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman's "Nutureshock: New Thinking About Children" (Twelve, 336 pages, $24.99) may be just the shock you need. (Parents, you know who you are.)

The pair tackle a wide range of child-rearing and education-related subjects with the precision of solid journalists, and with the precision demanded by the science-based approach they take (there are 80 pages of notes, citations and selected references).

There's a truckload of food for thought. For example, in schools with greater diversity, the odds of a child having a friend from a different racial group decreases. Or: Most classic strategies to promote truthfulness just encourage kids to be better liars.

The "new truths have come at a crawl, over a decade, from various studies replicating and refining prior ones.

"The result is that many important ideas have been right under our noses. ... As a society, collectively, we never recognized they were the real thing."

Chris Hedges is mad and doesn't want us to take it any more. "We are chained to the flickering shadows of celebrity culture, the spectacle of the arena and the airwaves, the lies of advertising, the endless personal dramas, many of them completely fictional, that have become the staple of news, celebrity gossip, New Age mysticism and pop psychology," he writes in "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle" (Nation Books, 232 pages, $24.95).

It may be a familiar premise by now, but Hedges is as careful a thinker as he is a writer. Even as he rails against the "puppet masters" who control our lives — strong language that may be off-putting to those not on his wavelength — he thoroughly details how we reached this point in our history.

And left wing does not mean doctrinaire: Bill Clinton, for example, gets whomped as hard as anyone ("It was Bill Clinton who led the Democrats to the corporate watering trough").

Hedges — a senior fellow at the Nation Institute, columnist for Truthdig and longtime reporter for many outlets, including the New York Times where he was part of Pulitzer Prize-winning team covering global terrorism — is at heart a moralist who more than anything wants to see the restoration of American values.

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.