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North America
Here are some of our favorite guides and literature on North America (USA and Canada) that we have previously featured on our home page.

Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? ( Chin Music Press, $18.50) Part history, part anecdote, part cookbook, Do You Know… is itself a historic document about New Orleans. The first section of the book, on Hurricane Katrina, has writers discussing how they lived through the storm and its aftermath. Jason Berry drinks, cuts up fallen trees and curses George W. Bush; Bill Lavender walks across New Orleans through the rising water in search of a way out of town. The second half of the book is a collection of people’s stories about life in New Orleans. C. W. Cannon’s 2003 Mardi Gras manifest is an anti-Puritanical, pro-public space tract celebrating New Orleans. There are recipes for red beans and rice and a story about a trapeze artist. Punctuating it all are 19th century lithographs of the city as well as quotes by the likes of Mark Twain; Sister Madeleine Hachard, an 18th century nun; Mayor Ray Nagin; Dennis Kucinich and Barbara Bush among others. This is a well-designed book brought to you by the press that published Kuhaku. - ADD TO CART	Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City Anthony Flint ( Random House, hardback, $27.00) As the nominal head of city planning and infrastructure for New York from the 1920s through the 1960s, Robert Moses was responsible for the displacement of hundreds of thousands of New York residents. Although citizen groups became increasingly resistant to Moses' schemes, in the early 1950s he was still regarded as a selfless public servant by the media and much of the public. Anthony Flint's Wrestling with Moses recounts Jane Jacobs' public battles against Moses' plans to extend roadways through Washington Square, and later, Greenwich Village and much of SoHo. Jacobs, a Greenwich Village resident and a writer for Architectural Forum, had already written critically about urban redevelopment projects before Moses launched his lower Manhattan schemes. Over the course of the fights, Jacobs became a master strategist who knew how to use civil disobedience to persuade neighbors and power brokers to resist any compromise with Moses. She also wrote one of the great books on urban planning, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Wrestling with Moses is a great introduction to this well known struggle between two very different views of how cities should work and who gets to decide. - ADD TO CART
Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City Billy Sothern ( University of California Press, $21.95) New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina titles have carved out a big space on the shelves of bookstores in New Orleans. Some titles that came out just before the storm, like Rob Walker's Letters from New Orleans and the first four books of the Neighborhood Storybook Project are still relevant by showing aspects of the city that are now gone forever. In Down in New Orleans, Billy Sothern starts a tale of his own evacuation to Mississippi, before adding layer after layer of (hi)stories. Between accounts of his exile and return to a damaged home, Sothern tells us about a local hero who rescued trapped residents in his boat before being arrested as a terrorism suspect and held by police for over a month; the journey of residents trying to escape the rising waters by walking across the Crescent City Connection bridge into neighboring Jefferson Parish only to be turned back at gunpoint by local police; and the fate of the cities most vulnerable populations, including prison inmates abandoned in flooded cells by fleeing police. Underpinning these stories are the workings of history, race, and poverty in the city that made the breeches and the resulting crises not just visible, but inevitable. - ADD TO CART	All Summer Long Brian Chidester ( Dumb Angel, $19.95) An offbeat but librarian-like look into the early 60s surf culture that swept Southern California from goofy beach movies to bohemian surf zines. These kids are really into this mod-surf aesthetic, from weird thrift store cash-in classical LPs with hipster surfer girls on the cover to the clean spaceship lines of Googie designed drive-ins. It’s funny seeing this world through the eyes of modern day hipsters. They transform the 60s Californian beach side suburbs into utopian futuristic dream scapes. There’s an extensive Beach Boys rock family tree too for Pet Sounds freaks. - ADD TO CART
Pacific Agony Bruce Benderson ( Semiotext(e), paperback, $14.95) The narrator of Benderson's savagely funny novel cons his way into a travel writing gig in the Pacific Northwest. The perky flight attendants, his Portland editor, his local contacts and pretty much everyone and everything else receive Reginald Fortiphton's cynical attention. Naturally, the sites he is supposed to write positively about come off in less than glowing terms. "What a lovely battleship gray" he remarks about Seattle to his companions from atop the Space Needle, shortly after skewering the Experience Music Project ("the Cathedral of Musical Emptiness") at its base. A liberal ingestion of morphine downed with alcohol and, over time, our hero veers into paranoia. Benderson's writing, thick with detail, hovers between humor and the darkest despair. - ADD TO CART	A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge Josh Neufeld ( Pantheon Books, hardback, $24.95) When Hurricane Katrina closed in on New Orleans, the characters in Josh Neufeld graphic novel each prepared as best they could for the storm. Whether evacuating the city or staying home, stocking up on food or hunkering down in the family business, each made rational decisions with the available information and access to resources. Based on interviews of survivors of the storm and its aftermath, Neufeld captures the trauma endured by New Orleanians that week: the heat, thirst, filth, fear and anger. Like Spike Lee or Dave Egger's work on New Orleans, it is the individuals in A.D. who are at the heart of the story of the destruction of New Orleans. - ADD TO CART
State by State, a Panoramic Portrait of America: 50 Writers on 50 States Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey, editors ( Ecco Press, paperback, $16.99) This book reminds me of a particularly good episode of This American Life. Each chapter pertains to a particular state, with some pieces evoking childhood memories of the writer: Anthony Bourdain's New Jersey of factory smokestack smells and misshapen suburban lawns, and Jhumpa Lahiri's Rhode Island of library books and coastal sojourns. Alexandra Fuller's Wyoming is colored by a former cowboy's tales of a long LSD-fueled cattle drive. SE Hinton's cool yet reflective piece on Oklahoma is written from within an ice storm. Jack Hitt investigates the rise of post-Bush faux redneck culture in South Carolina, while George Packer traces the troubled history of his home state of Alabama, and how it ties in with his own political family's checkered past. There are so many great contributors in this volume, from Sleater Kinney' Carrie Brownstein on Washington State, to William Vollman on California and Jonathan Franzen on New York. Add in Dave Eggars and Susan Orleans! Itâ€™s the lay of the land as seen by its literary citizens. - ADD TO CART	West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders and Killers in the Golden State Max Arax ( Public Affairs, hardback, $26.95) The underbelly of California has long held a strange allure, from the Barbary Coast through to the 1940s noir dames. The murderous cults and fallen starlets have created an idea of California quite outside of the myth of Hollywood, surf and sunshine. Max Arax's California lies in the farmlands of the Central Valley. He traces its meaning from the vantage point of the mortgage crisis and the war on terror, but also in the remains of the dust bowl and in the murder of his father in a Fresno nightclub in 1972. Along the way Arax meets with Berkeley based conspiracy theorists, the last 'Okie' in a small Central Valley farming community, a persecuted raw milk farmer and some Humboldt marijuana moguls. He depicts a California quite separate from the façade. It is a state built on immigrant labor and dreams, in which power and class and race devastate. - ADD TO CART
A Journey into the Transcendentalists’ New England R. Todd Felton ( Roaring Forties Press, $19.95) This is an intriguing addition to the ever growing genre of literary guidebooks. It comes as part of a new series that includes Dorothy Parker’s New York and Steinbeck’s California. This particular volume is an exploration of the lives and geographies of the 19th century Transcendentalist movement. Different New England literary and cultural landmarks are highlighted in the context of the ideas and intellectual activity that occurred there. The chapter on the commune Brook Farm is particularly absorbing. This 19th century attempt at a ‘back to the land’ lifestyle fitted in with the Transcendentalists’ spiritual and somewhat mythic ideas of the human connection to the earth. The movement failed for many of the same reasons the hippy communes did: the inability of people to share the workload and truly co-operate with each other, and the difficult balance between the hard labor that farm work requires and the space needed to write and create. It is incredibly inspiring reading about prior attempts at creating imagined or intellectual idylls and ‘actual’ egalitarian utopias, especially in the context of the current political climate. “There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.” (Emerson). I imagine that traveling with this book would infuse the places mentioned within with meaning that you just wouldn’t get from reading a mere commemorative plaque. - ADD TO CART	The Power Broker Robert A. Caro ( Vintage, hardback, $25.00) For almost 40 years, Robert Moses was the most powerful man in New York City. Franklin Roosevelt loathed him and as New York governor and later as President tried and failed to strip him of much of his power. Obscure agencies created and headed by Moses gave him nearly complete and autonomous control over much of the infrastructure of New York City as well as much of the state. Governors and mayors, beginning with Al Smith in the 1920s and LaGuardia in the 1930s, knew that it made good political sense to build public beaches and parks, as well as 'parkways,' tunnels and bridges. Robert Caro's masterful biography charts the career of the idealistic, reform-minded visionary who wedded his ideas of social improvement with raw, unencumbered power. Caro makes it clear that, over time, it was power for its own sake, not city planning, that Moses practiced. Over the decades, his destruction of Penn Station, his plans for a parking lot in Central Park (next to Tavern on the Green, which Moses designed and built,) a four-lane extension of Fifth Avenue through Washington Square and his control over the 1964 Worlds' Fair created increasing resistance to Moses. By the early 1970s much of Moses' powers had been stripped from him. The release of Caro’s book in 1974, detailing backroom political and business dealings, pretty much finished off Moses' reputation. - ADD TO CART
New York Line By Line Robinson ( Universe Publishing, hardback, $19.95) Each one of these meticulously - one might almost say fanatically - precise and delicate pen-and-ink drawings of the New York cityscape contains more detail than most of us could process in a week. Robinson, a German seeing the city with fresh eyes, made these drawings forty years ago; yet their crisp, concrete present-ness on the page eliminates any sense of distance in time. The overwhelming profusion of scrupulously rendered rooftops, windows, chimneys, trees, thousands of them on every page, engenders a strange sense of exhilaration. This is a book that can get you high. - ADD TO CART	Red Highways: A Liberal’s Journey into the Heartland Rose Aguilar ( PoliPointPress, $15.95) Well, of course there are Republicans in San Francisco. However, the fact that the Green Party has more elected officials than the Republicans do, says much about San Francisco politics. Guns, god and 'the gay agenda' don't hold much political sway here. Much in the spirit of Kapuscinski's interest in the 'Other', journalist Rose Aguilar, host of 'Your Call' on KALW 91.7 FM, drove around what we used to call the heartland, the Bible Belt, or George Bush country. These are the states that Obama lost. Her goal was to meet and talk to the people she had only heard stories about. Her encounters were civil and usually engaged. Maybe the biggest surprise is how many liberals she met in the unlikeliest places. This is a fun, and timely read. - ADD TO CART
Assassination Vacation Sarah Vowell ( Simon and Schuster, $14.00) You may already be familiar with Sarah Vowell's voice from her frequent appearances on NPR's This American Life or perhaps from her sulky turn as the voice of Violet, the moody teenager in The Incredibles. Assassination Vacation reads like a nerdy hipster's on-the-road guide to the landmarks of the first three presidential assassinations. Her writing voice is at once hip and geeky. She is unashamedly enthusiastic about the obscurities of history but somehow manages to imbue her visits to random commemorative plaques and recreated drawing rooms with a typical McSweeney's-esque detached and idiosyncratic wit. - ADD TO CART	Stephen Fry in America: Fifty States and the Man Who Set Out to See Them All Stephen Fry ( William Morrow, hardback, $34.99) Writer/novelist, actor, comedian, Twitterer: Stephen Fry is huge. He is a renaissance man. The British can't get enough of him. Until two weeks ago, I had never heard of him. In his new book, Fry displays the outsider's fascination with our land of contradictions. Think of Bill Bryson's tour of Britain, Australia and the Appalachian Trail in reverse. Fry is, like Bryson, witty, but never at the expense of his subjects. He keeps the obvious destinations to a brief sentence. San Francisco merely shows up as the site for an interview with Jony Ive, the designer of the iPod. In Montgomery, Alabama he spends time at the Board of Pardons and Parole, and in Fairfield, Iowa, he visits the Maharishi University of Management. In other words, he points out the oddities and the seemingly mundane of American life and reminds us (again) what a strange and interesting country we live in. - ADD TO CART
Five Flights Up and Other New York Apartment Stories Toni Schlesinger ( Princeton Architectural Press, $24.95) This collection of interviews, culled from Toni Schlesinger’s ‘Shelter’ column in The Village Voice, evokes a now mythical pre-Giuliani New York. The different characters that emerge from the interviews create a vivid picture of the storied ancient immigrant communities of the great boroughs alongside the reckless abandon-all-ye-hope feel of warehouse living in 1970s downtown Manhattan. Schlesinger’s voice is charming and chatty yet somehow incisive and arch. This is the kind of book that you can open on any page and be drawn into another person’s world, from a JD Salinger short-story-like Upper East Side existence to the Iranian painter and her husband who live in separate apartments so they can both have studios. A fascinating glimpse into the lives of New Yorkers, from pompous Chelsea loft dwellers and retired longshoremen who have transformed their habitats and have in turn been transformed by the city in which they have chosen to live. - ADD TO CART

The Bottom of the Harbor
Joseph Mitchell
( Pantheon, hardback, $24.00)

These days, virtually all travel literature has an underlying current of what might be called anticipatory nostalgia: the nagging awareness that whatever the author describes is about to be blown away by the gale winds of cultural globalization. This was not the case 50 years ago when Joseph Mitchell wrote these pieces about the New York harbor. The harbor seemed immutable; after all wasn't the city built around it? Yet Mitchell wrote as if he was trying to hold and preserve something precious, and now that the way of life he recorded has vanished, it is clear that he succeeded. He was particularly attracted to the people who worked the harbor, their skills, their tools, their superstitions, and especially their talk. Mitchell was a world-class listener. In one essay, he walks through the cemetery of a community of freed slaves who settled as oystermen on Staten Island, along with one of the last survivors, whose memories of the people under the headstones stretch back to the 19th century. This collection is a must-read for any lover of New York, of great writing, or both.
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The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square
Ned Sublette
( Lawrence Hill Books, paperback, $16.95)

Ned Sublette’s previous work on Cuban music and culture serves as a link in this exploration of the roots of New Orleans culture. For the few years that the French established and controlled New Orleans, its trade, including African and Caribbean slaves, was routed through Cap Français, Saint-Domingue (today, Cap Haitien, Haiti). Spain, which controlled New Orleans longer than the French, used Cuba as New Orleans’ main trading route. These influences, as well as the U.S.'s domestic slave trade made New Orleans culture and history unique in the Americas. Sublette explores questions around the African origins of New Orleans and Caribbean slaves, the role of concubinage and slave breeding among slave owners, the French planter influence in eastern Cuba, piracy, and the shifting rights and powers among colonial powers and persons of color. Sublette shows how these related subjects shaped New Orleans' African-American music and culture.
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