Ilkark,tion
I
n Lean In: Women, Work and the
Will to Lead (Knopf), Facebook COO
Sheryl Sandberg explores women-
in-the-workplace issues, with the author
providing advice and anecdotes along
with each piece of research. For example,
studies show that women not only get less
credit than men for helping out colleagues,
but also that successful women are per-
ceived as less likable by both sexes. Is this
fair? No, not really, but as Sandberg aims
to show in her book, women have the abil-
ity to work to change things.
In 1942, a U.S. military plane crashed
in Greenland; the B-17 that was sent to
rescue the men hit a glacier. On a second
mission, a Grumman Duck got a single
man out of the B-17 before disappearing
forever. In intertwining narratives, Frozen
in Time (Harper) by Mitchell Zuckoff
documents the crashes between1942-1943
and the quest 70 years later to find the
Duck's wreckage. Paced like a nail-biting
novel, Zuckoff's account will have you
on the edge of your seat as you navigate
through the frozen wasteland known as
Greenland.
Writers Frederic Raphael and Joseph
Epstein corresponded via the Internet for
an entire year — though they had never
met or even spoken to each other. The
result is Distant Intimacy: A Friendship
in the Age of the Internet (Yale University
Press), a set of "electronic" letters that
entertains readers as much as when the
topic is grave as when it is droll. Talking
about their professional lives as writers,
their families and hobbies, Raphael and
Epstein draw the reader in with their
entertaining tales. Assessments of figures
such as Annie Leibovitz, Harold Bloom,
George Steiner, Isaiah Berlin and Robert
Gottlieb, among others, are scattered
throughout.
New York Times columnist Bruce Feiler
set out with these two questions: "What do
happy families do right, and how can the
rest of us learn to make our families hap-
pier?" The father of twin daughters, Feiler
found the answers often came from sur-
prising sources and with advice contrary
to what we have always been taught. In
his book The Secrets of Happy Families
(William Morrow), Feiler offers a play-
book of suggestions and tips to make your
family happier. Talking to various sources
— from finance managers about how to
manage allowance to members of Silicon
Valley to figure out how to improve family
efficiency — Feller provides a toolkit for
the new generation of families, along with
anecdotes from his own family's testing of
these tips, like this one: Don't worry about
family dinner. Instead, focus on finding
time every day to be together; it's what you
talk about, not what you eat, that matters.
East Lansing native Nate Silver is a sta-
tistics genius. At the age of 25, he invented
a system called PECOTA for predicting
baseball performances. In 2008, he suc-
cessfully predicted the presidential elec-
tion. In 2012, he predicted Barack Obama's
re-election, forecasting the exact number
of electoral votes for both Obama and Mitt
Romney, as well as forecasting the popular
vote with only a 0.7 percent margin of
error. His book, The Signal and the Noise
(Penguin), explains why some predictions
succeed and others fail in regard to topics
such as the weather, stock market, NBA
and poker. Silver shows how to filter out
the excess from what's truly important to
make accurate predictions.
As David Nirenberg shows in Anti-
Judaism: The Western Tradition
(Norton), anti-Jewish thought has been
influencing Western society for centuries,
going back to Egypt in the third century
B.C.E., with Egyptian historian Manetho,
who is thought to have created the first
anti-Jewish cosmology, which influenced
many of the anti-Jewish ideologies to fol-
low. Nirenberg takes the reader across
the Western world, from the founding
of Christianity and Islam, to the Spanish
Inquisition, to the German Holocaust.
Even during times when there were no
Jews present in a society, there was still
anti-Jewish thought; and when Jews were
present, they suffered from violence and
oppression. Delving deeply into history,
Nirenberg also shows that anti-Jewish
thought in the Western world is not con-
fined to radicals.
In the work world nowadays, dress
codes are relaxed, and technology is a
constant distractor. Judith Martin, the
author of the "Miss Manners" columns,
along with her son, executive Nicholas
Ivor Martin, attempt to create a guide to
the modern workplace in their book, Miss
Manners Minds Your Business (Norton).
Written in question-and-answer format,
with Miss Manners answering questions
from her "Gentle Readers:' this volume
provides everything a working person
should know about — from after-hours
work parties to your coworker's messy
cubicle.
Throughout history, many crime cases
remain unsolved. In The Annals of
Unsolved Crime (Melville House), Edward
Jay Epstein tries to figure out logical solu-
tions to some of them. Through usage of
recorded evidence, eyewitness accounts,
police testimonies and more, Epstein stag-
es the crime and poses logical theories of
what could have happened. From there, he
presents which scenario he believes is the
truth, backing up his reasoning with the
evidence. The cases he looks at range from
the assassination of Abraham Lincoln to
the Amanda Knox ordeal.
Humor is a time-honored tradition of
modern Jewish culture, one that Ruth
R. Wisse explores in her new book, No
Joke: Making Jewish Humor (Princeton
University Press). In German, Russian,
Hebrew, English and Yiddish, Wisse traces
Jewish humor around the world, and how
it impacts the culture where it is found.
However, this book isn't just a joke book.
As Wisse shows the joys of Jewish humor,
she also poses deep questions, such as, "Is
`leave 'em laughing' the wisest motto for a
people that others have intended to sweep
off the stage of history?"
Sidney Schwartz is a consultant to
synagogues and other Jewish organiza-
tions. In Jewish Megatrends: Charting
the Course of the American Jewish
Future (Jewish Lights), he offers a vision
for a community that can simultaneously
strengthen the institutions that serve those
who seek greater Jewish identification and
at the same attract younger Jews, many
of whom are not particularly preoccupied
with issues like intermarriage and anti-
Semitism.
Cooked (Penguin) by Michael Pollan
explores the one thing we depend upon
in some way in our daily lives: cooking.
Traveling from the Basque country of
Spain to barbeque pits in North Carolina,
Pollan views different cultures and foods
and asks the question: "Why does cooking
matter?"
Michael Moss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning
New York Times reporter, takes readers
on an adventure to discover what's really
in the food we eat, and how companies
make us want that food, in his book Salt
Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked
Us (Random House). Moss covers the
American food market unflinchingly, for-
ever changing the way you'll think about
the food you eat.
After he received a pre-diabetic, pre-
heart disease health diagnosis, it was sug-
gested to New York Times food columnist
Mark Bittman that he should become a
vegan. For Bittman, whose career centers
on food, this was not a viable option.
Instead, he came up with a different plan:
"Vegan Before 6," or "VB6," in which
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