Since the early 1970s, hundreds (perhaps thousands) of novels have been written with the same basic plot: a young and naive man, graced with wide-eyed innocence and (always) extremely good looks, arrives in a big city from a small town, realizes his gay sexual awakening, and spirals downward into an underground filled with debauchery, danger, and bad music. This territory has been mined so often (and continues to dominate the debut efforts of many up-and-coming novelists) that established writers dare to trespass in this realm only if they could deliver something unique. Unfortunately, "Boulevard" is anything but.

Grimsley is a confident writer whose prose is unadorned and meticulous, but his writing can't save the hackneyed plot. The novel's central character, Newell, leaves small-town Alabama, and the novel's first page (correction: the first sentence!) describes him getting off the bus in New Orleans in 1976. This B-novel cliche is followed by 120 pages of formula--first time going to a gay bar, first sniff of amyl nitrate, first joint, first visit to a pornographic bookstore (where Newell ultimately lands a job), first sexual encounter, etc.

In addition, there are flaccid descriptions of famous French Quarter landmarks that could have been lifted from Fodor's. The prose here is so detached, so cynical, so clinical that it conveys no emotional impact: at one point, Newell reflects on his first night of drinking and dancing as a "nice evening" of "pleasant places"--an impression that the previous twenty pages absolutely does not convey. It's hard to say if Grimsley means to suggest that Newell is a vapid reporter of his so-called life or if he means to condemn the excesses of gay life in New Orleans.

After this first chapter, "Boulevard" takes a sharp turn and hints at what this novel could have been. Grimsley shifts the story's style and point of view: first to Miss Sophia, an older, schizophrenic transsexual who works with Newell in the bookstore, then to Mark, Newell's drug-addled boyfriend, and a final chapter (as well as a coda of sorts) that, with whiplash rapidity, switches perspectives among the several characters introduced throughout the book. Interspersed is a journal written by a nineteenth-century neighbor of a notorious woman who imprisoned and tortured her slaves.

As others have noted, the chapter about Miss Sophia seems entirely out of place in this novel, but I thought it daring and believable; on its own, it would have made a great short story or the kernel of another novel altogether. As a whole, however, these last three chapters don't attempt to make the characters more believable (they certainly don't illuminate the reasons for Newell's sudden downfall and his equally sudden epiphany at the end of the book), and they tantalize the reader with the silhouette of an entirely different--and possibly better--novel.

Amusing and brisk, "Welcome to Higby" could have been called "Melrose Place, Mississippi"--although Dunn's ear for dialogue is far superior to any trashy sitcom's script. I admit I couldn't put it down, and I certainly laughed out loud on several occasions. Yet, like a television comedy you just can't stop watching in spite of yourself, Dunn's sophomore effort will undoubtedly fade quickly from memory.

The novel follows the adventures of a large number of Higby's residents over Labor Day weekend in 1993, and there are some truly crazy and truly troubled and truly loveable people in this town. The kind but insecure Euless Ludlam and the homely and lonely Carmen Valentine are certainly favorites, while the put-upon and illiterate (but fully reformed) ex-convict Bowmar Stambler can be my neighbor anytime.

Another reviewer's rant disparaging the "stock characters" isn't in the least fair: In what Southern town would these people be cliches? To cite just one example, I didn't fully realize until halfway through the book that the Leigh sisters, neither of whom match any type I've ever imagined, were "people of color" (to use the author's expression). Yes, the plot may be predictable--a bit too predictable, in fact--but the characters, their beliefs, and their behaviors certainly are not. Still, I agree that the novel occasionally go so far over the top that it turns from sitcom to farce: a vegan fundamentalist Christian cult that kidnaps wayward drunks and imprisons them until they become complacent believers? What's the point?

If you're looking for an undemanding, eccentric romp, you may well enjoy the hijinks of the inhabitants of Higby. It's a nice place to visit...

"The Cruel Sea" focuses on the British naval experience during World War II--more specifically, on the crew of a corvette during the first half of the war and, to a lesser extent, of a frigate during its waning years. Like most war stories, the plotting is at times necessarily predictable (yet still thrilling), but Monsarrat's epic is a cut above in both its human element (even in its occasional depiction of Germans) and in its presentation of the morally gray aspects of war. This is no ode to blind patriotism. Instead, the novel is an elegy on the selfless bravery and selfish survival instincts of a group of sailors whose reasons for being in the war are as varied as the men themselves: the stern but fair-minded Lieutenant-Commander Ericson, the indolent and tyrannical (and somewhat comical) First Lieutenant Bennett, the nervous and self-doubting Sub-Lieutenant Ferraby, the level-headed and thoughtful Sub-Lieutenant Lockhart (who, I would guess, is Monsarrat's alter ego), and a supporting cast of dozens. There are some spine-chilling and devastating battle scenes, but the book never once loses its focus: the men (and women) who fought and endured the war.

Another surprising aspect of "The Cruel Sea" is its intense lyricism. There are many sentences and descriptions that linger in the mind long after one has finished the novel. The death a crew member: "He did not exactly surrender to the sea, but he stopped caring much whether he lived or died; and on this night, an ambiguous will was not enough." An officer finding out his girlfriend is pregnant: "The child would be the occasion of their marriage, not the cause for it." Equally impressive is the novel's unusual wit--humor far beyond the stereotypical bawdiness of sailors: the friendly banter between crew members, the scrapes between men on leave and family members or other civilians, the hilarious clash of cultures when the frigate is docked for repairs in New York City.

Generally, I am averse to "war novels" (with the exceptions of the usual famous classics); I'd rather read the real thing--journalism or history--and forego the shallow characterizations and poor writing so common to the genre of military fiction. So I can't explain what caused me to pick up this 500-page book, but I am certainly glad I did. This novel is a neglected classic and should be read by an audience far beyond the aficionados of war novels.

Light on plot, heavy on symbolism, and a little predictable, Cather's first novel (a novella, actually) still contains moments of brilliance, especially in its strong characterizations and occasional flashes of wit. The story concerns a Boston architect who is contendedly married but suddenly embarks on an affair in London with an old flame from his youth. He soon becomes tormented over his double life but finds himself unable to resolve his conflicted feelings. Heavily indebted to the Gilded Age novelists, "Alexander's Bridge" reads like a typical first novel from a writer who shows a lot of promise.

Later in life, Cather wrote an essay entitled "My First Novels (There Were Two)," as close to an apology for a first novel as most writers ever make. She admitted that most of the "younger writers" in her peer group followed the manner of Henry James and Edith Wharton, "without having their qualifications"; she "thought a book should be made out of 'interesting material.'" Only while writing her next novel, "O Pioneers!," did she realize that "taking a ride through a familiar country"--the rural Nebraska of her youth--was "a much more absorbing process." Nevertheless, "Alexander's Bridge" hints at the virtuoso novelist she was later to become, and it's certainly better than many writers achieve in an entire lifetime.

This collection of essays, gathering articles written for a variety of publications (but mostly for "The Skeptical Inquirer"), covers a number of subjects: creationism, UFOlogy, television evangelists, a few borderline scientific claims, and especially spiritualism and psychic research. Gardner is brilliant, and his writing is compelling, extremely witty, and easy to understand. In many ways, it should be required reading for anyone interested in "fringe" movements, but readers should understand that, as a whole, the book has some shortcomings inherent in these sorts of collections.

Some of the articles in "The New Age" provide convincing refutations of the topic under discussion, while other essays preach to the converted. Occasionally, he hits a bull's-eye: his essay on certain televangelists, written after the revelations about the Bakkers and before Swaggart's fall from grace, provides much information that is incriminating enough to push fence-sitting readers onto the greener side of skepticism. Other articles are valuable purely for historical reasons, such as his survey of perpetual motion machines. All too often, though, it feels like Gardner is shooting ducks in a very small barrel: easy targets, but bordering on the pathetic. One might argue that these articles are necessary because so many people believe in such garbage, but I can't imagine, for example, that his mocking summaries on the preposterous metaphysics expounded by Shirley MacLaine would convince anyone gullible enough to believe her in the first place. His chapters on the actress rarely offer direct refutation of her outlandish claims or point out their many contradictions.

The second deficiency is far more serious. Like many writers who collect their essays, Gardner has opted for reprinting the essays as they were written rather than rewriting them into a coherent and fluid whole. (His concession to the reader is to publish an afterword to each essay that reprints responses and updates information.) The problem with this unenterprising approach is twofold: since many of the essays were written on related or similar topics for disparate audiences, there is a lot of repetition, and the book bounces back and forth among subjects with no sense of direction. As a result, we read no less than four times, in nearly the same prose, about physicist John Taylor's testing of Uri Geller's "spoon-bending" trick, twice about Robert Browning's skepticism towards D. D. Home's seances, and so on. Likewise, instead of one chapter on Shirley MacLaine, we get two (three if you count the chapter on channeling), repeating much of the same information and placed in different parts of the book.

The final problem with the book is no fault of Gardner's: many of the essays are simply outdated--particularly those on borderline physics (such as superstring theory and the unsupported claims of Thomas Gold and Halton C. Arp, whose fifteen minutes are pretty much up). In fact, in 1996 Gardner published a sequel, "Weird Water and Fuzzy Logic," which I'm now eager to read.

Even though I've highlighted the negative aspects of this work, Gardner's analysis is trenchant and authoritative. Reading these essays made me realize that we need a "debunker's almanac"--an annual collection keeping up with the latest scams. In the meantime, I've ordered a subscription to "The Skeptical Inquirer."

As an adolescent, Fernandez-Armesto read the first volumes of Toynbee's "A Study of History" and "vowed never to return to them." Later in life, he "found that Toynbee's work is half full of wisdom," and "Civilizations" owes much to that half, admitting that his doctrine of "challenge and response"--the interrelationship between humans and their environment--is a "powerful and useful characterization" of how civilization can be measured. Inspired by this and other ideas, Fernandez-Armesto here defines and organizes civilizations by "their systematic refashioning of nature."

Spanning over ten millennia, proceeding from tundra societies to maritime empires, and incorporating histories both obscure and familiar, "Civilizations" is a cornucopia of minutiae and generalizations, and the breadth of Fernandez-Armesto's reading and knowledge is staggering. Since he covers hundreds of societies, many get only a page or two while others get more detailed treatment, and the encyclopedic aspect of this work can be both exhilarating and overwhelming. (Readers lacking a historical atlas will probably find the lack of maps quite frustrating.) The book works best when the author is making a point or telling a story, as when he takes the reader on a tour of the wonders of the classical (Greek) world, when he discusses both the inflated significance and the true accomplishments of Vasco da Gama, or when he focuses, in the book's final chapters, on the importance of maritime history (his specialization) during the last thousand years. "Civilizations" falters a bit, however, when Fernandez-Armesto sketches cultures with which he seems to have a passing knowledge (Songhay, New Guineau, the Mound Builders). In some of these sections, the prose reads like a series of observations transcribed or paraphrased from a sequence of those index cards favored by researchers. Still, some of those index cards are pretty darn interesting.

Fernandez-Armesto admits that this comparative study is "an experimental work," "rough-hewn," written "in something like a frenzy." Although I didn't think that its slapdash character was particularly wearisome, the book does contain some sloppy, imprecise statements that a second draft would have thrashed into submission. During his discussion of the Atlantic slave trade during the early modern period, for example, the author writes what he simply cannot mean: "It is not even clear what abolitionists found morally repugnant about slavery: they let other forms of exploitation, including coolie abuse, sweatshops, and convict labor succeed it." Putting aside the glib anachronisms in this sentence, the ambiguous "let" in this sentence demands clarification: abolitionists of the late 1700s and early 1800s were no more responsible for "coolie labor" or sweatshops than Einstein could have been for "letting" Hiroshima and Chernobyl happen.

There are a number of carelessly worded and unsupported gaffes like this one, made in the "frenzy" of getting it all down, and the author doesn't always package his assortment of assertions and abundance of data into a cohesive whole. Fortunately these shortcomings don't overwhelm the merits of this sweeping, information-packed historical survey.

As much a mystery-style thriller as science-fiction novel, "Ubik" projects a future (1992, but no matter) in which telepathic citizens, or "psis," are hired to invade privacy and spy on businesses, while "inertials" are employed to neutralize these insidious forces. In this new world, technological advances maintain recently departed citizens in "half life," a temporary state of suspended animation, and commercial moratoriums provide access to loved ones until they eventually pass on to their next full life.

Glen Runciter is co-owner, with his half-dead (or half-alive) wife, of the leading anti-psi firm. He and his assistant, Joe Chip, find themselves challenged by new, even more sinister forces they don't quite understand. Some of the members of their firm seem to have died in an act of sabotage, but which ones? Who's responsible? What is Ubik, the aerosol spray that claims to do everything (when used as directed)? And why is time regressing to 1939? Every clue seems to be a red herring, and the "truth" isn't revealed until the very end--or is it?

As others have noted, Dick's writing is characteristically featureless (a minimalist, almost pulp-fiction style), but the intricacies of the page-turning plot more than compensate for the pedestrianism. Published in 1969, "Ubik" still entertains while it scrutinizes (and lampoons) both crass commercialism and metaphysics. On the one hand, the omnipresence of advertising and pay-per-use dispensers is dead-on satire in a century where we've become seemingly immune to paying a couple of bucks for a bottle of water with a fancy label on it. (Perpetually in debt, Joe Chip has to pay every time he opens his refrigerator, uses the shower, and enters--or leaves--his apartment, which leads to some pretty hilarious dilemmas.) On the other hand, how seriously you take the "philosophy" presented in this book might depend on your beliefs in the afterlife and/or reincarnation (not for nothing does Dick refer twice to the "Tibetan Book of the Dead"). But even if such metaphysical concepts aren't your thing, you can still sit back and enjoy the ride.

A neglected comic masterpiece that deserves to be rediscovered, "Esther" features an inspired premise as its plot: a young, free-thinking socialite falls desperately in love with an Episcopal minister. The result is a free-for-all clash of intellects, a confrontation between faith and reason, and the inevitable battle of the sexes.

The marvels of Adams's novel are his remarkably nuanced and fully realized characters. Esther, the free-thinker, wants to share her lover's faith and "is trying to get it by reason"--but doesn't initially understand that a person "can never reason yourself into it." Mr. Hazard, the minister, is confident that he will "succeed in drawing her into the fold, because his lifelong faith, that all human energies belonged to the church, was on trial, and, if it broke down in a test so supreme as that of marriage, the blow would go far to prostrate him forever." Esther's principles of independence and self-education collide with Hazard's desire to steer her into submission as his wife and fellow believer.

But my favorite character is relegated to a supporting role: Catherine, a recent transplant from the frontiers of Colorado, befriends Esther and dazzles New York society with her innocence, naivete, and sincerity. It's never really quite clear, however, whether her simplicity is the genuine article or just a show mocking the pretensions of her admirers. As one of the intellectuals who lightheartedly teases her wonders, there was "a little doubt whether she was making fun of him or he of her, and she never left him in perfect security on this point."

The novel sparkles with banter and quarrels, jokes and ripostes, but any attempt to reproduce the humor in a short review would fall flat: Adams's witticisms are dependent upon context and character. Still, I caught myself laughing out loud often at the book's cleverness and hilarity.

Bodanis has written a fun-to-read and concise guide outlining the history and impact of the world's most famous equation. He opens with an inspired conceit: Cameron Diaz once said, quite seriously, that she wish she knew what the equation meant, and he wrote this book for the curious, intelligent reader who, like Diaz, has little or no background (or even interest) in science and wants to understand Einstein's discovery.

Any book about physics and math that has such an audience in mind risks--indeed, requires--oversimplification. The prose is often so folksy that those of us used to reading more scholarly material will find it a bit annoying, yet even these passages show that the author is truly enjoying his material and wants to convey that enjoyment to his readers. Similarly, nitpickers are sure to have a field day finding inaccuracies and omissions. For example, Bodanis states that an object swells, or gains mass, as its speed approaches the speed of light; in a very lengthy note he admits that this description is only metaphor (and a misleading one at that). Yet, if he had avoided this metaphor and included the more accurate description contained in the note, he certainly would have lost his audience. In this case, I think, Bodanis has made the right decision: a vague or incomplete understanding is certainly better than no understanding at all.

In spite of its intentional simplicity, the book relates a number of interesting biographical tidbits that were unfamiliar to me, particularly about Voltaire's lover, Emile du Chatelet, and the unjustly neglected Lise Meitner, who, by fleeing Nazi Germany, was ultimately robbed of a Nobel Prize. Bodanis makes science, with its back-stabbing egos and generous celebrities, come alive. In addition, unlike many other histories of science, Bodanis does not overlook the importance of religious beliefs in stimulating (and occasionally blinding) scientists, especially Faraday and Einstein.

This book also contains a much-needed and concise answer to Heisenberg's apologists. Make no mistake: Heisenberg was a brilliant scientist and he clearly realized later in life that he was on the wrong side, but it seems incontrovertible that he collaborated with the Nazis. The book to read, as Bodanis notes, is "Hitler's Uranium Club"; its transcripts of secret recordings of Heisenberg's own words belie his later claim that he was trying to thwart the Nazi attempt to create the bomb. Bodanis's appendix includes a sample of the overwhelming and irrefutable evidence against Heisenberg. (Heisenberg's sympathizers often praise "Copenhagen." This play, by Michael Frayn, describes a meeting between Heisenberg and Neil Bohrs that both men recalled years later in conflicting accounts, and it consists entirely of imagined dialogue. Although an indisputably brilliant dramatic work, "Copenhagen" is in essence a work of fiction, since nobody knows for sure what was said or even why the two men really met--as Frayn himself notes in his postscript to the published play. In addition, "Copenhagen" is based on Thomas Powers's biography of Heisenberg, which appeared before the publication of "Hitler's Uranium Club.")

These stories, details, and debates are just a small part of the wealth of information David Bodanis has managed to pack into a slim volume. The appendix, notes, and suggestions for further reading, which amounts to a full third of the book, are not to be missed: not only do they clarify many points covered cursorily in the text, but they are often quite amusing and will surely spur readers to investigate further a number of topics.

Ramchandra, a schoolteacher, seems to be happily married; his dream is to one day buy a house for his family. To earn extra income, he tutors students on the side, but he constantly and unsuccessfully struggles to make ends meet, and he falls in love with one of his students.

While this is certainly familiar literary terrain, Samrat Upadahyay's debut novel is distinctive for its Kathmandu setting, social milieu, and religious elements. Featuring prose that is emotionally reserved and stylistically brusque, the book excels at portraying a middle-class protagonist, including his guilt whenever he spends money on frivolous luxuries, his remorse when he cheats on his wife, and the drudgery of his workaday world.

The same can't be said for the rest of the characters, who sometimes border on cardboard cutouts. There are the nasty in-laws, who regard Ramchandra as an inferior match for their daughter. There is his mistress, Maliti, whose motives are shallow and whose passions seem capricious. And there is Ramchandra's wife, Goma, a compassionate, suffering saint who overcomes her initial anger over the affair and resorts to a surprising solution to accommodate her husband's mistress.

Although Goma is certainly likeable (what saint isn't?), the author presents absolutely nothing in Goma's character or background that would make this aspect of the story even remotely believable. Much of this subplot struck me as fanciful, because its representation resembled a midlife fantasy instead of a midlife crisis. True--married men everywhere have affairs and their wives accept them back, but how many wives are so bizarrely tolerant of their husband's transgressions?

The novel is also strewn with passages relating the social and political upheaval in Nepal. The purpose of these passages, while informative, is never really clear. Upadhyay might be contrasting everyday personal travails with political and social disorder ("My personal problems are my country's problems," Ramchandra says at one point), but the comparison seems superficial and the disconnectedness of these episodes is often jarring.

Nevertheless, the book is never boring, and the depictions of the Dashain festival and religious rituals are captivating. Much, much more happens in the novel, and in many ways it redeems itself in the final chapters.