This seems like a pretty good idea for a book: adventures of a twenty-something in three Communist capitals. Throw in the kicky title and a punchy attitude and it can't lose.

I enjoyed Griest's stories. Her writing style is light. I can understand the criticisms of one earlier reviewer here who thought Griest was too superficial and didn't learn anything. I'm not sure that's really the case, but Griest does keep her narrative in the moment, without spending too much time analyzing what it all meant. This makes for a smoother telling of the story.

Griest spends the most time in Moscow and knew years ahead of time that she would go to Russia someday. This section was not surprisingly the best part of the book. The part about Beijing was okay, in which Griest works for an English-language Chinese newspaper. She never fits in and is constantly reminded of the fact. Her journey to Havana is a spur-of-the-moment trip, and it is more fun than Beijing. She doesn't have to worry about upsetting the boss or embarrassing her friends. Even though she's there for only a short time, she falls in love. She also falls in love in Russia, but only after she has been there quite awhile. And she never gets close to having a serious relationship in Beijing.

Around the Bloc is a good first book. It isn't as good as Almost French by Sarah Turnbull, another book about a journalist who finds adventures halfway around the world. Although it's more revealing, somehow it isn't as personal. But I suspect that Griest will only get better and I look forward to more from her.

This collection of human interest stories from the New York Times follows several volumes of the Wall Street Journal's Middle of the Page column and The New York Times's own collections of science articles. No matter how religiously you read the newspaper, you will have missed or forgotten most of these stories. In fact, most of the stories are forgettable. But some of them will stick with you.

I enjoyed reading about a man who had lived in a terminal at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris for over ten years. So that's where Spielberg got his idea for the movie! There is a story about twin girls who didn't know the other existed until they were sixteen and finally found each other. Shades of Parent Trap.

Some of the stories are a little too heartwarming to be believable, but who's to say? The first story of a man who helps a homeless New Yorker find his mother and get a second chance at life becomes too much when there is a follow-up story after a year that finds the formerly homeless man living with his mother and playing piano at church every day. I'd rather be homeless.

If you love stories about child prodigies and lost pets who find their way back home, or if you are a film director looking for your next big project, Tales from the Times may be just the ticket.

Larry Ferstenou got my attention right away by mentioning two books that everyone who wants to retire early should read: Paul Terhorst's Cashing in on the American Dream and Joe Dominguez's Your Money or Your Life. He also talks about a few dozen other books that can help in your goal of early retirement, but those two are must-reads.

Ferstenou has written a good how-to book on retiring early, but if you are the sort of person who has figured out that you want to quit the rat race and live life at your own speed, you probably don't need a book. You have probably already crunched the numbers and figured out what you have to do. What this kind of book does is let you know that there are others out there who have done it already. It's kind of a pep talk to let you know that it's possible and that there are several ways to get there. And you probably don't need as much money as you think.

As a pep talk, You Can Retire Young! is excellent. Ferstenou has included plenty of nuts and bolts advice to reassure you that you are on the right path and also has an upbeat attitude that makes it easy reading. He gives resources, such as books and web sites, and cites examples from his own experience. By the time you are finished, you feel confident that you can do it, too.

In my opinion, you can get all the information you need to retire early from the Terhorst and Dominguez books, along with Elaine St. James's Simple Living and Amy Daczyczn's Tightwad Gazette. But you may need an extra dose of motivation now and then along the way, and You Can Retire Early! is one of the better books on the subject.

I wish I had ignored the professional reviews of this movie. Instead, I believed the lukewarm reviews and waited until it came out on DVD and was no longer playing on the big screen. Love, Actually would have been a great movie to see at the theater. The beautiful scenes of London at Christmastime reminded me of the way Manhattan looks in Woody Allen movies. It never looks that clean and beautiful in real life, but just as you imagine someone you love a little more handsome than others might see him, so you remember a city that you love to visit.

There was one advantage to seeing Love, Actually on DVD instead of in the theater. The special features include scenes that weren't used in the movie. Most of the scenes were better off on the cutting room floor, but the director should have made room for one scene that was cut. The scene is of Emma Thompson's character being called to see her son's "scary headmistress" concerning his behavior. It seems he wrote an essay for class that was not in the spirit of Christmas. It was, however, very funny, and Emma Thompson took her son's side against the humorless authorities. The scene was not only funny, but it was in keeping with the theme of finding love all around. Before the incident, Thompson had loved her son as a mother would, but she didn't really like him. In the cut scene, they bonded at last.

After having read and enjoyed Steinbach's previous book, Without Reservations, I was eager to see what she has been up to in the past few years and if she and Naohiro are still an item. In Without Reservations, Steinbach tells the story of how she took almost a year off from her job, bought an apartment in Paris and fell in love. It is a story of risk and reward. It really happened, but Steinbach tells it like a story.

In Educating Alice, Steinbach has quit her newspaper job for good. The royalties from Without Reservations must be rolling in, because now she can afford to take classes at the Ritz cooking school in Paris, geisha school in Kyoto, and a tour of lovely gardens in Avignon. Not much risk here. There is no apparent relationship among the classes, other than that Steinbach is interested in the subjects.

The only thread that runs through the entire book besides Steinbach herself, is Naohiro, her lover from Without Reservations. But the relationship is established and both Alice and Naohiro seem content to leave it as it is. So there is no conflict or drama. If I hadn't known Naohiro from the previous book, I'm not sure I would have been interested in their romance, which is conducted in Educating Alice mostly through letters.

I did enjoy reading about Steinbach's adventures at the Ritz, the first and best chapter of Educating Alice. Her view of the Upstairs, Downstairs nature of the grand hotel and her descriptions of her classmates and the chef are entertaining. Her discovery of the Oltrarno section of Florence is pleasant, and the adventures she has in Havana are the liveliest of the bunch.

Steinbach says of the Prague creative writing workshop she attends in one chapter, that "I thought the use of fiction techniques might improve my work as a nonfiction writer." While the individual chapters of Educating Alice are told as short stories, it would have been rewarding if the chapters had been parts of a larger story, as well. She didn't need the writing workshop at all. She showed in Without Reservations that she has already mastered that technique.

I ran across the first two Walter books while I was at the mall waiting for my husband to finish looking at every single DVD in stock (there must have been thousands.) So I had plenty of time to read both books. I loved them!

I rarely have occasion to look at childrens' books, so I was a bit surprised at the title. It's a far cry from Wishbone and Clifford the Big Red Dog. But this is a very funny book. Yes, it's lowbrow and coarse. So are the Three Stooges and most children. And behind their sophisticated, mature exteriors, so are most adults. So relax and enjoy this well-written (by William Kotzwinkle, author of E.T.) story of a stray dog whose family loves him even with his one major flaw. Find out how Walter triumphs despite being sold at the family yard sale to an evil clown who uses Walter to inflate putrid balloons to use as weapons during a bank robbery.

And for those over-educated lowbrows among you, check out the Latin translation (really!), Walter, Canus Inflatus.

It's apparent that David Sedaris fans are very loyal and will not want to hear anything that sounds like criticism of their favorite writer. So let me say up front that I have been an enthusiastic fan since I first heard an abridged reading of SantaLand Diaries on NPR several years ago. I loved the unabridged and somewhat edgier version even more. I have enjoyed every one of his essay collections. His delivery, written and spoken, is unique. He is among the finest essayists writing today.

On the other hand, I am no Sedarista. While some of his pieces are funny or touching or thoughtful or odd, others are a bit creepy. I first read The Girl Next Door in The New Yorker and it was disturbing, not only because of the strange family he describes, but because of his own behavior. It was no less disturbing a second time around.

All but one of the essays in this collection have appeared before, in magazines or on radio. The single essay that seems to be newly published here is Chicken in the Henhouse, funny in places, but it left me uneasy in the same way that The Girl Next Door did.

These essays have Sedaris's family as their theme. Apparently the family member who is most comfortable in his own skin is his younger brother, Paul, a Southern redneck who surrounds himself with clutter and dogs. Sedaris never mentions that his sister Amy is also a writer. There are funny lines and conversations, but I wouldn't categorize this as a humor collection. His previous collections have included mainstream funny essays with more serious and unsettling pieces. This collection contains nothing like SantaLand Diaries or Me Talk Pretty One Day and Jesus Shaves, the fabulous essays about the trials of learning French, and trying to explain, with limited vocabulary, why an egg-laying bunny is the symbol of Easter in America. The pieces in Dress Your Family are a little too honest and revealing to be comfortably funny.

But I read every word. Sedaris's writing is clean and spare. He doesn't waste any words. These essays, as effortless as they read, must have required merciless editing on Sedaris's part to remove every unnecessary word, and to make every phrase just the right one.

Which is why I am still puzzling over the title. There is no essay called Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, nor is there any reference to corduroy or denim. Perhaps it has to do with the French origin of the words? Maybe the reason is so obvious that when someone tells me what it means, I'll smack my forehead and feel like a dope. But meanwhile, I'm stumped.

Author Carol Burke is not afraid to jump into a controversial topic and throw everything she has at it. Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane, and the High-and-Tight starts out by quoting the woman-hating and profane marching songs of some basic training units. She describes the perverted and disgusting hazing that first-year service academy students are subjected to. She explains how a Navy admiral who didn't fit the mold was ridiculed, criticized, and threatened until he finally committed suicide. This is not the military that the Pentagon wants us to see.

Burke's observations and conclusions, however, are not to be dismissed. The military is a macho culture and in an all-volunteer force, those who join are either compelled to by economics (lack of training and opportunity for better jobs) or are attracted by what seems to be the last bastion of the ultra masculine he-man, no-girls-allowed crowd. Burke investigates why this should be and how it is neither good for the military mission nor sustainable.

Burke's style is readable and entertaining. She takes the lid off the military's dirty little secrets and proceeds to shock and awe. Much more disturbing than the overt misogyny of the marching songs Burke cites, are the numerous lyrics that mention napalming and killing children. This sounds like a disfunctional organization rather than a training ground for tomorrow's heroes.

Camp All-American is well-researched and there is an excellent bibliography. A single exception may have been the story she tells of the bedtime ritual at the Naval Academy, in which plebes say goodnight to their superiors and then to Jane Fonda, followed by a profanity. The only source for this story is an anonymous academy faculty member.

As I was reading the book, which was published in early 2004, I wondered how Burke would explain Abu Ghraib in the context of her military and prison studies. As luck would have it, the online magazine Salon did an interview with her recently and addresses that very subject. The Lord of the Flies mentality did not surprise Burke, nor did the fact that everything was meticulously photographed. She mentioned, as she does in the book, that as society changes and technology advances, the military will find that gender is no longer an issue. Torture, on the other hand, probably will be.

You might get the idea that this is a book of fun facts about the face and so it is. But it is also a look at philosophy and psychology and human behavior and art and culture, using the face and its individual parts as jumping-off points.

For instance, we learn that the purpose of the eyebrow is to keep sweat out of the eye. But author Daniel McNeill goes on to observe that in different cultures and at different times, it has been fashionable for women and men to pluck out the eyebrows. And the main purpose of the eyebrow is communication. With it, we can indicate a wide range of expressions. McNeill uses Groucho Marx, John Belushi, Uriah Heep, and Charles Darwin to makes his points about eyebrows.

McNeill proceeds to deconstruct the eyelashes, and nearly every other bit of the face in much the same way, using French poetry, Elizabethan drama, 20th century popular culture, and smatterings of natural science to illuminate his descriptions. We learn that flight attendants routinely convince themselves that they like the difficult passenger so that they can deal with him more effectively. What does that have to do with the face? The flight attendants know that it is almost impossible to fake a convincing smile so they can only be effective if they believe they truly like the truculent boor in seat 14D. It's the same sort of logic that makes a successful telephone worker smile even though the listener can't see the smile. You sound different when you smile. Happier.

There are tidbits like this throughout The Face. If you find a discussion about Greek philosophers heavy going, hang on, McNeill will have moved on to Dracula or Mark Twain in a few paragraphs.

The Face was so enjoyable and informative, that I am quite puzzled to find that McNeill hasn't written any more non-fiction since this 1998 book.

After reading how controversial Opening Skinner's Box is, I had to read the book myself. Some of the people interviewed in the book are claiming to have been incorrectly quoted, and some psychologists take issue with Slater's scholarship and conclusions. Having been warned not to take the facts too seriously, I thought it would still be intriguing to consider the deeper questions posed by the scientists who performed the experiments described in the book.

And it was intriguing. Slater debunks the myth that B.F. Skinner raised his first child in a "box" in order to conduct an elaborate behavior experiment on her. The box turns out to have been a high-tech playpen designed and built by the doting father that Skinner apparently was. Another famous experiment which revealed that most people would torture another if encouraged by a benign authority figure was especially chilling in light of the Abu Ghraib torture by American guards.

However, I came away with the distinct impression that Slater is a nut. Slater seemed especially enthusiastic about recreating an experiment in which normal people pretended to be demented enough to enter a mental hospital, then reverted to normal behavior and waited to see how long it would be before they would be discharged. Slater checked into some eight different hospitals. She also took some of the anti-psychotic meds she was prescribed rather than tossing them.

She reveals that she was unable to recreate the experiment strictly, because under the original conditions, the pseudo-patients would be truthful after being admitted, but Slater actually had a mental hospital stay in her past, so she lied. And I simply didn't believe that bit about biting the ten-year-old chocolate bar in the Skinner House at first. As I read more of the book and learned more about Slater, it wasn't so unbelievable any more.

Anyway, Opening Skinner's Box is definitely an unusual book. It poses many thoughtful questions about the nature of humanness. It is well-written, but I can't vouch for how well-researched it is or how factual. It is extremely interesting and thought-provoking, and more than a little creepy.