Four books I've read recently:

A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All
Esquire editor takes it upon himself to read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica. Yeah, sure he does. If you can suspend your disbelief, you might enjoy this. If you can get past the factual errors, you might enjoy this. If you are a fan of reference-lite books like Imponderables, you might enjoy this. Me, I was mainly continuing in the hope of getting to the part where the author either gives up the project, arrives at a life-changing epiphany or admits that he's been skimming for comedic material all along. It didn't come. (Here's a Radosh review of a (scathing) Joe Queenan review.)

David Simon, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets
This is some of the best crime writing I've ever read. It was source material for the Homicide: Life on the Street television show. Simon's book is excellent. Rather than being strictly procedural or strictly personality-driven, it offers elements of both. And Simon's Baltimore is a city whose decline is as thorough as that of Tom Wolfe's South Bronx, or Kris Parker's. Drugs, racial tension, laziness, incompetence, frustration and desperation--it's got it all. The decay hits at a sense level, which makes for harrowing, thought-provoking reading.

David Simon and Edward Burns, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood
Simon flips the script, writing here about the residents of one particular (economically depressed, crack-ravaged) Baltimore neighborhood. Much like his other book, it's journalism that reads like a novel of social protest. Along with Richard Price, Simon is my latest crime-writing obsession. And speaking of Price: he wrote a script for the third season of Simon and Burns' 'The Wire' (George Pelecanos also works on it. And HBO made a miniseries of 'The Corner.' With Charles S. Dutton.)

Gina Mallet, Last Chance to Eat: The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World
Why must all books remotely concerned with food have recipes in them? Do people use them as cookbooks? Is this something that literary agents demand? Last Chance to Eat wants to be a memoir of foodie days gone by, and it wants to be a Schlosser-style expose of factory farming, xenophobic soft-cheese prohibitions and the relentless free-market decline of heirloom varieties. In Mallet's hands, these two goals aren't as divergent as they sound. I like food books best when they mix a little social criticism in with the memoir, and this is a good example of that.  ¶ 1:59 PM