At a time when America was still in thrall to Kurt Cobain’s dark angst and stroking its collectively goateed chin to such chipper tunes as Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” and Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun,” Ace of Base was living in its own happy nation. The Swedish family act’s sugary tracks offered neither pop-culture musings nor profound statements about a generation of disaffected youth — but they had a good beat, and you could dance all night to them.

A new greatest-hits album (creatively titled “Greatest Hits”) puts together a dozen tracks from the band’s first eight years. It’s a package that ought to have yielded one of the summer’s best party CDs: Ace of Base may lack musical heft, but the band has produced track after track of effervescent, enticing pop, overquoted comparisons to Abba notwithstanding. And the new compilation does start out with a promising foursome: “All That She Wants,” “The Sign,” the seductive, driving “Everytime It Rains” and the compellingly cheerful celebration of “Beautiful Life.”

But the album loses steam by its halfway point, trailing off with Motown ripoff “Always Have, Always Will” and ending with rather nondescript alternate mixes of two of the tracks. (The disc also offers two new songs — the forgettable “Life Is a Flower” and bubble gum “C’est la Vie (Always 21).”) In fact, the whole exercise seems both pointless and poorly executed. In what feels like a misguided attempt at impartiality, the album’s previously released tracks are divided more or less evenly between the three previous albums — bypassing the band’s reggae-grooved initial European release, “Wheel of Fortune,” and generally ignoring the disproportionate success of multiplatinum debut “The Sign,” which held the group’s best hooks and the most chart hits.

The liner notes, too, offer little more than Oscar speeches from each member. (Jonas: “I’d like to give big credits to my dear father Gvran, who’s in heaven now, for always supporting me … Thanks also to my girlfriend Birthe, my dear mother, band mates.”) It’s not that I really need liner notes to explicate lyrics like “It’s a beautiful life, oh oh oh, I just want to be here beside you” — but then again, I didn’t really need more pouting pics from the vinyl-clad popsters, either.

Over the past 14 years, the list has become one of the oldest and most respected tools used to measure company cultures and values. To make the list — especially at a time when companies have to offer major perks to compete for the best employees — is widely regarded as a badge of honor, one that companies like Bank of America, Prudential and IBM are happy to receive.

But if you ask journalist Elinor Burkett about this hallowed distinction, you’ll get a more disturbing assessment. She believes that these distinguished companies have set American women back half a century with discriminatory policies that violate the once-sacred feminist canon of equal pay for equal work.

In her book, “The Baby Boon: How Family-Friendly America Cheats the Childless,” Burkett argues that both the family-friendly platforms pushed by politicians across the spectrum and the family-friendly policies adopted by corporate America over the past decade are anti-feminist, regressive and tinged with racism. Such programs, she says, are little more than a politically correct way for affluent baby boomers to milk the system for cash and personal indulgences.

Government- and corporate-sponsored pro-family programs, says Burkett, shift the burden of parenthood off parents — most of whom, presumably, have chosen to have children — onto the shoulders of their childless friends, co-workers and peers.

When the Equal Pay Act was passed by Congress in 1963, it upended a business precept that had stood rigidly in place since women had entered the workforce: that men, because they were more likely to be supporting a household on their salaries, deserved to be paid more than women, who were probably single (why else would they be working?) and responsible only for their own expenses. The act’s passage promised women the “simplest and most basic foundation of economic justice,” writes Burkett.

Almost 40 years later, however, the pro-family programs endorsed by governments and employers now offer just the opposite: unequal pay for equal work. Employees with children get thousands of dollars a year in benefits — extra insurance and unpaid leave, scholarship aid and tax credits — that are denied to nonparents. Those of us who remain childless save untold sums for our employers, Burkett argues; yet these sums are not repaid in other benefits, like extra vacation time or greater 401K contributions.

Burkett also cites an array of less tangible inequalities. Childless employees, she says, are often asked to pitch in to finish a project when their co-workers have to leave early to pick up a sick child. Nonparents may be forced into less desirable shifts to allow parents to spend breakfast and dinner with their children, and asked to cover for parents on holidays. (For example, Burkett writes about a New York Times editor who managed to wreak havoc on the paper’s metro desk simply by handing July 4 weekend work assignments to the staffers who had not worked a holiday in two years — that is, to the newsroom’s mothers.)

While more traditional feminists laud the array of new programs and policies designed to make it easier for women to continue to work while raising children, Burkett sees a world in which women are still rewarded unequally for the choices they make — with the highest rewards going to the women who choose motherhood, the most traditional female role of all. The goal for which feminists labored in the second half of the century — the opportunity to have both a family and a career — was never supposed to be easy or to pay more, Burkett says; it was just supposed to be available.

Perhaps I am dense, but, to me, the “right” to choose both career and family means that no one can say: Look, if you want to work, you may not bear children. Or, if you want kids, you may not work. And, finally, thank goodness, women have gained that right. But having the right to opt for that choice doesn’t guarantee that it will be easy or stressless, or that you will be able to do both at once without keeling over in collapse … Rights are guarantees of opportunities, not outcomes.

Burkett doesn’t appear to be anti-child. Her quarrel lies more with the middle-class boomer women who she says expect society to fund their reproduction efforts, than with poor or working-class parents in greater need of financial support. In fact, Burkett makes the case that government and corporate policies divert benefits from the children who need the most assistance.

Admittedly, Burkett’s argument has some serious flaws. She tears into the multiple tax breaks given to parents, but never manages to break down the costs incurred by raising children, presumably the expenses that these tax breaks are intended to offset. And her sympathy for those who would create adults-only neighborhoods and restaurant dining rooms smacks of intolerance: Pro-family programs may indeed be what she refers to distastefully as “affirmative action for women,” but child-free spaces constitute active discrimination.

An even greater liability, perhaps, is Burkett’s blithe, brief dismissal of any claim that caring for children is a community responsibility. On one hand, she says she is open to a discussion on the social value of raising the next generation:

I accept the proposition that discrimination can be justified in the face of a compelling social interest … I’m prepared to entertain arguments about why there is a compelling need for us to transfer the wealth and energies of nonparents to those raising kids. But I still haven’t heard them framed in any terms that justify giving upper-middle-class parents tax credits and child-care deductions, leave from work to watch Susi dance Swan Lake, or flex-time to check on the nanny.

But Burkett herself fails to initiate that discussion: She produces no zero-population-growth arguments, makes no call for a declining birthrate.

There is, however, a lot about “Baby Boon” that rings true. Burkett is an experienced reporter and a compelling writer, and she has done her homework. She makes her case persuasively and unrelentingly — not just on behalf of the childless, but also for the families living in poverty for whom programs like HOPE scholarships are sadly irrelevant.

Burkett provides statistic after statistic to suggest that America is ready for a backlash against parenthood: the one in four women born between 1956 and 1973 who will never give birth; the 19 percent of married couples who have chosen not to have a child — a figure that has doubled in the past decade, she notes.

She tracks the politicization of “family values,” and maps the bipartisan machinations that led to the Family Medical Leave Act (the creation of which united liberals eager to support women in the workforce with conservatives hoping to keep moms at their children’s sides). She questions the sense of entitlement that middle-class parents seem to have developed; and she asks uncomfortable questions about whether unpaid-leave policies, tax credits and tuition deductions — which primarily benefit more affluent families — are merely intended to pay white, educated Americans to reproduce.

And she lays down a call for change: She suggests that if we are seriously concerned about the status of underprivileged children, we should shift “pro-family” aid to benefit the low-income populations that need it most. She calls for “a national conversation about what claim middle-class and upper-middle-class parents have on the childless.”

Burkett’s is a conversation that many people may not be willing to continue. She makes some very good points, and in many cases I agree with her. But that doesn’t mean I will be chatting up her case at cocktail parties anytime soon. Just try bringing up these ideas around parents — you’re likely to get some cold stares and uncomfortable pauses, as well as some good old-fashioned, in-your-face hostility. Appearing anti-child became a cardinal sin during what Burkett calls the “procreation-obsessed ’90s,” and I’ve got plenty of parental friends whom I’d prefer not to alienate over a public-policy debate.

Burkett’s willingness to speak up in public, at the of risk being called a child-hating shrew, may be her book’s most revolutionary tenet. But her expectation that her ideas may be translated into a revolution in policy is unlikely to be realized — not only because of the multitudes who disagree with her, but also because of people like me: the observers for whom the political has not yet become personal, who agree in private but stay mute to keep the peace.

“Seeing Through Places” attempts to trace lines such as these between past
and present, between the physical geography of her youth and her adult
emotional maps. And many of the essays do offer evocative slices of an
era gone by and raise valid questions about our complex relationships to
the physical world around us. Gordon reflects interestingly, for example,
on her failure to conjure a mental image of her childhood church:

Why is it that I have much clearer memories of Immaculate
Conception Church and of Father L.’s office than I have of our parish
church? I know that it was torn down some time before my father’s death,
that is, before I was seven, but I have memories only of some objects that
adorned it — ironwork, holy water fonts, bowls screwed to the wall with a
cross their only ornament — and the poor box, with its slot and iron
lettering FOR THE POOR … There should be a catalogue of forgetting,
simply a list of names which carry with them no images.

But the volume’s underlying premise — that places as much as people shape
our lives — is a hard sell. Was it the rigid lines of Gordon’s grandmother’s
house that created a young writer who allowed herself to be browbeaten by
an interview subject — or was it the series of fierce authority figures
who had populated her early life? Exactly what effect did the city of
Rome have on the fearful young woman, and what landscape or
architecture was it that changed her into the confident, disciplined adult
who sits down at dawn each morning to sip coffee and write in her Cape Cod
vacation house? Part of the problem is that while Gordon’s adolescence
is vividly drawn, her adulthood seems less clearly outlined; consequently,
it remains a bit of a mystery how the environment of her youth created the
adult we only glimpse.

Still, if Gordon fails to answer all her own questions, she does at least
inspire you to ask similar ones — as I read, I found myself mentally
pacing the hallway of my own childhood home, trying to draw the lines of
my own history. And in fact, Gordon seems to recognize her own failure to
clearly tie these landscapes to her own emotional geographies. After
filling her map with monasteries, cloisters and cathedrals, she ends the
book with what sounds like a confession: “How can I say anything,” she
writes, “except, ‘Now I am here.’”

Gregory Maguire’s new book retells Cinderella’s story from the perspective of one of the stepsisters, in much the same way his first novel, “Wicked,” reworked “The Wizard of Oz” to give the witch’s point of view. In “Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister,” Cinderella is a manipulative, self-pitying child who hates her new family, fears the outside world and holes up at home until a visiting French prince’s search for a bride offers a chance at escape.

Clever but painfully plain Iris — ostensibly the stepsister in question — arrives in 17th century Haarlem during Holland’s tulip mania, with her stolid, mute sister, Ruth, and their mother, Margarethe, after their father’s murder sends them fleeing from their English home. The starving threesome eventually take refuge in the home of tulip importer Cornelius van den Meer; Margarethe is to work there as housekeeper while Iris serves as companion to van den Meer’s lovely young daughter, Clara.

Clara, however, turns out to be petulant, ill-mannered and spoiled rotten, as well as too timid to leave her house. After van den Meer’s wife dies and he marries Margarethe, Clara creates a refuge for herself in the kitchen, taking on more of the household
chores. When Iris gets a chance to apprentice herself to a local artist, Clara urges her stepsister to let her take control of the girls’ shared duties:

“I don’t care if you’re happy or not, not really. But if
you’re gone from the house, I’m the more secure in my kitchen. The more
needed, the more private. Call me Cinderling,” says Clara, standing
straighter behind her mask of ashes. “Call me Ashgirl, Cinderella, I don’t
care. I am safe in the kitchen.”

Maguire’s more complicated version of the fairy tale takes its time in
telling; by the time readers get to the climactic grand ball, they’ve gone
through a surplus of set-ups and foreshadowings, metaphorical gestures and
red herrings. To drive home his politically correct reversal of the Grimms’ preference
for earthly beauty, Maguire weighs down the text with ponderous symbolic
flourishes: a town caught up in pursuit of the fragile but lovely
tulips that plummets into bankruptcy; a painter whose studio, filled with
radiant religious works, distracts visitors from a back room stocked with
portraits of demons and imps; and a convoluted, curious tale of kidnapping and physical
transformation.

Maguires own transformative work is less successful, however. Unlike the heroine
in “Wicked” who emerged as a far more complex and likable character than
in L. Frank Baum’s original, the figures in “Stepsister” seem simply to be
different stereotypes: the outshined, smart but plain heroine; the
bitter old woman clinging dearly to survival. (And, oddly, Maguire’s rewrite only goes so far: Cinderella herself still gets a version of happily ever after.)

J.K. Rowling’s wildly successful “Harry Potter” books prove that fairy
tales can provide fine literary fodder. But Rowling surprises us with her
complex personalities and fanciful story lines; Maguire’s latest, on the
other hand, offers only stock characters and heavy-handed
devices. In the end, “Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister” is just a bit short on magic.

Prine collaborates here with alt-country artists like Iris DeMent and Lucinda Williams, as well as hitmakers like Trisha Yearwood and Patty Loveless. All these pairings ought to work: Prine is a consummate professional, and he’s picked some of the best voices around. But not all the vocal marriages are equal partnerships. Harris’ clear, soft tones, for instance, are capable of smoothing out Prine’s voice, scratchy as old vinyl. But Patty Loveless’ rich alto — capable of belting out hits like “Trouble With the Truth” — is withheld and wasted on “Back Street Affair,” while Irish crooner Dolores Keane, who joins Prine for two tracks, sounds too creamy and cultured to pull off lines like “In a smoky bar/In the back seat of your car.”

Among the disc’s highlights are the four duets with DeMent, whose sessions with Prine kicked off the “In Spite of Ourselves” project three years ago. These include the quirky title track, Prine’s only original song on the album, and the tender “We Could,” which is quite possibly the happiest song DeMent has ever sung. The album’s strongest piece is a clever medley with Lucinda Williams that joins “Wedding Bells” — an ex-husband’s lament about his wife’s remarriage — with “Darling, Let’s Turn Back the Years,” a onetime lover’s woebegone wish to right past wrongs. “Down the aisle with someone else you’re walking,” Prine sings, to which Lucinda Williams replies, “Let’s pretend that time has stopped/And I didn’t go away.” The verses could be the blissful conclusion to a long love story, but the two singers turn the song into a delusional tease. In the end, Prine is left alone repeating, “Those wedding bells will never ring for me.”

Prine ends the album the same way. Despite the passionate declarations of the penultimate “In Spite of Ourselves,” there’s just a chorus of men to back him up on the final track, an old Tex Ritter song. “Dear John,” they sing mockingly on the refrain, “I sent your saddle home.”