Reiken's fictional Rubin family was vacationing in the late '70s, in Allenhurst, not far from poor, infested Manasquan, near where I grew up -- a tiny town of tiny houses squished so close together that if a surfboard leaning up against one house fell, it could smack into the wood siding of another. Like many Shore towns -- they're all distinct, and yet they're all "the Shore" -- Manasquan is a sweet village populated by blondes and home to lively bars named Leggett's, the Osprey, O'Neill's. There, bachelorettes can do tequila shots to "Thunder Road," "Living on a Prayer" and just about any song from the 1980s.

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Readers hungry for the mere mention of Osama's name, especially now, at a time when Sept. 11 remains fresh but the only glimpse of Osama is on "Saturday Night Live," will turn these few sentences over and over in their minds. During the Afghan-Soviet war, Carmen Bin Ladin writes: "He was admired. He was involved in a noble cause. Osama was a warrior -- a Saudi hero." After meeting him for the first time, she notes, almost unimpressed: "He was not strikingly different from the other brothers -- just younger, and more reserved." But then there's this: "When Osama stepped into the room, you felt it." It's one of many lines in "Inside the Kingdom" that leaves us desperate for more. What did she feel?

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The party is one of a handful of exuberant moments that Cain, Postlewait and Thomson have detailed in their book, "Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: A True Story From Hell on Earth." It's also one of the reasons a few conservative media outlets have portrayed the book as being what the title signaled it might be: an American bender of sex and drugs and irresponsibility in exotic places. "U.N. missions painted as booze-soaked orgies," the Washington Times' headline trumpeted. "UN beset by sex, drugs, book says," said Canada's National Post. "Sex & Drugs at U.N.," said the New York Post.

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In other words, it took 18 years for me to figure out that New Jersey had a special reputation. My college classmates from all over the country would stare at my prom pictures with drop-jawed fascination, as if they'd believed big hair, sequins and too-tanned skin were just the stuff of legend. Here was proof, right in their own dorm, in 1995, that Jersey still yielded these curiously decorated creatures and their wife-beater-wearing counterparts -- women who swore like truck drivers, fathers who kept guns in bedside tables, cousins who lived in trailer parks, friends who were in the mob. To them, New Jersey was some white-trash fantasia, quite like what you find in Mira Nair's "Hysterical Blindness," the most terrifying depiction of Jersey life and fashions yet. It was a Los Angeles-born friend who said she'd hated New Jersey ever since she learned that the '80s show "Dance Party USA" was filmed there.

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Carol Burke, author of the new book "Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane, and the High and Tight: Gender, Folklore and Changing Military Culture," wasn't at all surprised to learn that soldiers ritualistically tortured Iraqi prisoners and documented their deeds. Her research, done long before the Abu Ghraib news broke, shows that these types of practices are widespread in military cultures around the globe. Initiation rites often involve elaborate, carnivalesque ceremonies, which can include dressing up, physical pain, and personal and sexual humiliation. And the soldiers nearly always leave behind a trail of photographs and videotapes.

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Alexandra Robbins, author of "Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities," can't express the same enthusiasm for most real-life sororities. While Robbins insists the book isn't "anti-sorority," after practically living with sisters for an academic year, she told Salon she wouldn't want "a future daughter" to join one of these groups.

Robbins doesn't rail against sororities in this undercover account of the lives of four sorority sisters at an unnamed (and well-disguised) university. In fact, when she easily might have ridiculed or chastised the girls for their childish, catty or dangerous behavior, Robbins bites her tongue. Still, most people will come away from "Pledged" feeling the same way Robbins does: Who would want their daughter to be constantly reminded she has to be skinny, rich and man-crazy? Without even going into the hazing stories, sororities seem like any mother's worst nightmare.

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Laura Flanders, public radio personality and author of "Real Majority, Media Minority," takes a look at the backgrounds and policies of such women as Condoleezza Rice, Elaine Chao and Christine Todd Whitman in her new book, "Bushwomen: Tales of a Cynical Species." This informative and entertaining investigation serves up the types of profiles Flanders believes the mainstream media has failed to provide; Laura Bush, Lynne Cheney, Karen Hughes, Ann Veneman, Gale Ann Norton and Katherine Harris also come under scrutiny, from their childhoods to their business backgrounds to the way they've cast a feminist gloss on two brutal wars. Does the Bush administration use its ambitious and successful women to put a kinder face on its cruel policies? Flanders thinks so. Women voters are a crucial group in the upcoming presidential election; will they be convinced to vote for Bush by his cadre of likable, smooth-talking female aides and Cabinet members?

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But as Coll dramatically draws out, two years later, by the summer of 2001, the Manson family enjoyed many more sympathizers within the CIA Counterterrorist Center. By then, "they worked long hours, exchanging Arabic translations across the office partitions, frequently 'with a panic-stricken look' in their eyes." One officer in "Ghost Wars" remembers them telling one another, "We're going to miss stuff. We are missing stuff. We can't keep up."

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Curious readers won't be disappointed: In "The Great Big Book of Tomorrow" we even get a picture of the author's real dog. More importantly, the book is a cohesive, play-by-play of the last two decades' most consuming controversies broken down and shaken up, typically, into four or six cartoon panels, often featuring those familiar 1950s-retro caricatures. What also distinguishes "This Modern World" from many other cartoons is that they tend to be text-heavy; as "Tom Tomorrow" explained to Salon in a recent interview, he's happy to take on and dissect the finer points of healthcare plans and trade agreements, not to mention the Bush administration's increasingly confusing motives for attacking Iraq.

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"Nina: Adolescence" opens with the drowning of 4-year-old Jonas in the Begleys' backyard pond. Nina, 11, is watching him while their mother, Marian, a talented artist, runs inside to get the phone. Nina bends down to pick up a pretty piece of glass in the water. "She held it up to her eye to see if it changed the way the world looked," Hassinger writes. "She saw a quiet pond, tinged green, blurred by the thick glass. She did not see Jonas." There is nothing melodramatic about Jonas' death; he drowns and dies quickly, Marian tries to administer CPR, an ambulance takes him away, leaving Nina alone -- a prospect she will continue to face in the years to come.

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Yet "The Zanzibar Chest," even at its most harrowing in Hartley's riveting chapters about the U.N.'s failed intervention in Somalia and the Rwandan genocide, is thrillingly charged with an undercurrent of passion. That love for Africa is in Hartley's blood; he's British, but his family has lived there for four generations. What separated Hartley and many of his Reuters colleagues from the war correspondents was that they were writing about their homes. Such intimacy lends his first book a sense that, in each disaster, the stakes were personal and therefore much, much higher.

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As the 34-year-old Gorlin explained, while this may seem like peculiar counsel from a man of God, the idea of relieving carnal desires is rooted in an obscure line from the Talmud. (Writer Nathan Englander also borrowed the line for his 1999 story collection, "For the Relief of Unbearable Urges.") The contemporary story in "The Holy Land" also has roots in the biblical parable of the prodigal son: Mendy, protected and beloved in an Orthodox religious community, seeks out danger and excitement in the secular world, only to find some of his most cherished dreams destroyed by the realities of post-Oslo Israel.

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We're off with brave Lucinda to Prairie City, Neb., where Botox and $20 power yoga classes may exist, but have not yet become self-mocking clichés. (Personally, I hope to never write the words "Botox," "East Village," "single" and "apartment" ever again.) If we've become collectively, deliciously drunk on "Sex and the City," then Daum's novel feels like the first steady hour in the afternoon, after we shake off our hangover.

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For the young people who graduated from college and high school in the booming 1990s, the future seemed endless. A new economy was taking shape, jobs were plentiful, and terrorism was something that happened far, far away.

Now all that has changed.

As the unemployment rate hovers around 6 percent, the same people who were so employable just a few years ago are now scrambling to make ends meet.

If Sept. 11 jolted young people to the altar, as various articles suggested, then this recession, the worst since World War II, might be pulling lovers apart, or at the very least, delaying their nuptials. Instead of planning their weddings, many young couples are sitting around the kitchen table and, for the first time, fretting over how to pay the bills.

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Until the tempestuous family at the center of this drama gather together for dinner for the first time in years. That blowout, and director Baltasar Kormákur's magnificent portrayal of the family's disintegration, almost matches the fishing-plant pyre in its violence and despair.

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And so are his parents. After all, at some point between hanging a mobile above Kevin's crib and shepherding him to school dances, something went horribly wrong.

What went wrong is what Eva, Kevin's mother, tries to figure out in a series of letters to her "estranged" husband Franklin, a year or so after their son unleashed his not-so-secret rage on their quaint, affluent New York suburb (Kevin is very upset when Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris steal his spotlight a few weeks later). The Khatchadourians (there's a younger daughter named Celia, too) are wealthy and white; Kevin grows up never wanting for anything. But while Shriver attacks the phenomenon with unflagging gusto (she heavily researched the real-life school murders of the late 1990s), she isn't preoccupied with figuring out what motivates these young men, nor does she ruminate on how a vapid American society creates adolescent monsters.

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