A Flower-Power Childhood and Serial Daddys. Joelle Fraser's confident first book is an autobiographical effort to take stock of growing up with divorced parents, each who had a string of new partners. By Janet Maslin. [New York Times: Arts]

How Companies Lie: Why Enron is just the tip of the iceberg, by Richard Schroth and A. Larry Elliott. New York: Crown Business. 2002.

Corporate strategists A. Larry Elliott and Richard Schroth discuss their new book, How Companies Lie: Why Enron is Just the Tip of the Iceberg. The book explains the accounting practices that enable companies to mislead investors and shows investors what to watch for in evaluating companies. The authors illustrate their points by using the examples of Enron, Sunbeam, Global Crossing, Waste Management, and other companies. The book proposes new legislation to create a federal insurance fund to reimburse investors who lose money as a result of a company's stock manipulation and advocates an audit tax, which would fund the transfer of corporate auditing to a neutral, SEC-administered process.

[Book TV]

This summer I have been reading Sprezzatura: 50 Ways Italian Genius Shaped the World, by Peter d'Epiro and Mary Desmond Pinkowish (2001. New York: Anchor. ISBN 0-385-72019-X).

Although—coincidentally—I run a website called Sprezzatura.net, I had been reluctant to pick up this book: I had feared it might be one of those smarmy publicity jobs, a chavinistic and uncritical recycling of received ideas about Italy and Italians.

In fact, the book is an accurate, well-researched, and unsentimental conspectus. I know most of the stories in the book, but in each chapter I learned something new (in several cases things which contradicted my own received ideas) about Italy and about Western culture in general.

Each of the fifty chapters is an essay which can stand alone. Among other things, this means that it is a good book to carry and read while waiting. It has superb notes, with suggested reading for each topic, including CDs and WWW sites.