Bob Armstrong doesn't exactly scream "pimp." A mid-50s white male with a penchant for cynical diatribes who works his days as a freelance writer, Armstrong spends his nights (and mornings) shuttling Havana, Shannon, Bianca and other assorted Zen Dolls around San Francisco for $500 an hour. He's old, he's white and he's a damn far cry from Robert Beck, aka Iceberg Slim, a 24-year pimping veteran turned writer from Chicago whose name is played on in Armstrong's book Vanilla Slim: An Improbable Pimp in the Empire of Lust.

To augment his lackluster career as a journalist reviewing porn videos for Exotic magazine under the moniker Flagstone Walker and writing a semi-regular column for the San Francisco Chronicle, Armstrong moves into the escort business. While there is certainly no detail lacking as Armstrong relates his yearlong foray into the sex trade between gratuitous lines of speed and a multitude of cigarettes, sometimes his love affair with his own intelligence gets in the way of the narrative. Armstrong wants you to know that he's educated. He reads The New Republic; he name-drops politicians, artists and philosophers to the mostly disinterested Zen Dolls as he drives them around; he makes porno films in the name of high art. One can almost see him letting out a self-satisfied chuckle after besting one of his escorts in a mental game of Othello.

Slim is insightful and fresh at times, but tedious at others. Still, Armstrong's pitch for respect after a career of writing from the gutter is an overall success.

Bad things happen to Linda Risi Harrison Rodriguez Menely Barraud. Her mother is by turns angry and aloof; her father touches her inappropriately. They never let her forget that she's adopted, but they won't talk about the circumstances of her birth. She gets transferred from one San Francisco convent school to another, and most of the nuns hate her for no reason. She has sex for the first time and doesn't know she's been knocked up until she awakens in the hospital with with half her reproductive system removed after an ectopic pregnancy. The second time she has sex, she conceives Courtney Love with a rageaholic who plans to solve all their money problems by turning the house into a center for people on bad acid trips.

By 30, she's been married three times and has five kids, including a boy she didn't mean to adopt, and has moved the brood to New Zealand. Her oldest daughter goes off to live with ex-stepfathers, in group homes and at friends' houses. One son dies and neighbors take the adopted one, so she moves the rest of the family to Oregon and has two more sons. After years of therapy, she takes her dead best friend's last name and goes into practice as a therapist.

The Courtney Love in Her Mother's Daughter seems more like an abstraction than a person and, all things considered, she seems fairly well-adjusted. She's more of a presence than her sisters, who were actually in Carroll's care, but she's less important to the narrative than her mother's nanny, first crush or third best friend.

The turning point comes when Carroll visits Love in the maternity ward and, after meeting a detoxing Kurt Cobain for the first time, realizes there must be a curse on the firstborn daughter of a firstborn daughter. The only way to protect Frances Bean Cobain is for Carroll to find her own roots. The book picks up once she's reunited with her birth mother, author Paula Fox. Too bad that's only 20 pages from the end.

When the CEO of Wal-Mart publicly touts his interest in organic foods you know the stuff is no longer the domain of pastoral hippies. What's not clear, however, is what the stuff actually is. For example, can a manufacturer use organic preservatives and pesticides and still be "organic"? Does an organic dairy give a cow chemical medication or maintain purity by letting it suffer through an illness? These are some of the questions that business journalist Samuel Fromartz probes in Organic, Inc.

Fromartz got interested in the subject through his stomach. He loved cooking and thus fell in love with Whole Foods; he loves knowing from whence his ingredients come. Some of the best parts of Organic, Inc. serve as an extension of the farmer's market ideal: to put a human face on the otherwise anonymous food-supply line.

This is accomplished in a series of profiles of farmers and industry icons, which combine to form a diverse portrait of an industry that's still in its childhood. From Harvard-educated soybean farmers struggling to sustain a profit, to the salad empire of Earthbound Inc., to struggling strawberry growers in California, Organic, Inc. is about an industry caught between the idealism of its founders and profit motives of both modest and imperial proportions.

Produce companies like Earthbound Farm, soy processors like White Wave and retailers like Whole Foods are no longer niche players, and are pushing into the mainstream fast. While they still only account for a little more than 2 percent of domestic food sales, organics are one of the fastest growing segments of that market, expanding by 20 percent since 1990.

Aside from a very dull chapter on pesticides, Fromartz does a fine job navigating the line between idealism of the early "movement" farmers and their contemporaries, many of whom are merely trying to stay afloat in an ever-fragmenting marketplace. What unites the best of both strains is the worthiness of answering the following question, asked by White Wave founder Steve Demos: How do you create a health food Americans actually want to eat? In a time of bulging waistlines, it's more than a mere marketing quandary.

"We are restless as well as strapped," writes Anya Kamenetz. "The common thread joining all members of this generation is a sense of permanent impermanence. It's hard to commit to a family, a community, a job, or a life path when you don't know if you'll be able to make a living, make a marriage last, or live free of debt." Kamenetz, a 25-year-old Yale graduate and Village Voice contributor, authoritatively articulates the economic instability of Millennials in Generation Debt. With this book, Generation Y now has its own Barbara Ehrenreich.

Kamenetz focuses on several primary economic barriers today's young adults face: gigantic student loan and credit card debt, stagnant wages in entry-level or temp employment and ridiculously high housing costs. She describes how financial aid has gradually shifted from grants to loans since the 1970s, often leaving recent graduates more than $30,000 in debt (and, Kamenetz notes, "loan debt among grad students increased seven times faster than undergraduate debt in the 1990s"). Plus, college grads now have four-figure credit card bills as well. She quotes a 31-year-old Discover Card employee who is still paying off credit card debt from college, who tells today's students, "'RUN! Next time you see our table on campus, RUN the other way!!" Kamenetz writes that "half of all temp workers in the '90s were aged twenty to thirty-four," noting that young people are all too willing to work contingent, freelance "crap jobs" with no benefits and rotten pay. "The 1990s singles' average yearly income … was $2,522 less in constant 1995 dollars than that of the young adults in 1972-73."

Kamenetz concludes that a generation accustomed to protesting the war in Iraq and Third World sweatshops had better begin marching for their own well-being: "Where is our national student antidebt crusade?" More than a sociological tract, Generation Debt is a campaign manifesto in search of a candidate.

Conducting is surely the most mysterious musical activity. Beyond getting the orchestra started at the same time and keeping the beat, what do conductors do? They are certainly the centers of attention, notably so in Philadelphia, where the band boss has international stature. Phyllis White Rodr’guez-Peralta, who is not a musicologist (she is a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Temple), gives us affectionate portraits of the last three directors of the Philadelphia Orchestra: Eugene Ormandy, Riccardo Muti and Wolfgang Sawallisch.

Unfortunately, no mysteries are uncovered here. We are given accounts of the repertoires and public activities of the three, well-worn descriptions of their basic philosophies and a smattering of gossip. Much of the narrative reads like an extended press release. There are countless missed opportunities for more depth. Why was Ormandy's version of Beethoven's Fifth different from Muti's? Why was Sawallisch such a superb Strauss interpreter? Serious criticism is minimal. There is a reference to the "sprinkling of critics" who considered Ormandy a second-rate interpreter, but nothing of the barbs about Muti's flashiness or Sawallisch's stodginess. Even if such charges were overblown, an exploration of them might have led to some illuminating discussions.

Rodr’guez-Peralta would probably have achieved greater breadth had she spoken to more musicians. There are still many players around who performed under all three men. To be fair, the few musicians who are quoted, including the extensive interviews with pianists Gary Graffman and Lang Lang, and violinist Sarah Chang, betray the basic difficulty of describing the mechanisms of music making. These folks have dedicated their lives to expressing themselves with their instruments, not with words. What we are left with is a breezy tour guide to a hefty chunk of the life of a great American orchestra, but more in the Fodor style, less in the manner of Tocqueville.

Reading this memoir made me want to drive a splintery stake through the black, black heart of the so-called "happy days" of the 1950s, and rebury them in an unmarked grave. In Girls of Tender Age, Mary-Ann Tirone Smith chronicles her life as the child of "working stiffs" (her father's description of their socioeconomic level) living in Charter Oak Terrace, America's first low-income housing project, in Hartford, Conn. Among the accepted social mores of the time was the idea that unspeakable things were literally "unspeakable." Thus, when the author's 11-year-old classmate is raped and strangled, their teacher acknowledges it by briskly stating that there will be no speaking of Irene, even as the janitor carries the murdered child's desk from the classroom. When Mary-Ann reads an article about the murder, and asks her father what "rape" means, he snatches the paper away and tells her to go to her room. Mary-Ann's autistic brother, Tyler, is deemed retarded by mental health professionals, despite amassing a well-read library of books about WWII. Not all is dark and dire, however, and the author's family is rife with vibrant, hilarious characters. Yet Irene's murder remains the focus of the book. The author's life story is interwoven with that of Irene's murderer, Bob Malm, charged with sexual molestation at the age of 12, the first of many offenses. Shortly before murdering Irene, for example, Malm assaulted a Hartford teenager. This being the '50s, however, the responding officer decided that the livid red marks on the girl's neck looked more like hickies than an attempted strangulation, and dismissed her claim of attempted rape. Like a dutiful girl of her time, the author managed to block the murder from her mind until years later, when she was asked to write about how growing up in Hartford impacted her writing (the accomplished novelist's work includes the Poppy Rice mystery series). The extremely readable result is Girls of Tender Age, penned after the author's realization that "Irene had been killed twice once by her murderer and once by the tight-lipped society that was the fifties."

"Since coming to Iraq for the first time in January 2004," writes Jackie Spinner, "I realized that absolute freedom was simply not being afraid to die." Her memoir, Tell Them I Didn't Cry: A Young Journalist's Story of Joy, Loss, and Survival in Iraq, tells stories about the war in Iraq. But while she describes her experiences in Baghdad, Fallujah and Kurdistan, her focus is less battles, politics or portraits of U.S. troops and Iraqis than it is the ways that this war changes lives, in ways painful and profound, predictable and harrowing.

A Washington Post staff writer when she started writing about Abu Ghraib defendant Jeremy Sivits, Spinner arrived in Baghdad with no war zone experience, imagining her most important task would be to maintain her reporter's objectivity. But her notions evolved as she stayed on, spending some 13 months there (with rare breaks to return home or vacation), much to the dismay of her family, who never anticipated she would risk her life for a story. (The book underlines their concerns with brief "dispatches" at the end of each chapter by Jackie's twin sister Jenny, an English professor at Philadelphia's St. Joseph's University.)

Spinner describes her horror at Iraq's disintegration, increasing distrust of the U.S. military to provide truthful information, and close friendships with the Iraqi staff at the Post's Baghdad office, especially her vibrant young interpreter Luma, to whom she dedicates the book. (She also recalls vividly her own near kidnapping outside Abu Ghraib, an experience that, along with her friendship with Jill Carroll, has prompted recent calls for her comments on this and other dangers for journalists in the country.)

Spinner doesn't repeat here the stories she wrote for the Post, which ranged from human interest and cooking features to war news (by the end of her stay, she was the paper's Iraq Bureau chief). If early on her book seems careful, as if still protecting her memories (or herself from her memories), by the end it approaches the heady delirium of Michael Herr's Dispatches (still the best war story ever told), ruminating on the costs and scary appeal of war, the losses covered over by nationalism, racism and misogyny.

Recalling her own Vietnam veteran father's reluctance to speak of his experience, she respects the impossibility of explaining in words what happened to and around her. "In war," she writes, with regard to the brutal calculations made in split seconds, "there's no time for nuances, on either side." And yet Spinner discovers them.

Love it or hate it, "You Oughta Know" is an extraordinary song. You probably remember where you were the first time you heard it. It kicked Jen Trynin's ass when she heard it blaring from a jukebox in a club that couldn't bother to spell her name right on the sign touting the night's headliner. After a major-label bidding war, Trynin was supposed to blow up big. Then Alanis Morissette, whose Jagged Little Pill was released the same day as Trynin's Cockamamie, came out of nowhere and siphoned her fuel. At least Trynin was smart enough all along to know she wasn't the bomb.

None of her own songs is as memorable as "You Oughta Know" if you listened to WDRE in 1995, you might recall "Better Than Nothing" but Everything I'm Cracked Up to Be is a smart, sharp account of her stint as a alt-rock also-ran. Trynin captures the time by scattering recognizable names Aimee Mann, Candlebox, Soul Asylum among credible pseudonyms and composite characters.

Her sarcasm and self-deprecating wit serve her well, and she's got stinging takes on sacred cows (i.e., "bands who can't play or write or sing worth shit but by indier-than-thou consensus are more real than 'sellout' bands who dare to practice or promote themselves or simply try a teensy bit") and the industry interns who jock them ("They're generally white, upper-middle-class college-educated kids whose daddies subsidize the free time they have to sit around discussing the nuances of the guitar tones on the latest Guided By Voices disc.").

Nothing traumatic happens, but the record business is a pit of phonies and the road's a series of disappointments. Trynin doesn't eat or sleep well, and she has an ill-advised fling with her bassist. Her resistance to female opening acts causes a stink, and even people who love her song call it by the wrong name. She gets her fairy-tale ending, but after crisscrossing the country as a commoner, settling down as a queen sounds awfully dull.

Men and women are socially and emotionally different! Although that's an easy way to sum up Norah Vincent's psychosocial drag experiment, Self-Made Man, it's not the whole story. For 18 months, Vincent lived on and off as Ned, bowling in a league, spending time at a monastery, dating women, going to strip clubs and, finally, joining an Iron John-type men's empowerment group. Her journey starts out amusingly enough, with a voice coach and the intricate process of applying a stick-on beard. But as Vincent becomes more Ned than Norah, learning how truly emotionally suffocating it is to be a "real" or even "typical" man in the post-feminist age, her identity as a lesbian woman cannot remain intact. This, coupled with the extreme guilt of deceiving those she is trying to know on more than a superficial level, raises an array of questions that are far more interesting, ultimately, than any supposed revelations Vincent unearths regarding masculinity. Vincent tells us from the start that she is no rational scientist: "to say that I conducted and recorded the results of an experiment is not to say that this book pretends to be a scientific or objective study." Indeed, Vincent's vantage point as a lesbian and alt-weekly columnist with the intermittent pseudointellectual bravado that suggests makes her voice a biased and, at times, infuriating one. A project like this, which aims to break down gendered experiences into neat chapter names ("Work," "Life," "Sex," "Love"), is bound to lend itself to sweeping generalizations about what a "typical guy" must be like or what a "needy" female Internet dater "really wants." This is not to say that Vincent doesn't admit to having missed the mark sometimes, to being surprised and even sheepish when her expectations are not met, such as when she feels "genuine sympathy" after frequenting strip clubs and catches "at least … a glimpse of the discomfort of being a man in a man's world." Vincent doesn't shy away from inconsistency; she marvels at men's lack of emotionally fulfilling friendships and then praises their attitude of trusting a guy until he proves untrustworthy. She extols the virtues of women's friendships and then criticizes the cattiness that leads a woman to want "to see [her] sister fail." This equal-opportunity pigeonholing is what makes the book and the experiment successful, just as Vincent's inability to continue seeing each sex's burdens from the inside must make her ultimately forfeit "her insider status in the other camp."

Whereas some authors persist in gazing at their own navel, Jonathan Ames persists in gazing at his asshole. From his vivid descriptions of Irritable Bowel Syndrome to his chapter on finally curing his anal itch, Ames shares his bodily experiences with naked candor. Readers are as likely to be shocked as they are to be reduced to helpless laughter.

Ames is fascinated with cataloging everything from his pimples to his genital wartsÑnothing, apparently, is off-limits. When a woman sexually excites him, he has no shame in revealing his inappropriate erection. With equal parts sadness, embarrassment and boasting, Ames recounts his sexploits with a dominatrix who beats him, a prostitute who sucks him, a peep show girl who lets him suck her, and of course, transsexuals, whom he chases.

However, the self-deprecating author wisely peppers I Love You More Than You Know with enough sentimental essays that his forays into fecal matter and fucking are tempered by thoughts about his family. Ames' love for his parents, his son and his great aunt Doris might seem out of place in this otherwise filthy book, but they act as necessary pauses between the most scatological chapters.

That said, some of Ames' best essays are his lengthiestÑcovering a boxing match in Memphis, taking a Club Med vacation and going on a book tour through Europe. These scary/hilarious sagas are much more satisfying than the series of short "definitions" Ames wrote for The Future Dictionary of America that appear throughout the book. Although some of these entries, such as "pro-Semitism," are amusing, they don't quite reflect the sustained wit of his more developed pieces. They are simply too clever by half.

Ames' collection may ultimately be uneven, but fans of the author will love I Love You More Than You Know. Readers with a weak gag reflex, however, beware.