HOT TYPE ELISSA SCHAPPELL

Tell me, do you know the difference between Khomeini and Qaddafi? A Hutu and a Tutsi? M. L. Rossi rides to your rescue, spelling out What Every American Should Know About the Rest of the World (Plume), and not a moment too soon ...

Also this month: Three ex-con real-estate moguls set out to restore Harlem to its glory days and take on gentrification by any means necessary in Mat Johnson's clever cautionary novel, Hunting in Harlem (Bloomsbury). Maria Flook looks under rocks in Invisible Eden (Broadway), tracking clues about the murder of a fashion writer who fled New York for single motherhood on Cape Cod. Platoon leader turned novelist James Brady shows he knows war in The Marine (St. Martin's).

Teresa Carpenter takes us back to The Miss Stone Affair (Simon & Schuster) in 1901, when a

female missionary became the first American to be taken hostage on foreign soil. Edward T. O'Donnell's Ship Ablaze (Broadway) commemorates the infamous 1904 sinking of the steamboat General Slocum, in which more than 1,000 New Yorkers lost their lives. In The Last Good Time (Crown),

Jonathan Van Meter snaps his fingers and—ba boom—it's

the swinging heyday of nightclub impresario Skinny D'Amato. The carnally unimpeded antiheroine of Gigi Levangie Grazer's novel is a Maneater (Simon & Schuster). This Father's Day, scrap the soap on a rope; David Strah beats the drum in praise of Gay Dads (Tarcher/Putnam). In The House on Beartoxvn Road (Random House), Elizabeth Cohen's infant daughter is learning the world, while her father, beset by Alzheimer's, is forgetting it. Faced with the sale of his summer house, George Howe Colt reminisces about The Big House (Scribner), summoning a century's worth of weddings, nervous breakdowns, and love affairs. Fellini's Rome flashes before your eyes in Karen Pinkus's Tlte Montesi Scandal (University of Chicago). Ingenious children's-book photographer Valorie Fisher is back at play with the marvelously peculiar Ellsworth's Extraordinary Electric Ears (Atheneum). The history of international design firm Kartell (Skira) is seen through the lens of photographers such as Helmut Newton and Ellen Von Unwerth. Arthur Kempton's Boogaloo (Pantheon) soulfully charts the lives of "Father of Gospel" Thomas A. Doresy, soul singer Sam Cooke, Motown god Berry Gordy, and

__funk visionary George Clinton. In Claire Scovell LaZebnik's

second novel, Same as It Never Was (St. Martin's), tragedy

lands a jaded U.C.L.A. student with guardianship of her fouryear-old sister. The hero of dirty boy Michel Houellebecq's new novel, Platform (Knopf), is a bureaucrat who promotes sexual tourism in Thailand. From the Arctic to the jungle,

British artists Oily & Suzi (Abrams) capture crocodiles, leopards, and polar bears on canvas, then invite the animal subjects to sink their teeth into the artwork. Richard Brookhiser salutes Gouverneur Morris, the peglegged Gentleman Revolutionary (Free Press) who wrote the Constitution. As of This Writing (Norton) harnesses the essential essays of literary critic Clive James. Rock, rap, reactionaries, and liberals all get a thrashing in Danny Goldberg's insightful Dispatches from the Culture War (Miramax). Archivist Lincoln Cushing's iRevolucion! (Chronicle) exhibits the rarely seen poster art of Cuba. New York Post "Page Six" reporter Ian Spiegelman makes a heated debut with Everyone's Burning (Villard). Charlotte and Peter Fiell's Scandinavian Design (Taschen) is packed as tight as herring with design companies and artists from 1900 to the present. Printed on gold-embossed pages, Les Must de Cartier (Assouline) comes sheathed in a panther-skin slipcase. Ten Little Indians (Grove) track Sherman Alexie back into familiar reservation territory.

Tell me, what is the difference between embedded and in bed with?