HURRAY FOR THE RED, WHITE, AND BLUE

Taking the underclass's side in America's class war, Joe Bageant goes Deer Hunting with Jesus (Crown), firing off reports on “white trashonomics,” praise temples, and the explosion of the gun culture. Drew Westen dissects The Political Brain (Public Affairs), explaining why emotion trumps reason, oratory beats good ideas, and seemingly sane people vote against their best interests. Sammy’s House (Hyperion) heralds the return of Kristin Gore and her hero, a quirky health-care-policy wonkette. Jamie Malanowski's satirical novel The Coup (Doubleday) pictures a vice president whose thirst for power can be slaked only by unseating the Numskull in Chief. Trudy Hopedale (Simon & Schuster), the consummate D.C. hostess, stars in Jeffrey Frank's inside-theBeltway comedy of political manners (or lack thereof).

GO GREEN Alan Weisman dares us to imagine The World Without Us (St. Martin’s). How long would it take for nature to reclaim the earth? How long before our homes, power plants, museums, and places of worship were erased from the planet? Elizabeth Rogers and Thomas M. Kostigen's The Green Book (Crown) cameos celebrity recycling fanatics such as Cameron Diaz and Will Ferrell.

KINDA BLUE While funny and surreal, the stories in budding talent Robin Romm's fiction offering. The Mother Garden (Scribner), are rooted in grief. In Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (Knopf), Mick Brown records the meteoric rise and spectacular flameout of Phil Spector. From teachers to truckers, sex workers to orphans, Stephanie Nolen's devastatingly moving 28 (Walker) puts heroic human faces on the catastrophic toll AIDS is taking on the African people. Forget W.W.J.D.; Suzan Colon and Jennifer Traig wonder. What Would Wonder Woman Do? (Chronicle). In order to assemble Joseph Cornell’s Dreams (Exact Change), Catherine Corman plumbed the letters and diaries of the shadow-box genius. Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life (Ammo) heralds the second coming of the late Cincinnati artist. The photographs in Richard Pare'sThe Lost Vanguard (Monacelli) testify to the revolutionary radicalism of Russian modernist architecture from 1922 to 1932.

I LOVE A RAINBOW William F. Buckley Jr.'sThe Rake (HarperCollins); photographer Arnold Newman’s Arnold Newman: The Early Works (D.A.P.); Rosemary Mahoney'sDown the Nile (Little, Brown); The Best of Wodehouse (Knopf), with an introduction by John Mortimer; Wilfrid Sheed's The House That George Built (Random House); Holly Peterson'sThe Manny (Dial); photographer Howell Conant’s Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Schirmer/Mosel); Gunter Grass's memoir, Peeling the Onion (Harcourt); Katie Roiphe’s Uncommon Arrangements (Dial).

Now get thee to a wiener roast.

In Off the Record (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Norman Pearlstine, former editor in chief of Time Inc., depicts an American press so greedy for White House access and news with American Idol-style sex appeal that they've become willing (or witless) accomplices in the government's deployment of anonymous sources and leak campaigns to spin "the truth," all the while further discrediting themselves. Pearlstine goes on the record to defend against criticism he betrayed the First Amendment by giving up a Time reporter's notes during the "Plamegate" investigation, and in the next breath puts out the call for Congress to pass a federal shield law to insulate writers from government meddling. One custom pair of flip-flops, coming right up ...