In The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell : An Accidental Soldier’s Account of the War in Iraq, author John Crawford shares a startlingly realistic tale that has a common theme among today’s young men unwittingly embroiled in the current ‘War on Terror’: college-aged boys who enlisted in the National Guard to get a little extra tuition money, never expecting they’d be shipped abroad to Iraq to fight in an increasingly unpopular war.

Crawford encounters all kinds problems upon his arrival in Iraq, from shoddy, malfunctioning equipment and outdated gear to incompetent officers and hostile locals. What was initially supposed to be a tour of “three months, six at most” turned into over a year of serving abroad in a military branch that should have been serving at home in the first place.

Crawford’s perspective is an honest and unforgiving one, even when it comes to himself. He confesses that he and his fellow soldiers had very little concern for the locals and often indulged in the pharmaceudical supplies for relief from a the pressures of a hellish situation. He details several accounts of scavenging through landfills for spare parts and having to improvise when they had little equipment or supplies.

This story gives a refreshingly frank account of the situation in Iraq, more personal and hardhitting on several flaws of both the military and political situation that media outlets had been trying to gloss over.

The Fate Of Africa: From the Hopes of Freedom to The Heart of Despair; A History of fifty Years of Independence by Martin Meredith is, despite the rather verbose title, an indepth and powerful look at Africa’s troubled and violent modern history, from its early, tentative hopes of independence to its current bitter and hard-broiled political and ethnic upheavals of many struggling African nations such as Rwanda, Zimbabwe, and Sierra Leone. Meredith provides a gruelling and detailed look at the development and the continent’s most troubled countries, at his best when cataloguing South Africa and Zimbabwe. He doesn’t mince words or sterilize facts and reasons, but simply lays out a logical picture of the current political and cultural situtation of many of these clashing countries and peoples, its ethnic cleansings, criminal regimes, and vast squalor, oftentimes with the end result being one of true horror: that absolute power can corrupt absolutely.

Do you know what to do if you get caught in a blizzard? How about facing down a mob of angry kangaroos in the outback? Authors Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht are back with the latest book in their Worst Case Scenario Handbook series: The Worst-Case Scenario Book Of Survival Questions, which is not only an entertaining and even insightful read, but also inspires readers to ask themselves if they’re prepared for emergency situations.

This book contains over 200 illustrated questions in multiple-choice format of varying difficulty. The choices sketched out for readers to choose from in order to escape their sticky situation are often action-packed and exciting for the more unlikely scenarios the average person will find his or herself in, but also suprisingly useful for the more mundane, and therefore more likely, ones. For example, Piven and Borgenicht ask what you would do if your car’s thermostat drops into the red zone, you smell something burning, and flames are coming out from under the hood of your car. Answer? Get out of the car and take cover behind a structure or in a ditch. Flames indicate that there is probably an electrical fire or oil or fuel leak, and if the car explodes, burning debris and gasoline can be thrown for yards in all directions.

While most readers will never run into many of the wilder notions contained in the book, and shouldn’t take it as a definitive survival guide, it’s a compelling read for entertaining friends at parties, getting ideas for writing an action-packed novel or script, or simply to learn a few useful pieces of information next time life throws you a curveball.

Visit the Worst Case Scenarios website to quiz yourself on even more hazardous situations.

Picking up where 2004’s Caught Stealing left off, Charlie Huston’s Six Bad Things: A Novel catches back up with former minor league baseball player Hank Thompson, who’s living a quiet life on the Yucatan peninsula with the $4 million he managed to steal from the Russian mob. But when a Russian backpacker shows up to his beach hut asking questions and death threats are issued against his family, Hank heads north to California. There, he tangos with a memorable cast of smugglers, mobsters, corporate thugs, and Vegas drug dealers as he tries to sort things out. Hank’s funny and sympathetic character makes the reader root for him even as he puts his family in danger and as the author reminds us that he’s killed six people in New York.

Publisher’s website (Ballantine)

Review of “Six Bad Things” at Blogcritics.

What was America like before Christopher Columbus messed it up? Charles C. Mann speculates on the subject in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, using sources from archaelogists, anthropologists, paleolinguists and others which suggest that the history of our continent before 1492 isn’t quite what we learned in high school. For instance, Mann speculates that Americas first people didn’t come over from Siberia on the Bering Strait around 12,000 B.C., but came by boat to the Pacific coast 10-20 thousand years earlier. He debunks the idea that Columbus met wild, uncivilized savages when he came to America by offering that the land was already becoming urban and densely populated, and more technologically advanced than we had previously assumed. Mann even suggests that Native Americans weren’t living in harmony with nature, but in fact altered the American landscape drastically. The author admits that his theories are speculative, but he provides a strong argument and the subject matter is interesting to say the least.

Publisher’s website

“The Game” is not a how-to-meet-women guide, but there is a lot of crossover in the audience. Meet Neil Strauss, the author of this fascinating memoir. Once a self described “Average Frustrated Chump,” he became one of the country’s foremost Pick-up Artists (PUA) after attending a seminar at Hollywood’s Roosevelt Hotel on the topic. He quickly becomes obsessed with the life, meeting more and more women (many of the juicier stories chronicled for all time between the covers of the book), and even moves into a mansion with other PUAs. It’s here, however, by observing the PUAs that he discovers some of the more gruesome truths about the “art,” the misogyny, desperation, and the miserable childhoods that most of them share. Ironically, the memoir is more about understanding men than women. Strauss’s credentials also include penning the “auto-biography” of Jenna Jameson, and a career as a well known rock critic.

Available Sept. 1st.