Business Bungles

From the "learn from your mistakes" school of thought comes Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins: The Paradox of Innovation. Today's business world calls for taking risks and accepting setbacks, say authors Richard Farson (Management of the Absurd) and Ralph Keyes (Chancing It). In this tiny volume, they cite examples from Rudy Giuliani's performance amid the chaos of September 11 to inventor Charles Kettering's perseverance in the face of adversity. Recognizing obstacles is essential to victory, Farson and Keyes contend, and despite their book's brevity, they demonstrate concrete ways to do so. (Free Press, $22 144p ISBN 0-7432-2592-9; June 10)

With a humorous take on the business of mistakes, Andrew Marlatt (an editor, writer, designer and technician at SatireWire.com) offers Economy of Errors: SatireWire Gives Business the Business. The book is a compendium of nine issues of the satirical magazine BusinessMonth Weekly. Some of the pieces are indeed funny (e.g., an article titled "Cubists Launch Unnavigable Web Site; Conceptual Realism Dominates Site No One Will Be Able to Use Anyway"); others are just plain corny (e.g., an ad proclaiming, "Business Gifts for Business People: Save Yourself with 'Shoot Howard Next!' Officewear"). (Broadway, $14.95 paper 192p ISBN 0-7679-0887-2; June 4)

While bad manners aren't often cited as a workplace "failure," they do affect productivity and service at the office. Rude Awakenings: Overcoming the Civility Crisis in the Workplace addresses impolite business behavior, such as interrupting others, setting impossible deadlines, sending crabby e-mails and bullying co-workers. Author Giovinella Gonthier, a former ambassador, offers suggestions for various situations, from conferences and meetings to restrooms and copy machine areas. Although the likely audience for her book is managers who have to deal with impoliteness (will ill-mannered employees really pick this book up?), the tips are valuable for anyone working in an office environment. (Dearborn, $25 240p ISBN 0-7931-5197-X; May)

Praising Great Lodges and Attacking Great Men

With their enormous halls, hickory furniture, Indian print textiles and mounted stags' heads, the majestic old inns and hotels of U.S. national parks almost rival the landscape for attention. Old Faithful Inn, Crater Lake Lodge, El Tovar and the Oregon Caves Chateau are just a few of the marvels of the West found in Great Lodges of the National Parks: An Illustrated History. Author Christine Barnes (Great Lodges of the West), a consultant and historian for the PBS series to which this book is a companion, offers an engaging history of each lodge and its environs with photos by nature photographer Fred Pflughoft, whose work appears in national magazines and calendars, and indoor and nature photographer David Morris (Great Lodges of the West). (W.W. West [PGW, dist.], $35 192p ISBN 0-9653924-5-7; Apr.)

A graduate of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, Jesse Larner is a translator in Manhattan. In Mount Rushmore: An Icon Reconsidered, he leaps into a full-frontal assault on the four-headed monument, calling it "a work of deliberately racist iconography, designed and engineered by a member of the Ku Klux Klan," perched on land appropriated from Native Americans. The 1920s tourist attraction sent Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint sprawling all over the presidents in the tongue-in-cheek thriller North by Northwest, but none of this wit or enjoyment is for Larner, who alternates between serious-minded first-person travel narrative and livid political invective. (Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books, $24.95 400p ISBN 1-560-25346-0; Apr.)

Noble Hat Hanging

The genius of an architect who made beautiful and functional homes out of inexpensive materials is celebrated in Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency. The book showcases work the South Africa—born Mockbee (1944—2002) undertook in Hale County, Ala., where he recruited architecture students to help design and build free homes for impoverished residents. Andrea Oppenheimer Dean, a former executive editor at Architecture magazine, and photographer Timothy Hursley, an architectural photographer who has been documenting Rural Studio for nine years, present 132 color and 12 b&w photos of the warm, modern homes (which often incorporate recycled and natural materials like tires and hay bales) and discuss them with Mockbee, his students and the home owners. The work has been featured on Oprah, Nightline, CBS News and in Time and People. (Princeton Architectural Press, $30 paper 192p ISBN 1-56898-292-5; Apr.)

"Today's proletarian dwellings... despite their current revolting appearance of hovels, housing barracks or overnight shelters, will be reproduced in the future on a higher level." Say what you will about his dubious faith in socialist housing schemes, celebrated Czech avant-garde artist and designer Karel Teige (1900—1951) elaborates some provocative and humane ideas for modern housing. His treatise The Minimum Dwelling (1932), translated into English for the first time by MIT architecture professor and Teige scholar Eric Dluhosch, surveys interwar European housing and argues, among other things, for the demise of the eat-in kitchen (the proletariat have no time to cook) and suggests the hotel, with its centralized services, as an ideal model for workers' dwellings. (MIT, $59.95 440p ISBN 0-262-20136-4; June)

Color Lines

W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Sherwood Anderson, Ralph Ellison, Randall Kennedy and Patricia J. Williams are among the writers and thinkers anthologized in Burning All Illusions: Writings from The Nation on Race. Edited by commentator and Smith College African-American studies professor Paula Giddings (In Search of Sisterhood), the book collects pieces published in the magazine from the Reconstruction period through this year, including a nuanced 1923 sketch of four people who straddle the color line, a 1916 letter to the editor in defense of lynching, Hoyt W. Fuller's 1963 report on the "Rise of the Negro Militant," Gerald Early on blacks and sports, and much more. (Thunder's Mouth/Nation Books, $16.95 paper 522p ISBN 1-56025-384-3; June)

An erudite comparison of racism and anti-Semitism throughout Western history, George M. Fredrickson's amazingly concise Racism: A Short History explains how medieval anti-Semitism influenced the racist rationalization of the African slave trade; shows how the Enlightenment and Romanticism opened up new avenues for thinking about Jews and slaves; and contrasts American Jim Crow laws, Nazi Germany's Aryan nation and South African apartheid. A U.S. history professor at Stanford and co-director of the Research Institute for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity, Fredrickson offers a scholarly but compelling and accessible narrative. (Princeton, $22.95 216p ISBN 0-691-00899-X; May)

A Golden Reign

Two attractively illustrated volumes mark Queen Elizabeth's golden jubilee this year. Elizabeth: Fifty Glorious Years is by Jennie Bond, who has covered the tumult at Buckingham Palace for the last 25 years as BBC royal correspondent. In this decade-by-decade chronicle, Bond aims to paint a somewhat intimate portrait of the queen as a "working mother" who respects her children's wishes and whims (however much she may disapprove) and would rather be out with her dogs and horses than doing almost anything else. Close followers of the royals will probably not learn much that's new, but will enjoy the detailed trip down memory lane—which reviews all the important scandals and state affairs—and the many photos. (Reader's Digest, $26.95 160p ISBN 0-7621-0369-8; May)

The Queen: 50 Years—A Celebration is an admiring paean to Elizabeth II's years on the throne by a former BBC court correspondent, Ronald Allison, who became the queen's press secretary in 1973. The book gives a year-by-year synopsis of the queen's life since her ascension to the throne. Allison addresses some persistent questions about the royals' family life (is Prince Phillip a good father?) and touches on how political and technological developments (particularly television) have altered Buckingham Palace life and the role of the queen. (HarperCollins UK [Trafalgar Sq., dist.], $35 192p ISBN 0-00-414078-8; June 1)

April Publication

Left as an infant with Catholic Charities in 1950s Buffalo, N.Y., Theresa Cameron was doomed to spend her childhood in foster homes because her mother never signed the final adoption papers. "Very little has been written to convey what children experience and how they feel living among strangers," notes Cameron, now a Harvard-trained urban planner and designer, in her introduction to Foster Care Odyssey: A Black Girl's Story—and even less about that of black children. Her ability to clearheadedly evaluate the morass of negative feelings without lapsing into sentimentality is one of the most affecting aspects of this memoir, which covers 19 years in foster care. (Univ. Press of Mississippi, $28 272p ISBN 1-57806-420-1)