ASIA The Tiger Ladies: A Memoir of Kashmir by Sudha Koul (Beacon Press, $24). Sudha Koul was born in 1947, the year India gained independence and Pakistan was created. She now enters the hot South Asian literary scene with this evocative, wistful memoir about the tranquil Kashmir valley of her childhood-a perfumed land where grandmothers surreptitiously smoke hookahs and religious differences are noteworthy only in hindsight.
-Anjula Razdan

FOODFatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture, edited by Andrew Kimbrell (Island Press, $45 paper, $75 cloth). In groundbreaking essays and breathtaking photographs, Fatal Harvest movingly documents the high price-both environmental and social-we pay for our industrialized food while documenting the bountiful promise of sustainable agriculture.
-Jay Walljasper

BIRDSRare Encounters with Ordinary Birds by Lyanda Lynn Haupt (Sasquatch Books, $21.95). It takes curiosity to lick a bird nest to learn how it tastes-and pluck to raise 37 baby chimney swifts by hand. Naturalist Lyanda Lynn Haupt has done these things and more. Her collection of essays peers into the lives of such common birds as crows and starlings, and examines the human-bird connection in a way that is neither romanticized nor reductive. As Haupt writes, 'The tinier the details I come to comprehend . . . the more inspiring of awe.'
-Chris Dodge

THE SOUTHWEST