First, Jerry Reed is forever tied to my love for Smokey and the Bandit - one of the absolute seminal movies of my childhood. I can still sing pretty much all of the words to "Eastbound and Down"; he was both talented and fun.

Several titles were just brought to my attention by the quarterly mailer from Bellingham's fabulous Village Books. To wit:

Falling Off the Edge: Travels Through the Dark Heart of Globalization by Alex Perry:

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, international corporations, governments and Western pundits have embraced the idea of a global village: a shrinking, booming world in which everyone benefits. But what if the coming boom is an explosion? Alex Perry, award-winning TIME correspondent, travels from the South China Sea to the highlands of Afghanistan to the Sahara—and observes globalization on the ground, instead of from the executive suite. Perry takes readers to Shenzen, China's boom city where sweatshops pay under-age workers less than $4 a day; and to Bombay, where the gap between rich and poor means million-dollar apartments overlook million-people slums. He shares a beer with Southeast Asian pirates who prey on the world's busiest shipping artery. And he puts us in the middle of a firefight between American Special Forces and the Taliban. He shows that for every winner in our brave new world, there are tens of thousands of losers. And be they Chinese army veterans, Indian Maoist rebels or the Somali branch of al Qaeda, they are very, very angry.

Perry is Time magazine's Africa Bureau Chief. What interests me here is the thorough investigation of how small decisions, such as buying cheap t-shirts made with sweatshop labor, can have an almost "domino effect" that results in acts of terror. I'm not making a direct jump here from a kid in a factory to the 9/11 terrorists but I do find it worthy of considering how we ignore those who suffer at our own peril. A suicide bomber has no reason to live (by definition) so one wonders, how do our actions cause in any way contribute to feelings of hopelessness around the world?

I Live Here by Mia Kirshner and several other contributors:

I Live Here is a visually stunning narrative — told through journals, stories, images, and graphic novellas — in which the lives of refugees and displaced people become at once personal and global. Bearing witness to stories that are too often overlooked, it is a raw and intimate journey to crises in four corners of the world: war in Chechnya, ethnic cleansing in Burma, globalization in Mexico, and AIDS in Malawi.

The voices we encounter are those of displaced women and children, in their own words or in stories told in text and images by noted writers and artists. The stories unfold in an avalanche: An orphan goes to jail for stealing leftovers. A teenage girl falls in love in a city of disappeared women. A child soldier escapes his army only to be saved by the people he was taught to kill.

Kirkus called this one a "A visually stunning presentation of the lives of women and children surviving under the worst circumstances in Burma, Mexico, Russia and Malawi....[A] myriad of powerful images."

It is reviewed as a "paper documentary" which intrigues me a great deal. Mostly though, to build on my comments for Perry's book, I see an ongoing exploration of the overlooked and underrepresented here - a way for Americans to view the world from a closer perspective and grasp further the way in which globalization is making the world's problems everyone's problems. I do wish something like this could be put together for our own country though. Part of why it is so hard for the average American to understand Zimbabwe is because far too many don't understand Kentucky (or New Orleans, or Opa Locka, or Galena, Alaska or on and on).


Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart by Tim Butcher:

Published to rave reviews in the United Kingdom and named a Richard & Judy Book Club selection—the only work of nonfiction on the 2008 list—Blood River is the harrowing and audacious story of Tim Butcher's journey in the Congo and his retracing of renowned explorer H. M. Stanley's famous 1874 expedition in which he mapped the Congo River. When Daily Telegraph correspondent Tim Butcher was sent to Africa in 2000 he quickly became obsessed with the legendary Congo River and the idea of re-creating Stanley's legendary journey along the three-thousand-mile waterway. Despite warnings that his plan was suicidal, Butcher set out for the Congo's eastern border with just a rucksack and a few thousand dollars hidden in his boots. Making his way in an assortment of vehicles, including a motorbike and a dugout canoe, helped along by a cast of characters from UN aid workers to a pygmy-rights advocate, he followed in the footsteps of the great Victorian adventurers.

Oddly, I seem to be all about Africa today. What interests me about Butcher's book is that it will allow a direct comparison between famous exploration diaries like Stanley's and the modern day. You can write about contemporary Africa but then juxtaposing it exactly with the words of someone who was in the same place 125 years before makes the changes that much more glaring. One the things that impressed Peter Beard's End of the Game on me so deeply was his inclusion of Isak Dinesen's diaries and then his own photographs and comments from the same place, decades later. Again, this sort of thing appeals to me for all sorts of geographic locations, especially here in the US.

And finally, Haven Kimmel's new novel, Iodine:

From her earliest years, Trace turned away from her abusive mother toward her loving father. Within the twisty logic of abuse, her desperate love for him took on a romantic cast that persists to this day, though she's had no contact with her family since she ran away from home years ago. Alone but for her beloved dog, she's eked out an impoverished but functional existence, living in an abandoned house, putting herself through college, and astonishing her teachers with her genius and erudition. What they don't know is that she leads a double life: thanks to forged documents, at school she is Ianthe Covington, a young woman with no past.

Trace's singular life is upended when she and her literature professor fall in love. She tells him nothing about her life, and as it becomes apparent that he has his own dark secrets, she's forced to face herself and her past. After recovering a horrific, long-suppressed memory, Trace finally copes with the fallout from her brutal, bizarre childhood. Kimmelparcels out Trace's strange, dark story in mesmerizing bits that obscure as much as they reveal, and keep the reader guessing until the end.

At Village Books they write: "Strung together with the theories and symbolism of Jung, Freud, and Hillman, the characters circle each other like predators and prey. Haven Kimmel's Iodine is such a complex puzzle that I am still reeling from the last moments of the book."

I haven't read a description of anything that comes close to this one. I'm not a huge Kimmel fan (I know, I know) but Iodine sounds very off beat and a bit Scarlett Thomas-esque. I'll wait and see what you others out in the lit blogosphere have to say on it.