Our nonfiction selections are all over the map. We offer up one true-crime tome, and one other book that mixes true crime with science and environmental issues. Studs Terkel returns with another of his famed oral histories. Joanna Lipper introduces readers to six teen moms. One book takes an intriguing look at the art and history of being a host, and another goes behind the scenes at making of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Wild life
"The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature" by David Baron (W.W. Norton, $24.95) is part true-crime novel, part environmental study, part science text. The true-crime aspects work well, and the case is a stunner. In 1991, a teenager went for a run behind his Colorado high school. His body was found two days later, and it was immediately clear what had killed him -- a mountain lion was still perched not far from the body.

Area residents were shocked, but as it turns out, they shouldn't have been. Mountain lions had been circling the Boulder area for years, prowling across lawns and snatching up house pets. Baron, an award-winning science journalist, explores the shift in urban sprawl that has pushed homes to the very edge of wildlife habitats.

W.W. Norton & Company

The city of Boulder itself, known for its laid-back, environmentally sensitive attitudes, plays an interesting role here too. Baron relates the events of an area meeting where some residents blame each other for moving in on top of the lions, others demand that the animals be killed, and no one goes home happy.

Just as in the meeting, the book offers no one answer. But it raises powerful questions, and reminds even those of us who live in cities that we share our space with animals we see, and many that we do not.    —Gael Fashingbauer Cooper

Host with the most
Jesse Browner's "The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down: An Informal History of Hospitality" (Bloomsbury, $23.95) is not, as you may first imagine, a discourse on how the finger-bowl came to be properly placed above the dessert fork. Rather, it is a philosophical examination of the delicate exchange that takes place between two parties when one is a guest under another's roof. Topics covered include that of the control a host exerts over his guest's environment, the divide between the invited and the uninvited, and the metaphysical objections a true host has to catering his events.

Bloomsbury

Browner illustrates his points with allusions to history's famous and infamous hospitable figures, beginning with Hitler's parties at Berghof, a retreat fitted with such amenities as a tea-house accessible only by an elevator shaft lined with tear-gas nozzles. (Readers frustrated at the rather gentle textual treatment of the Führer may be mollified by a later chapter ascribing the descent of the Dark Ages entirely to a lack of manners; that chapter's heading is simply: "Germans!")

The book's title refers to a tense confrontation brought on by a byzantine tiered system of chair allocation in the court of Louis XIV. Certain personages were permitted armchairs, others straight-backed chairs, and the lowest caste of courtiers were confined to stools. The Duchess of Mantua refused to sit at all when not offered a chair in keeping with her perceived status. The book is packed with such captivating images: other favorites are those of Gertrude Stein presiding Buddhalike over her Left Bank salons, her legs tucked beneath her; and a terrible hoax that John James Audubon perpetuates on an unwanted houseguest, presenting the guest with images of ridiculously fanciful fish that Audubon claimed to have drawn from life.    —Kim Rollins

Baby love
In "Growing Up Fast" by Joanna Lipper (Picador, $25), one teen mother says "I'm 19 going on 20 and I feel like I'm 50." If the emotion behind that statement could be turned into an advertising campaign, the problem of teen pregnancy would be solved forever.

Picador

Lipper started by making a 30-minute film about teen mothers she met through a Massachusetts parenting program. But she found more material there than the film could display, and spent four years interviewing the women, the fathers, and their families.

The women struggle not only with poverty and parenting, but with the fathers of their babies, who are in and out of jail, father more children by other women, and generally cause more problems for their little families. The women take menial jobs, fight to keep even the most minimal housing, and often end up having more children with more irresponsible fathers.

We've seen this old tale before, but what makes Lipper's book a page-turner is how intimate and detailed the stories are. Whether it's attributable to an interviewing skill of Lipper's or the openness of the young mothers, they've held little back. "Growing Up Fast" is a fascinating and deeply personal look into a part of our world that many of us choose not to see.  —G.F.C.

Deadly 'Heart'
Without question, Ann Rule is the high priestess of the true-crime genre. Those of us who are fascinated with the topic know that there's a lot of garbage sitting on shelves in this section of any bookstore. Rule rarely disappoints. She writes two types of true-crime books these days, usually one long book-length case every year or so, and also a new volume in her True Crime Files, which collects short takes on numerous cases. The True Crime Files are a good appetizer, but it's the book-long cases that are the meaty main course.

Free Press

Rule's latest book-length case, "Heart Full of Lies: A True Story of Desire and Death" (Free Press, $26), tackles the murder of Chris Northon, a Hawaiian Airlines pilot who was found dead in his sleeping bag at an Oregon campsite. His wife Liysa admitted to taking his life, but claims she was forced to it by her husband's abuse. Yet Liysa's life is tangled with contradictions and lies, and no one else who knew him can imagine Chris Northon raising a hand to anyone.

It's the kind of case Rule does best -- murderer and victim are family, not strangers. The alleged murderer led a complicated emotional life -- putting forth a front to the world that didn't match what was really going on. People talk to Rule, and as a former Seattle police officer, she's able to separate truth from fiction. If there's a flaw in this book and in many of her book-length cases, it's an inability to paint victims as anything but faultless saints. I'm not suggesting that Northon was in any way to blame in this case, but he's portrayed as a kind of Mother Teresa of the Skies. It's a bit jolting, considering how deeply Rule delves into Liysa's character.

That said, as long as Rule keeps writing, there'll be life in the intriguing yet controversial true-crime genre yet. Nobody does it better.  —G.F.C.

Eternal hope
Studs Terkel's oral histories, especially "Working" and "The Good War," tell stories of America's people that are often ignored. Terkel's ability to find such fascinating subjects and get them to speak eloquently yet plainly is an incredible gift.

New Press

His new book, "Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times" (New Press, $25.95), tackles a more intangible topic than those of his most famous books. His theme here is social action in America and how it is driven by hope. This leads him to people both famous -- Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Paul Tibbets -- and ordinary. Many of his subjects are in their 90s, and have much fascinating history to relate. Yet some are young -- illegal immigrants hoping for a better life, and enthusiastic twenty-somethings who speak of the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle with the same elation as their parents may have spoken of the Civil Rights Movement.

Some of Terkel's subjects fit the topic better than others. Tibbets' tale of dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 is as spellbinding as any interview in the book (he tells of being called to prepare a third bomb, not knowing what would be its target), yet does it really speak of hope and social action?

Still, if those on another planet ever wanted to really understand America, warts, joy and all, they would do well to stock their shelves with Terkel's oeuvre.    —G.F.C.

Word by Word
The concept of a book that attempts to catalogue every word of the English language set to print in the last thousand years is surely that of an optimistic crackpot -- or, actually, a 68-year-long succession of optimistic crackpots. In "The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary" (Oxford University Press, $25) Simon Winchester recounts the tale of "the twelve mighty tombstone-sized volumes" that first saw publication in 1928, and the assortment of philologists, etymologists, and voracious readers that assembled them in Oxford's Scriptorium.

Oxford University Press

The blitheness with which the early contributors approach the OED is charmingly baffling: take, for example, the letter that James Murray (a Whitmanesque editor) writes MacMillan, the dictionary's publisher, which reveals that the dictionary would "be far more enormous than one could possibly sell -- far too large to be printed at anything but a frightful expenditure of money." This sentence was penned with no real idea that MacMillan might find such an announcement distressing; after all, Victorian England was known for projects of ridiculous enormity, such as steamships the size of the Empire State Building.

One hesitates to use the phrase "exhaustively researched" when describing this history, since "exhaustive" sounds too much like "tiresome," and Winchester's book is anything but. His enthusiasm for the OED and English itself is infectious, and the story features delightfully unexpected guest appearances by such personages as Henry Sweet (the notoriously rude phonetician on whom Shaw's Henry Higgins was modeled), Coleridge's grandson, and Alexander Graham Bell.    —K.R.

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