Gordon Parks "once took a ride tailed by the cops with some young L.A. [Black] Panthers with guns in their laps," writes Greg Tate in today's Village Voice obituary. "One asked him if he would still choose the camera over the gun, as he'd declared in his 1967 memoir, A Choice of Weapons. Parks reiterated his belief. Two weeks later the Panther was dead." Parks, who was the first black staff photographer at Life in the '50s and the first ever to direct a studio film (The Learning Tree, in 1969), lived life alongside his subjects, from blacks in the Twin Cities to Malcolm X. Born in Kansas in 1912, the future writer, jazz musician, poet, painter, choreographer, and composer moved to St. Paul as a stunned teenager after the death of his mother, according to his autobiography Voices in the Mirror, and was promptly thrown out into the subzero weather by his brother-in-law. He spent a week homeless, "bouncing between Jim Williams's pool hall during the day and the trolley cars at night," writes Michael Tortorello in a 1998 City Pages appreciation. "One morning, hungry and broke, Parks drew a knife on one of the conductors, and then, in shame, offered to sell it to him in exchange for breakfast"...More >>

Jasper Fforde is known for his four-volume Thursday Next detective series, in which Next was prone to travelling via a "Prose Portal" into novels such as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, interacting with the characters thereby alternating the plots themselves. Fforde supposedly bemoaned his cult status and hoped his current effort, The Big Over Easy, would appeal to the those without a masters degree in literature by delving into the world of nursery rhymes instead. Jack Spratt, beleaguered detective and notorious giant killer, heads up the Nursery Crime Division, and is charged with finding out who killed alcoholic womanizer Humpty Dumpty, found in a hundred pieces under his favorite sitting wall. An ambitious young detective named Mary Mary assists Spratt in interviewing witnesses and suspects such as Solomon Grundy, Wee Willie Winkie, and incarcerated mob boss Giorgio "Georgie Porgy" Porgia.More >>

Literally or metaphorically, great muckraking aims to make your gorge rise. Consider those heartwarming scenes of men and rats ground into sausage in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, or the yummy tidbits about how much you were lovin' e.coli in Fast Food Nation. By that standard, Devils on the Deep Blue Sea: The Dreams, Schemes, and Showdowns that Built America's Cruise-Ship Empires (Viking) merits only an unpleasant belch or two.

Sure, there are appalling moments. In the industry's early days, so many elderly cruisers passed away en route that one line used its meat locker as a temporary morgue. A beleaguered Carnival Cruises broke a four-day sitdown strike in 1981 by sneaking its private SWAT team aboard, then hustling the strikers onto buses that drove them directly to the airport and instant deportation. Grungy little Majesty Cruise Lines tried desperately to avoid foreclosure on a ship in 1995 by offering up a lifeboat and one of the stewards as collateral.

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A quick blast through the first 50 pages (in the spirit of numerological appropriateness) of 50 Cent's new autobiography "From Pieces to Weight" has been a bit of an odd experience. Tucked inside the title page is the offhand acknowledgment "This book was written with Kris Ex." That might explain who came up with such prose gems as the gangsta primer on cocaine to start things off ("Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology, called coke 'magical' and couldn't get enough of the stuff.") and odd bits of political insight ("Most politicians don't have any respect for the people who vote for them . . . but come election time, they're at the voters' mercy."). In fairness, it's a straightforward, decent read, and

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The atomic bomb has multiple fathers, most of them long-dead. Nobel-winning fission whiz Enrico Fermi checked out in '54. Leo Szilard, the polymath who persuaded Einstein to sign a letter to FDR stressing the weapon's necessity, joined him a decade later--three years before cancer claimed charismatic Manhattan Project director Robert Oppenheimer. Only Edward Teller made it past Y2K, handily avoiding major character status in Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (Soft Skull Press). Lydia Millet's exhaustively researched fifth novel was a work in progress by the time the megaton man passed in 2003, and libel considerations loomed.

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Chicklit convention dictates that marriage is the tidy, happily-ever-after endpoint of a long and infuriating quest for love. Local author Jennifer Jeanne Patterson begs to differ: In 52 Fights, a lighthearted memoir of her first year of bondage--er marriage--Patterson catalogues the petty arguments that have tested her relationship with hubby Matt.More >>

I finally started reading Norman Rush's early '90s novel Mating, and I'm loving it. Here's a little piece about it from Salon.

Hidden Prey by John Sandford (Berkley, $7.99)

Russian spies running amok in Duluth? Lucas Davenport, independently wealthy homicide investigator, has his silliest crime-solving spree yet in this, the 16th Prey novel by local bestseller Sandford. Actually, it's wrong to suggest that he solves anything-- Lucas is like a hero in an old movie serial, who finally gets the bad guy after suffering 12 chapters of ass-kickings. He gets more and more terse as his failures accumulate, and his use of the adjective "fuckin'" (i.e., "Get me out of this fuckin' story") escalates until it becomes amusing. Other than the premise, it's the only funny thing about the book, since Sandford's dialogue is so drab it makes Ed McBain's forced conversations seem like Mamet.