Why did punk implode so rapidly? Why did its bands flare up and fade out? And how did this movement resist yet revamp the hippies they rushed to replace?

In A Cultural Dictionary of Punk: 1974-1982 Nicholas Rombes, a professor of English, assembles a collage in the spirit of Walter Benjamin, a “montage and passageway of quotes” alphabetically arranged. He integrates primary sources, illustrations, his own fictional and factual stories. He constructs an alternative history: “In your dream, punk stayed a secret forever.” He emphasizes punk’s ephemeral arc, which failed to sustain its own outbursts of anger, shards of melody, and frustration with the malaise of the “post-Watergate, pre-Reagan” years when its earliest audience grew up.

Punk’s outbursts reacted to the failure of the ‘60s. Asked in 1977 “What do you want?” Johnny Rotten replied: “Freedom, I think they call it. The hippies used to call it that. But I bet there’s a better word for it.” Rombes stresses the split nature inherent in those born slightly too young for the Aquarian Age. This cohort resented the idealism turned commodification and complacency of the hippie era, but it yearned for the period prior, the clean nostalgia and pop sensibilities of the ‘50s. The cartoonish poses of the Dictators and Ramones signaled this reversion to melodic, aggressive, and funny messages. These bands, Rombes suggests, produced songs that spoke for TV-party, couch potato slouches: “that’s me.” However politically charged bands such as Avengers or Gang of Four challenged the listener to wonder: “maybe that could be me.”

If it was mystery author Jeffery Deaver’s intention to give new meaning to the phrase “an electrically charged thriller,” he couldn’t have generated a more powerful expression of it than the case of arch misuse of watts and amperes at the center of The Burning Wire. As the master of the scientific/technological approach to crime solving, he’s outdone himself with a form of weaponry and mass destruction we haven’t encountered before—virtual bombs of electric energy directed at a target at a surge level that’s lethal.

When the first of these sends a bolt of juice from a Manhattan power substation into a bus, killing a passenger, it causes criminalist Lincoln Rhyme to sit up in his wheelchair. What sort of demented individual would, or could, do such a thing, and what is this “unsub” (“unknown subject” in Rhyme-speak) after?

Working in his combination Manhattan apartment and state-of-the-art forensic lab, quadriplegic Rhyme, paralyzed from the waist down, runs his cases with a team of NYPD officers (including an overenthusiastic rookie cop), a few seasoned detectives, FBI men, lab techs, a devoted professional caregiver and his beloved field agent Amelia Sachs, a red-headed beauty.  Often ornery, he’s typically as demanding of himself as he is of his specialized crew. He now puts them to work on finding the mass murderer in their midst.

I was unfamiliar with the work of Martha McPhee until I learned she’d been on book tour in my hometown of San Francisco. Intrigued by the description on the bookstore website, I decided to do some investigative reporting. The reading, held at Booksmith in San Francisco, was titled “Writing about The News,” to reflect the book’s subject, economic boom and bust. But McPhee’s book really reflects a different kind of news: news about people’s dreams, news about New York City and most importantly, news about writers.

Dear Money is the story of a novelist, India Palmer, in New York City who appears to be successful but is actually struggling. (After all, a novelist without a “struggling” is like a hot dog without a bun.) India has won several awards and published four books, but ultimately she needs more money.

In short: India is living the reality of what it means to be a writer, and McPhee is not afraid to say exactly what that means. She spoke at the reading about proceeding with unease and uncertainty, wondering if revealing the man behind the curtain was really the right thing to do. With so many aspiring artists following that Yellow Brick Road towards the city of success and satisfaction, is telling the truth an act of nobility or betrayal?

Men: What would you do if your new wife suddenly started to act as though she was distracted by something that had nothing to do with you, something that’s been causing her to take off for hours without a word of explanation? If you’re surgeon Jonathan Ransom, on marital leave from your work with Doctors Without Borders, you follow her, as he did in author Christopher Reich’s Rules of Vengeance. When you find out that she’s liaising with another man and when you see her taking part in the annihilation of an important political figure and when she disappears and goes “black” (in the jargon of the spy trade), you drop your other obligations and go look for her. Your wife, code-named Emma, is a double agent.

In Reich’s third Ransom book, Rules of Betrayal, the doctor continues his search. It isn’t long before he learns that there’s a lost nuke in the wrong hands.

In what credible way do people get their mitts on such a thing?  In 1984 the bomb was carried aboard an American B-52 on a secret mission after Russian troops overthrew the government of Afghanistan.  The bomber went down in a remote and treacherous mountain range on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.  What has Emma got to do with this fouled-up piece of clandestine history?  And what kind of husband does she take Jonathan for anyway?

There are collectible books—and then there’s anything published by the Library of America, the independent non-profit organization founded in 1979 that Newsweek called “the most important book-publishing project in our nation’s history.”

The goal of the Library of America (LOA) is to preserve the literary heritage of the United States by publishing and keeping permanently in print authoritative editions of America’s best and most significant writing, from anthologies of Abraham Lincoln’s speeches to the acid-laced sci-fi musings of Philip K. Dick, each volume beautifully designed on high quality, acid-free paper, bound in a cloth cover and sewn to lay flat when opened. (Retail volumes come in a distinctive black dust jacket that you’ve no doubt seen on bookstore shelves; subscribers receive their books in a cream-colored slipcase edition.)