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As a Pakistani-born Muslim raised in Britain by Old World parents, Sarfraz Manzoor would seem unlikely to write a love letter to the music of Bruce Springsteen. But the British journalist’s charming and affectionate memoir is exactly that, chronicling his struggles to navigate the territory between the expectations of his strict parents and his own hopes and dreams.

At the center of the story is the iconic American rock star whose teenage struggles with a strict working-class father inspired the music that Manzoor would cling to throughout his adolescence in the neighborhood of Bury Park.

Greetings From Bury Park (the title is an homage to Springsteen’s first album, Greetings From Asbury Park) rises above the predictable coming-of-age genre on the strength of Manzoor’s unflinching honesty and his unique world view. He rejects his father’s blind allegiance to religious rules and Pakistani traditions, but he never rejects his father. His rebellion is quiet and respectful—no drug or alcohol binges, no rehab, no destructive behavior. And he poignantly shows how he comes to admire the life his father led even though it wasn’t what he chose.

In Springsteen’s lyrics, Manzoor discovered the courage to want something different and the wisdom that he could forge his own path and still be a good son. He recounts the night, at 16, when he lay in bed, headphones on, and listened to Springsteen for the first time. “A piercing harmonica announced the start of the first song. `I come from down in the valley,’ it began, `where mister, when you’re young, they bring you up to do just like your daddy done.’ From those opening words I wanted to know what happened next.”

You don’t have to be a Springsteen fan to enjoy this book or understand Manzoor’s devotion. You just have to recall a time when you were still open enough that music had the power to shatter the world view you inherited.

Manzoor takes us back to that tender place in a vivid way. But he doesn’t abandon us there. He takes us along as he journeys to manhood and makes sense of all that teen angst. And he doesn’t reject his adolescent obsession from the middle-aged cynicism that sometimes rewrites our personal histories. He embraces the geeky “nutter” of a university student who slept on the sidewalk to buy tickets for a Springsteen show as enthusiastically as he embraces the thirtysomething man who overcame his terror of being a Muslim traveling to the U.S. after the 9/11 attacks by taking a trip to see The Rising tour. He celebrates his past and his present equally, honoring one’s relation to the other. Ultimately, that’s his lesson, and it’s a good one. [Amazon, Amazon UK]

After Hurricane Katrina roared through New Orleans two years ago, breaching the levees and knocking a delightfully alive metropolis onto life support, local newspaper columnist Chris Rose became something of a literary avenging angel.

The writer, previously known mostly for having the inside scoop on where to go and what to eat in New Orleans, shucked off his patina of frivolity and instead became the anguished voice for a city wounded by nature and haunted by neglect.

His Times-Picayune columns, by turns angry and reflective, became must-reads over breakfast in the battered Crescent City, helping the newspaper become an indispensable part of the community—a feat not many papers can claim these days. In 2006, Rose self-published a collection of his post-Katrina columns under the title 1 Dead in Attic. Publisher Simon & Schuster has picked it up, and for this volume has added an additional 140 pages of Rose’s more recent work.

Arranged roughly chronologically, from citizens’ desperate flight out of Katrina’s path to the depression many have experienced from having their lives and city ripped apart, 1 Dead in Attic makes for heartfelt, harrowing yet often uplifting reading. Unlike most of the TV coverage, which focused on Katrina’s broad, destructive sweep—the Superdome, the ragged rooftop figures, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job”—Rose hews to the small, personal strokes.

So a trip to the drugstore becomes an excuse to examine New Orleans’ troubled psyche: “We talk about prescription medications now as if they were the soft-shell crabs at Clancy’s,” Rose writes in one of the columns, titled “Mad City”: “Suddenly, we’ve all developed a low-grade expertise in pharmacology.

“Everybody’s got it, this thing, this affliction, this affinity for forgetfulness, absentmindedness, confusion, laughing in inappropriate circumstances, crying when the wrong song comes on the radio, behaving in odd and contrary ways.

“A friend recounts a recent conversation into which Murphy’s Law was injected. ... In perhaps the most succinct characterization of contemporary life in New Orleans I’ve heard yet, one said to the other, `Murphy’s running this town now.’ Ain’t that the truth?”

Surprisingly, Rose doesn’t delve too deeply into politics. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin is the subject of at least one column, but this story is not dominated by politicians, the Army Corps of Engineers or even FEMA, though it’s clear Rose doesn’t think too much of anyone who may have prolonged the city’s agony.

Instead, he mostly writes about the small stories of death, hope and survival that make his adopted hometown a special place that’s worth savoring and saving. Whether it’s remembering how he, as a Wisconsin college student, fell in love with New Orleans he first time or telling the story of elderly Ellen Montgomery—who refused to leave and survived with her house full of cats and paintings intact, Katrina be damned—Rose doesn’t see a city full of victims but one of spirit and fortitude.

For all of their power, the columns that make up 1 Dead in Attic probably worked better when doled out two to three times a week in the newspaper format. Read together as a book, the litany of torment and tragedy is numbing. At the other end of the spectrum, some of his attempts at humor—as in “Tutti Frutti,” with all of its candy-bar references to Nagin after he gave his infamous “Chocolate City” speech—fall flat.

Still, even though many bad things have happened to Rose in the last couple of years—such as the collapse of his marriage and perhaps even his sanity—the ultimate message is that the last thing any true New Orleanian wants is pity. He, like New Orleans, survives.

It’s surely no accident that Rose quotes what he says is an indelible New Orleans credo: “When life gives you lemons—make daiquiris.” [Amazon, Amazon UK]

Norman Rockwell brought us a singular vision of small-town America, as did Edward Hopper. Now photographer Gregory Crewdson has created a new, uniquely unsettling American landscape: a highly atmospheric, cinematic world that pays homage to the past while standing on its own.

While Rockwell took the occasional, sly swipe at the status quo, raising a critical eyebrow at injustice, his depictions of a quasi-mythical Main Street, U.S.A., were by and large peaceable, safe. His paintings are a well-mannered (but hardly toothless) survey of the social, political and professional mores that governed the coffee shops and dinner tables of the American middle class.

At about the same time, Hopper’s paintings were infusing the same subject matter with something slightly more sinister. Hopper, one of America’s greatest realists, was more interested in the interplay of sunlight and shadow than he was in making social commentary. Even so, his art seemed to recognize the danger lurking on quiet streets, or behind closed doors. Hopper took Rockwell’s cheerful coffee shop and turned it, ever so subtly, into a lonely, lustful place, the customers slumped together against the threat of darkness.

Today, half a century after Rockwell and Hopper, Crewdson presents us with another American realism. And while Crewdson works in a different medium, he tackles the same streets, houses, cars as his predecessors—the same distinctly American iconography, revisited after decades of neglect and despair. This is Americana stripped of sentimentality: the working poor, the forgotten middle class, surrounded by failure and realizing they’ve been robbed of the life they were promised.

Main Street, once bustling, is hushed now, its deserted storefronts papered over and forgotten. Commerce, as we all know, doesn’t live downtown anymore. And even if it did, Crewdson would evict it for the sake of an image: His photo shoots, elaborately documented in the second half of his book, Beneath the Roses, resemble movie sets, with lights, makeup artists and meticulously arranged props. This is Crewdson’s realism: fictional characters, events, disappearances, slights, all taking place on a set, carefully staged to reflect life at its most hopeless.

While the tone of his photographs is overwhelmingly bleak, Crewdson, who claims Diane Arbus and Walker Evans among his influences, occasionally betrays a wicked sense of humor: One photo shows a sedan halfway through an intersection, abandoned by its driver. The remaining passenger stares, alone but apparently unbothered, as light streams from the Independent Living Center on the corner. Crewdson is especially gifted at conveying a cold physical intimacy—sex without love, nakedness without desire. His subjects wear consistently blank expressions; the young and old, coupled and alone, are equally removed from their surroundings, equally dulled to personal tragedies and disappointments.

The book’s stark design and oversize pages create a dramatic canvas for the 175 photographs, taken during extended shoots from 2003 to 2007. Locations, scouted with the precision normally reserved for feature films, include Adams, North Adams and Pittsfield, Mass., as well as Rutland, Vt.

Like any bona fide realist, Crewdson isn’t interested in showing us a fantastical, dystopian version of ourselves. Instead he focuses on the life he imagines is already happening: undocumented, behind closed doors and shaded windows. And his photographs dare us to take a good, long look. [Amazon, Amazon UK]

Bangladesh, the low-lying delta-country east of India, seems to enter the West’s consciousness only during Mother Nature’s regular wraths, when video is beamed worldwide of the newly flooded homeless.

For that reason alone, A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam is a welcome novel, one that tries to humanize the story of Bangladesh’s birth, a country born not of one, but two, civil wars in the last 60 years.

Anam starts out provocatively enough: “Dear Husband,” young widow Rehana Haque writes to her dead husband, “I lost our children today.”

The novel then flashes forward 12 years to 1971, in the months leading up to the civil war between Pakistan’s western and eastern halves, the split of which eventually created Bangladesh. This is where we find Rehana, who plans menus for Eid celebrations in a comfortable Dhaka neighborhood and attends card games with a polyreligious group of women.

Her children, Sohail and Maya, are university students. Like many of their classmates, they have eagerly embraced communism as a response to their society’s inequality and poverty.

The family’s existence is turned on its head when Islamabad sends soldiers to quiet the agitating students. Rehana finds herself caught up in her children’s cause, and allows the revolutionaries to bury weapons in her back yard and to use a former rental unit as a makeshift infirmary for a wounded Bangladeshi officer.

She finds herself falling in love with the officer, a new affection that will directly compete with her love for her son.

Golden Age is filled with passages that almost poetically describe the horror of civil war: a captured soldier’s torture and the nonhuman that returns home to his family, the desperation and hopelessness of the refugee camps along the border with India.

“They were explorers, pioneers of cruelty, every day outdoing their own brutality, every day feeling closer to divinity, because they were told they were saving Pakistan and Islam, maybe even the Almighty himself, from the depravity of the Bengalis,” Anam writes about the oxymoronic pairing of faith and violence.

But she has trouble making more of the descriptive passages she has created. Her characters seem one-dimensional, and Rehana is particularly superficial.

Is Rehana a devoted mother willing to sacrifice everything for the happiness of her children? Or is she a selfish woman with an Oedipal fixation on her son, which makes her cold toward her daughter? If she is both, “Golden Age” doesn’t make that clear.

And as dramatic as the opening line to Rehana’s dead husband is, it is little more than a great opener. The unspeakable act she committed to regain custody of her children from relatives in Pakistan is actually trivial. The reader is left feeling a little had.

Anam, a Bangladesh diplomat’s daughter, grew up in New York and Bangkok, away from the turmoil back on the subcontinent. But anthropological research for her doctorate at Harvard University put her in the path of many of those who witnessed Bangladesh’s violent creation. She plans for Golden Age to be a trilogy, which gives her and us a welcome opportunity to better understand the origins of her troubled homeland. [Amazon, Amazon UK]

Thirty years ago, the writer Hunter S. Thompson looked down from a lofty New York City hotel balcony, and considered jumping.

“I feel like I might as well be sitting up here carving the words for my own tombstone,” he wrote in an introduction to The Great Shark Hunt. “… And when I finish, the only fitting exit will be right straight off this (expletive) terrace and into the Fountain, 28 stories below and at least 200 yards out in the air and across Fifth Avenue.

“Nobody could follow that act.”

He was probably right, but he didn’t jump. Not yet.

Instead he went on writing, drinking and taking drugs for 28 more years, never quite living up to his own first act as a writer.

Two years ago, he stopped trying. In poor health, he shot himself to death at his mountain home in Woody Creek, Colo., at the age of 67.

Even now, one is not quite sure what to make of his death. Was it a selfish and cowardly exit? Or a cool, courageous decision by an American original determined to leave on his own terms?

A new book co-written by Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner doesn’t resolve that question, but is worth reading all the same.

Less a biography than an oral history, Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson features contributions from more than 100 people who knew Thompson well. Together, these voices trace Thompson’s rise from the county jail in Louisville, Ky., at age 18 to his role in the 1970s as one of the most recognizable writers of his time.

They also tell how Thompson’s last decades were spent in a war between his own savage talent and the ruinous addictions that had come to dominate him. By 1977, what Thompson feared most had come true: His best writing was behind him.

Even the exceptions—and they included brilliant pieces such as his coverage of Roxanne Pulitzer’s divorce trial in West Palm Beach, Fla., and his furious, vicious and unforgiving obituary of Richard Nixon—stood out for their rarity.

He was encouraged to write more, Wenner says in “Gonzo.”

“I made several serious attempts to get him write a 1,500 word column for us once a month,” Wenner writes. “… How difficult could that have (expletive) been? Fifteen hundred words for $10,000? ... But he just couldn’t do it.”

For fans of his work, it’s pretty dispiriting stuff. But maybe we expect too much of our heroes.

In a 1996 interview, I asked Thompson if he wished he had jumped after all.

“Well, there’s a part of me that thinks I should have jumped,” he said. “But I would have missed a lot of fun. Dramatically, it would have been perfect had I jumped. Is that what you are asking me, whether I should have jumped?

“I wrestle with that. ... Yeah, I was up in New York again, a few weeks ago at press parties, I had a suite on top of the Four Seasons, with a huge terrace, that looked all over the city, and I could still see the Plaza Fountain.”

He eventually decided that the fun was over. Reading Gonzo may help you understand why. [Amazon, Amazon UK]

Switch “Afghan” with “Vietnamese” and you experience a chilling sense of deja vu while reading Opium Season.

The real-life story offers a perfect example of the old saying: Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. It’s a lesson author Joel Hafvenstein relearns as a condition of employment in perhaps the “dirtiest job” in foreign service—as a contractor in the Taliban/Khan-ruled poppy fields of Afghanistan.

It’s a region “they used to call Little America” in the 1950s, where American engineers built whole cities, Hafvenstein writes. Many Afghans remember a homeland lush with grapevines and fruit trees. Not anymore. In 2004, employees of the Chemonics company huddle together like hunted birds, trying to rebuild the Afghan infrastructure while holed up in sandbagged “safe” rooms. During his tour of duty, Hafvenstein will see many of his co-workers murdered.

Among the natives, political affiliations change direction like poppies swaying in the breeze, and true loyalties lie with centuries-old blood ties and warlord fealties. Add memories of hated colonialism and the ancient lure of opium profits, and you have a morass as impenetrable as fog in an Afghan mountain range.

Into this brutal setting step Hafvenstein and his co-workers, under contract with the U.S. Agency for International Development. They are there to help poor Afghan farmers quit cultivating poppies and find new ways to make a living. The Americans have high hopes and good intentions. They don’t want to “lose our chance to make a difference.” Hafvenstein writes of their plans with a heart-wrenching naivete.

But this is a land ripped by religious violence, where children’s math books teach kids how to calculate how many seconds it would take for a speeding bullet to pierce an enemy’s head. Soon it is the Chemonics staff members who are in the natives’ rifle sights.

The Americans attempt the normal stuff of business. Local employment applicants fill out forms requesting that they be given jobs “where I won’t be killed.” Hafvenstein tries to figure out a field payroll system where he won’t constantly be robbed, stuffing packets of currency inside his clothing. Choosing the wrong word, or even the wrong food, during a social visit can lead to death.

The Americans adrift in early 21st-century Afghanistan face the same nightmare as in 1960s Southeast Asian killing fields. What have we learned since then? Alarmingly, there’s little in Opium Season to show that we’ve learned much of anything. The book details episode after episode of cultural misunderstandings, artlessness and credulity on the part of the Americans.

But what Hafvenstein’s book offers is the chance to wise up quick. It contains important histories of the region with background on everything from colonialism to past poppy wars and Russian interventions. His prose, detailed and robust, cuts a clear path through the dizzying Afghan political minefield. We can read the book and discover new directions, learning where we should be and shouldn’t be in this time of war. [Amazon, Amazon UK]