It doesn't hurt that James Wolcott can write up a storm.  He proves this once again with a gritty and compulsively readable memoir, Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York.  Not quite a memoir in the conventional sense, rather Wolcott has written five long essays that seek to encapsulate the reckless, head-long world of movies, Punk music, porn and the New York City Ballet during a time when the glittering metropolis was both grimy and resplendent, when the likes of Norman Mailer, Blondie and Balanchine somehow co-existed in an urban fever dream of creativity not seen since.

Yet another looming casualty of the Information Age is the iconic roving foreign correspondent.  These days, when any clown with a cell phone can capture footage of streets riots in Cairo and Tripoli,  the events themselves—often stripped of all context—become just the latest media blips in a never-ending parade of near-meaningless “news stories.”  In Never the Hope Itself: Love and Ghosts in Latin America and Haiti, ex-National Public Radio correspondent Gerry Hadden offers a welcome corrective to this trend, as well as a reminder that turbulence in these regions is nothing new.