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America is not ready for the next big catastrophe, according to Stephen Flynn, a former Coast Guard commander. Flynn is concerned that California's earthen levees won't hold in the event of an earthquake.

When author A.M. Homes went home for Christmas one year, a "terrifying" message awaited her. Thirty-two years after giving Homes up for adoption, her biological mother was looking to get in touch.

Journalist P. J. O'Rourke says it's good to be from nowhere... like Toledo, Ohio. That's his hometown. He shares his thoughts about the city. His commentary was published in full form in the book, Good Roots: Writers Reflect on Growing Up in Ohio.

Heat author Bill Buford finds "his McGee" indispensable — that is, Harold McGee's essential tome On Food and Cooking. "McGee is the most important person alive writing about food," Buford says.

In July of 1956, wilderness activists Olaus and Mardy Murie made an expedition to the upper Sheenjek River of Alaska's Brooks Range to inventory an untouched wilderness. Five decades later, one of their young disciples returns to find the beauty intact.

When cooking author Julie Powell is looking for a hit of adolescent intensity, she heads for Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Those books "suck me under and spit me out, feeling as drained and fulfilled as a hormone-crazed bookworm half my age," she says.

At the annual Oscar gala, the cameras flash and reporters ask whose clothes you're wearing. But they only offer a glimpse of nominees and their escorts. This Sunday, commentator Peggy Orenstein will walk the red carpet with her filmmaker husband — another time.

Even in some of its more dicey neighborhoods, St. Paul, Minn., has the old-fashioned American look of an Edward Hopper painting. It's not particularly threatening looking, but for crime writer John Sandford, this is the territory of tough thugs.

Merde Encore is a pleasure so guilty that even the author, Genevieve, does not divulge her last name. And though Firoozeh Dumas keeps it hidden in the back of her shelf, she nevertheless finds it handy for learning to speak French the way a textbook would never teach her.

Young adult books sell well, but the genre is not without flaws. That's why young adult author Garret Freymann-Weyr is encouraging teens to venture into the adult shelf. She has three books for smarties that anyone — young or old — will enjoy.