Today's neocons would love it: Terrorists disturbing the peace and security of the United States are hunted down, not at taxpayer expense, but by a private agency for personal gain. The free market rules! Well, sort of. It was attempted a century ago, when enterprise was not so much private as it was wild and woolly, and concern for such minor legal details as individual rights was even less than it has become in our day. Eventually, of course, the government had to step in to arrest the bad guys and put them on trial-and when it did, the attendant early-20th-century corruption sounds as modern as in a John Grisham novel . . .

Novelist Erin Hunter has stumbled upon an original (and unwaveringly adorable) idea for a children’s book series: It’s an action-packed, battle-filled epic adventure staring… cats. Warriors: The Power of Three, which is now on its fourth book, Eclipse, has proven popular with kiddies who can’t get enough of . . .

Concert pianist and critic John Bell Young sets out to describe and explain Beethoven's nine symphonies with minimal technical jargon. His Guided Tour largely succeeds. Young offers solid summations of the structure, emotional content and intellectual background of each symphony. He also touches on subjects as various as Beethoven's celebrity status, the role of conductors in interpreting the score, the political backdrop . . .

How to Be Single by Liz Tuccillo, co-author of He's Just Not That Into You, is a book that attempts to tackle the massive conundrum of single life for women: It's important to be happy while single, but who wants to spend time working on being happy and single when you can spend time finding a man to make you happy? And that, quite frankly, is the downfall of this book for me, though it might serve as satisfying chick-lit for the masses. Tuccillo, one of HBO's Emmy Award-winning executive story editor's for "Sex and the City," puts her personal spin on the single . . .

The United States is lamentably behind the Western and Eastern nations that have already elected powerful female leaders. And despite the dogged perseverance with which she attempted to earn a victory, Hillary Clinton's defeat in the presidential primaries earlier this year helps continue this embarrassing legacy. When Vermont's former governor Madeleine Kunin published her book Pearls, Politics & Power: How Women Can Win and Lead more than four months ago, not only was Clinton very much in the race, but she seemed set to win. Instead of dealing a decisive blow to the glass ceiling that keeps women in America . . .

Many words have lost significance through overuse or misuse, and nowhere is this truer than in music jargon. The meaning of "Americana" is at the heart of a travelogue by music critic Amanda Petrusich. The journey takes her to Memphis and the Mississippi Delta, the Woody Guthrie Archives in New York and the homes of neo-hippie "free folk" musicians in New England. Petrusich is a little iffy on the history, often drawing . . .

Bob Dylan, Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen all suffer from genius exhaustion. They are hip nostalgia. Neil Young's superb Greendale went into so many different idioms (album, film, novel, comic book) that our short-attention culture couldn't manage its complexity. It was lost in translation. The Stones, Police and other rock brands are on Viagra tours, artificially getting it up. Weather Report is bringing back fusion that never should have existed and still doesn't if you want to authentically get down with jazz or rock. Tom Waits jumps out in front of all of them by scuttling up from the subterranean nether culture that has permitted him to grow artistically without suffering the kind of fame that can force one to keep going when it is long past . . .

Goldsmith and Wu, law professors at Harvard and Columbia, were always skeptical of the cyber utopianism of the 1990s with its delusions of a worldwide web without laws or corporate ownership, a Freedonia of the imagination. In the new edition of their important analysis of order and the Internet, the authors

For tangible proof of water's life affirming significance one doesn't have to go very far; examining the continual rediscovery and reinvention of Milwaukee's rivers will suffice. Whether it's early settlers drawn to the rivers' abundance of wild rice and waterfowl, fur traders looking for profitable inroads into Wisconsin's luxuriant wilderness, feuding founders using the rivers as battlegrounds or city officials seeking to transform them . . .

Italy is a country of many distinct regions, mutually incomprehensible dialects, squabbling political parties and great artistic fertility. The history of Italy is a lot to fit into one book, even if limited to the past two centuries, but British historian Christopher Duggan manages in around 600 well-written pages. One of his persistent themes is the country's doubtful search for identity. Even Mussolini failed. The dictator . . .