PBS contributors assemble eyewitness accounts and flash photography to give an overlooked West Coast jazz scene its day in the sun, and their Harlem of the West makes Matthew Moyer a happy kid indeed in the eye candy store.

Looking for a light read that you’ll forget the moment you finish? Then don’t read Becoming Abigail. Chris Abani’s poetic prose, subtle sequences, and graphic detail make Tim Wardyn quite thankful that he’s not Abigail’s cousin, Peter.

With the newest installment of the Noir anthology series, John Hood takes a few bloody bites out of the Big Bad Apple and savors the poisonous taste.

Old people finding romance and adventure in the seedy side of Florida? No, it’s not life on the mean streets of Bradenton, it’s Joe Ashby Porter’s new novel. Carl F. Gauze gives it a close read.

Feel like a little something different for the Summer holidays this year? You might want to think about bypassing Daytona and maybe catch a wave to the Southeastern shore of Lake Michigan. Bob Pomeroy , as usual, does your research for you.

Using the blog format as a literary device is an innovative gambit, and Ian Koss is suitably impressed with the results in Jim Munroe’s new novel. This also answers the question about what to do when you’re young and you’ve got a winning occult ritual/performance art piece - go on tour with indie bands!

Ian Koss swoons over the new coffee-table compendium of his fave zine, Make. The DIY revolution continues! Inventors will take back the garage from crappy garage bands!

Hannah Seman gives the straight dope on Robert Black’s Liberty Girl.

Learn how to use a circle template to express the essence of human despair. Brian Heater did, and he’s a better man for it.

In which Ian Koss neglects his children to play with their toys, and asks us to believe he doesn’t drink, gamble or womanize. A likely story.

Those still searching for the definitive biography of John Kennedy Toole, after the disappointing Ignatius Rising, will not find it in Ken & Thelma, which serves as less of a biography of the Confederacy of Dunces author, than a personal memoir of author Joel L. Fletcher, who knew his subject personally. Brian Heater looks for the deeper colors of the portrait.

Hosanna! Ian Koss sings the praises of Rails, and this tome is his undisputed Gospel!

Run for the hills, folks. The Kochalka bears are coming. Brian Heater sets traps.

Tired of fruitlessly looking for a kite photography platform? Unwilling to pay thousands of dollars for a steadicam holder for those scenes in your homebrew slasher flick? Ian Koss thinks O’Reilly’s Make may be the mag for those do-it-yourselfers with too much smart in their pants.

You’re stuck in the middle of nowhere, a hostile little hole where the residents look mean as toxic dump rats. Stranded without your wallet, without your car, and now you gotta figure out how you’re going to scare up some food and cash to call for help. Maybe if you’d read Jim Rose’s Snake Oil you’d know what to do. But you didn’t. And Ian Koss thinks you’re screwed.

Tired of rehashing the all-too-current Bush years? So’s Ben Varkentine , but he’s making an exception for unabashed “Hollywood liberal” Danny Goldberg’s catalog of attacks on free speech in the past 25 years. He hopes you will too. Politics and free speech, myths and realities, come one, come all, my friends, to the show that never ends.

“By any objective measure… Bush is a name that belongs next to Adams, Kennedy and Roosevelt as a force whose influence spans decades,” the Washington Post reports. This book documents the collective careers of the family all the way through George W. Bush, but makes a star of his Poppy. Shelton Hull takes in the shine.

Say it ain’t so – is Rivers Cuomo really such a jerk? This and other revelations were presented to Daniel Mitchell in Rivers’ Edge, an unauthorized history of Weezer and its members.

A less than reliable take on politics written with real old-school punch, like a cross between William S. Burroughs and Walter Winchell. The shock would reverberate across the world if a fifth of Sherman H. Skolnick’s reports on national and international politics were ever proven true. That’s what Shelton Hull says, anyway.

James MacLaren muses on Frank Zappa, in the process writing one of the BEST book reviews I’ve ever read.