A few years ago, Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s book Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children sparked a media firestorm by arguing that many women end up husband-less and childless—and by extension miserable—because they’re too focused on their careers during their 20s; they put off husband-finding and baby-bearing until it’s too late.

I was 26 when that book came out, and what didn’t sound right to me was the implication that women in their 20s were too caught up in their careers to think much about dating or relationships. For better or for worse, it seemed to me that most women I knew, myself included, were very interested in dating. The women I’m talking about, fellow journalists for the most part, were by no means boy-crazy slackers. We worked long hours; many of us moved to faraway cities to advance our careers. Yet when my cell phone flashed with the number of one of my girlfriends late at night, not once did I think the caller was wracked with worry over an article she was writing. No, it was bound to be about relationship trouble or its inverse, loneliness, which might as well be called lack-of-relationship trouble.

Lori Gottlieb’s essays in The Atlantic seemed more on target. In 2005, Ms. Gottlieb wrote about her decision not to settle for the one she was with at age 36 but rather to plunge into motherhood by means of a sperm donor while continuing to search for her soul mate. This spring, she renounced that decision. In a provocative essay called "Marry Him! The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough," she says a man, any man, would have been better than solo motherhood (marriage is not so much a "passion-fest" as it is "a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business").

Agree with her conclusions or not, the world Ms. Gottlieb evokes—populated by women who are pursuing, successfully or not, both careers and relationships—sounds more familiar, and the number of women in their 20s and early 30s on sites like Match.com bears that out. So does the experience of Mary Pols, author of Accidentally on Purpose: A One-Night Stand, My Unplanned Parenthood, and Loving the Best Mistake I Ever Made.

MS. POLS CAN HARDLY BE ACCUSED of having been unconcerned with marriage and family. Far from it. But throughout her 20s, she kept falling in love with men who were a wee bit less marriage- and family-minded than she was. So the years go by until, at age 39, Ms. Pols, by then a successful film critic, unwittingly found herself among the ranks of professionally accomplished, unhappily single women. Like Ms. Gottlieb, she’d had opportunities to "settle" (in her case, it was a guy who still sucked his thumb in his 30s); unlike Ms. Gottlieb, she didn’t plan to buck convention.

"When I became a woman of a certain age, that is, around thirty-five, my female friends began floating the suggestion of single motherhood to me," Ms. Pols recounts. That irked her. She had no desire to concede romantic defeat. "I was not interested in a nontraditional life. … I longed for partnership with a wonderful man, marriage, and then family. Somewhere in the bottom of a box in my closet I had a pair of photos I’d ripped out of the Washington Post Sunday magazine almost twenty years ago, photos of a dark-haired model on a beach, wearing a slim-fitting, lace wedding dress, which I’d thought would be just the kind of dress I’d like to wear to my wedding."

Then she got pregnant. What happened next was not all that different from the movie Knocked Up, except that it takes place in a non-Hollywood world, where women actually contemplate … abortion.

For Ms. Pols the choice was agonizing. To be a single mother meant giving up on having what she wanted, what her married friends had: "the smart, loving, outdoorsy husbands … the Christmas card postcards of perfection." But an abortion? At 39? It could very well be her last chance to have a baby. So she decided to keep it.

Ms. Pols is a charming and insightful storyteller, and her memoir is both engrossing and endearing as it looks backward—at the romantic relationships that didn’t work—and follows her through a pregnancy replete with awkward questions; adjustment to working single-motherhood (which entailed moving, changing up her shifts at work and creative approaches to the day-care dilemma); and the death of her beloved parents.

Then there’s her relationship with the baby’s father, Matt, a sweet but unemployed man 10 years younger than she is. Their differences are seemingly endless. Ms. Pols is an excellent cook; Matt, on the other hand, doesn’t eat vegetables. "This was the man I’d seen painstakingly pick a lettuce leaf off a cheeseburger, as if even a shred of it would cause him to spontaneously combust," she writes. But she and Matt are both committed to their son, and Ms. Pols’ voice is so wryly self-critical—even when she judges Matt, she’s taking herself to task for being judgmental—that it’s easy to like her.

I don’t know why she didn’t find Mr. Right, nor am I prepared to declare that she would have been better off "settling" before she found herself alone on the brink of 40. What I do know is that Mary Pols is more appealing than those who claim to know what she did "wrong."

Adelle Waldman is a writer living in Brooklyn. She can be reached at books@observer.com.

Carol Gilligan is one of the most influential feminist social theorists of her time. She’s also one of the least rigorous. Now she’s written a novel. It makes perfect sense: Why bother with real people whose experience may not conform to your theories when you can just make up characters who fit precisely? (Well, perhaps because it doesn’t make for good art—but that’s a secondary concern to someone who feels she’s unearthed the essential truth of the human condition and is on a mission to disseminate it.)

Ms. Gilligan leapt to fame in 1982 with the publication of In a Different Voice, in which she argued that women reason out moral questions differently from men. Women, she claimed, are less concerned with abstract rights and more concerned with maintaining relationships, or “the activity of care.” This difference has traditionally been construed—wrongly, according to Ms. Gilligan—as a sign of intellectual inferiority or immaturity, rather than a different but equally valid system of values.

Not everybody is comfortable with the notion of distinct masculine and feminine moralities—I, for one, am not—but, apparently, a good many people liked what they read. In 1996, Time named Ms. Gilligan as one of the 25 most influential people. Jane Fonda was so enamored of Ms. Gilligan that the actress gave Harvard University, where Ms. Gilligan taught for many years, $12.5 million to create a center on gender and development (including an endowed chair named for you know who).

Never mind that Ms. Gilligan favors language more appropriate to a self-help guru than a social scientist. For example, in In a Different Voice, a book purportedly based on hard research, she writes, “The myth of Persephone … [reminds us] … that the fertility of the earth is tied in some mysterious way to the continuation of the mother-daughter relationship.”

In recent years, she’s moved further away from traditional social science. The Birth of Pleasure (2002) was a meditation on romantic love in which Ms. Gilligan expounded her theories largely through anecdotes and literary analysis. Her point: Children, particularly girls, know certain essentials truths about relationships that adults have buried in order to survive in a patriarchal society; our denial of these truths, as we grow up, causes internal disassociation, which in fact is the root of tragedy.

Ms. Gilligan is extremely confident of her analysis, writing, for example, that “what allowed me to open the door and see into love was my experience of finding in girls an honesty that I remembered and learned to dismiss.” See into love? That’s quite an achievement, especially for an academic. She even compares her “discoveries” to those of Charles Darwin: “Adolescent girls became the Galapagos on my journey,” she writes.

KYRA IS LESS a novel than an illustration of what she learned on that journey; Ms. Gilligan’s characters are her handmaidens, eager to spread her theories. The plot was laid out in The Birth of Pleasure, in which Ms. Gilligan describes a story she says she’s heard “over and over again” from real people: A woman falls in love, the man leaves. “She had picked up the chemistry, felt the connection, experienced the joy of love, and then it was as if it had never happened, as if she was deluded or crazy,” writes Ms. Gilligan. The world thinks the woman is pathetic for not letting go, but not Ms. Gilligan, who has the wisdom (acquired from girls) to believe in the woman. “I suspected that it was the very intensity of the connection that was responsible for his leaving,” she concludes.

And that’s exactly what happens in Kyra.

Kyra is the woman scorned, Andreas the lover who decamps. But he comes back, eventually—sounding as if he’d undergone serious indoctrination at a re-eduction camp designed by Carol Gilligan. “I had pulled back,” reflects Andreas, “driven by an urgency I had not questioned. My passion for [Kyra] felt like an obstacle.” He’s repentant, and now, when he makes love to Kyra, it feels “holy.” Because he’s learned his lesson, he feels “committed” to “opening” himself.

Andreas has become Ms. Gilligan’s idea of the model man, one who’s learned to listen to women. In fact, he’s learned to listen closely and repeat: He got that holiness bit from Kyra, who, a few pages earlier, described being with Andreas “as holiness entering the room.”

As for Kyra, she manages to seem like a stilted and artificial construct—and irritatingly smug. Here’s how she explains why she was drawn to a previous love: “It was a vision we held in common … to create a socially transformative architecture that would sustain and nourish democratic values.” Ms. Gilligan seems to expect readers to admire Kyra on her own terms, especially when she bravely fights the patriarchy by questioning the structure of the traditional therapy-therapist relationship. “I can’t work this out with you if you continue to hide within this therapy structure,” Kyra tells her shrink. “You said that women have to change the structures.” Personally, I think Kyra sounds a little petulant, but apparently I’m wrong. She’s a trailblazer, an über-woman. The shrink admires her courage and learns from her, dutifully changing the structure of the therapy, bringing in details about her own life to rectify the power imbalance between patient and therapist.

We’re meant to see Kyra exactly as Kyra sees herself, which is exactly as Ms. Gilligan sees her. There’s no need for irony or doubt because Kyra and her adoring creator (and, by the end, Andreas) are wise, and naturally see the “truth.”

OF COURSE, A novel can be moralistic, which Kyra certainly is, and still be good. Tolstoy took that path, to say nothing of Jane Austen. But the message must be convincing, and in some ways that calls for a discipline more rigorous than social science. Unfortunately, Ms. Gilligan’s theories, when personified, seem reductive and simplistic, and will resonate only with those who already share both her Rousseau-inspired belief in the natural goodness of humanity and her New Age feminism.

The echo chamber in which Carol Gilligan operates has been in evidence for some time. In The Birth of Pleasure, she wrote of a narrative, “It is exquisitely observed, with all the nuance we have come to expect from four-year-old boys.” She wasn’t being ironic, not in the slightest. You see, she really likes four-year-old boys (they haven’t yet begun to shed their authentic selves). But a person has to be deeply out of touch with the world outside her own books to write “all the nuance we have come to expect from four-year-old boys” and mean a lot of nuance.

Adelle Waldman is a writer living in Brooklyn. She can be reached at books@observer.com.

When New York’s first Starbucks opened in 1994, it wasn’t greeted with alarm, as phase one of an insidious plan to colonize the city. In that innocent era, Starbucks, with a mere 425 stores—compared to more than 14,000 today—still enjoyed a reputation for being kind of hip and even a little bohemian (O.K., upscale bohemian). It hailed from Seattle, after all. It did cool things, like offer its part-time employees full health benefits. The coffee was said to be good, if a bit burnt-tasting.

The public’s relative unfamiliarity with Starbucks until recently is rather astonishing, considering that today complaints about the company are as commonplace as its green-and-white cups.

Even more than the infamous Disney store in Times Square, Starbucks is, for many, shorthand for so much of what’s awry in the city today: It stands for rampant gentrification; for corporate greed that puts homegrown, mom-and-pop cafes out of business; and for homogenization that is stripping the city of its authentic charms—the old-school neighborhood coffee shops that call to mind scrappy artists rather than troops of would-be Bill Gateses. (And what’s with the weird, New Agey quotes on its cups?)

Yet New Yorkers frequent the place, in droves.

Enter Taylor Clark into this strange nexus of patronage and pique. Mr. Clark, a journalist from Portland, Ore., is no Starbucks junkie. Temperamentally, he inclines toward independent coffee shops (he doesn’t like Starbucks’ sterility). His book about the coffee chain’s mind-blowingly rapid rise from tiny, independent coffee roaster to global juggernaut evaluates, one-by-one, progressives’ complaints lodged against the company—everything from its treatment of its 100,000-plus network of low-wage employees and the Third World tobacco-coffee farms supplying its beans to its impact on communities and local culture.

But Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce and Culture is not a jeremiad against the company any more than it is a fawning account by a businessy type who thinks a rising stock price is synonymous with the common good. It is something else altogether—smart cultural criticism minus any academic gobbledygook. Mr. Clark is quite funny as he dryly sends up the excesses of the corporate behemoth, and Starbucked is an entertaining, highly readable book.

Moreover, it’s a telling and timely one. While Mr. Clark’s evenhandedness is likely to disappoint people who reflexively see Starbucks’ rise as “a sign of the impending apocalypse,” those who want more than empty validation of anticorporate bias will find much here that is revelatory about our culture—and our world. (More than 4,000 of Starbucks’ outlets are located outside the U.S., in places as far-flung as Bahrain, Cyprus and Macau.)

As Mr. Clark points out, Starbucks didn’t just expand rapidly; it created a market that barely existed previously: “Twenty years ago, a national chain of stylish cafes selling coffee at unheard-of prices seemed as likely to succeed as a designer corn-on-the-cob vendor or a luxury thumbtack company. …” That today Americans barely bat an eye at paying $4 for, in Mr. Clark’s phrase, “pitchers of milk and espresso” tells us just how effectively Starbucks has changed the way we think.

That’s frightening. But it doesn’t mean that all of our worst fears about the company are well-founded. One of Mr. Clark’s most surprising finds contradicts the conventional wisdom that Starbucks is putting independent coffee shops out of business. It “isn’t merely a bit off the mark—it’s completely false,” he writes. “In 1989, the United States could claim a grand total of 585 coffeehouses, according to statistics from the Specialty Coffee Association of America.” Today, there are more than 24,000 coffee shops in the nation (only about 10,000 of which are Starbucks), and that number is growing.

Once upon a time, coffee was a loss leader for diners, which usually offered dirt cheap bottomless cups of terrible-quality brew. By making it acceptable to charge upward of $2 for a regular coffee, Starbucks has enabled a ballooning number of coffee shops to thrive outside upscale-bohemian niche markets like New York and San Francisco.

Another shocker undercuts the assumption that Starbucks’ preeminence has hurt small coffee farmers whom the company bullies into accepting unfairly low prices. Indeed, Starbucks gets a lot of flack because only a small percentage of its coffee is Fair Trade-certified. (Fair Trade coffee is bought not at a market-rate price but at a guaranteed price high enough to ensure a decent living for the farmers.) Yet in 2006, Starbucks paid an average of $1.42 per pound, 16 cents more than the Fair Trade price of $1.26 per pound. The reason: The Fair Trade designation is tied to price, not to quality, and Starbucks—unlike the big food conglomerates that chemically reconfigure their coffee beans (and provide 60 percent of the coffee that Americans consume)—isn’t looking for the cheapest beans available.

Economic analysis aside, Starbucked is also full of cocktail-party-worthy tidbits. Who knew, for example, that a Canadian man sued Starbucks because a “faulty toilet seat smashed his penis against the bowl”? Or that a gentleman’s club in Seoul, South Korea, capitalized on its name recognition by calling itself “Starbutts”?

Anticorporate animus, bizarre lawsuits and pornographic riffs on its name … such are the wages of being as prominent as Starbucks. Well, those things plus hundreds of millions of dollars in profits each year.

Adelle Waldman is a writer living in Brooklyn.

“So many of us have enjoyed Tiffany products in our lives,” Mr. Doctoroff gushed.

I’m not sure his words registered with the coffee-cart vendors whom Tiffany’s had contracted to display turquoise umbrellas and give out free coffee (in turquoise paper cups) and cookies, but Mr. Doctoroff was probably right about most of the hundred or so well-heeled tourists and Wall Street types who came to watch the ribbon-cutting and partake of free breakfast and gift bags.

Not to mention: check out the new store, which is rather stunning. The 11,000-square- foot space boasts 35-foot ceilings, restored marble floors and elaborate friezes and panels. Located at 37 Wall Street, around the corner from the New York Stock Exchange, it sits at the bottom of a 25-story Beaux Arts-style skyscraper from 1907.

The glittering, glass-encased jewelry is set off by wire mesh lighting fixtures from which crystal drops cascade.

Luxury certainly abounds, but does this signal a new era for lower Manhattan, a return to its previous grandeur? Mr. Doctoroff says yes. The first Tiffany & Co. opened in 1837 just around the corner. But in response to the city’s changing demographics, the store kept migrating uptown. “The history of Tiffany & Co.’s gradual move north traces the slow decline of lower Manhattan over generations,” he said.

What remains to be seen is whether the store will perform as well as expected when it was announced in June of 2006—back when Wall Street earnings were heady and sub-prime loans were sources of revenue, not red ink, for the major investment banks. Clearly, the mood on Wall Street has changed.

Last week, Merrill Lynch posted its first quarterly loss since the high-tech bubble burst in 2001. All in all, the biggest banks on Wall Street have posted more than $5 billion in losses from bad loans in recent months. All in all, it’s not poised to be a great year for bonuses, which could spell bad news for the new retailer.

But, at the grand opening, the mood was cheery, and penny-pinching was certainly not a priority.

A small orchestra played “Moon River” on the street, while bejeweled models in turquoise dresses posed for media and others—in black, Holly Golightly gear—traversed the crowd and posed with tourists in photos.

And when the doors finally opened: Trumpeters dressed like the footmen of the robber barons heralded the opening of the store in much the same fashion as kings are welcomed in other parts of the world. Whether or not the store lives up to expectations, it certainly made its entrance to the neighborhood in a grand style.

Specifically, the one that was officially unveiled to reporters Wednesday at a heavily guarded and extremely lavish press conference (picture red carpets; chandeliers large enough for any room at Versailles; gold-plated utensils; and a peculiarly lissome black-clad catering staff at a construction site), while a crowd of earnest, sandal-wearing demonstrators across the street waved hand-lettered signs bearing such slogans as, “Value of Land: Millions. Defending our Neighborhoods: Priceless” and “Zoning Laws Trump Trump.”

The Trump SoHo Hotel Condominium, slated for completion in the spring of 2009, would be the tallest building between the financial district and the Empire State Building. Part condo, part luxury hotel, the glassy tower with panoramic city views will undoubtedly be opulent—some might even say garishly so (with cause: the top floor will house a members-only club called “SoHi”).

It’s no surprise that the building has detractors among the NPR crowd, people for whom a genuine concern for historic preservation coalesces with an equally genuine distaste for unabashed materialism (a.k.a., the cornerstone of our capitalist economy). What was particularly impressive about the 50 or so protesters who showed up yesterday was their diversity—that is, their chronological, not ethnic or racial, diversity. Twenty-somethings in nerd glasses—the This American Life crowd—waved their placards next to gray-haired devotees of Isaiah Sheffer.

Culturally, the protesters and the Trump crowd have about as much in common with one another as Southern Baptists do with herstory-loving nudists.

But its detractors can’t derail Donald Trump’s building by arguing that it’s in bad taste—at least not without sneaking in a law against that which doesn’t run into thorny First Amendment issues. What they do have, however, are zoning regulations. The building, located on Spring Street, between Varick and Sixth Avenue, is technically in a manufacturing district, which means residential buildings are forbidden.

The catch is that transient hotels—like S.R.O.'s—are permitted.

Now, no one would call the Trump SoHo an S.R.O. (A polished, miniskirt-clad Ivanka Trump told reporters at the press conference that prices on the time-share residences will begin at $3,000 a square foot.) But because the units will not include kitchens and because owners—technically called “time-sharers”—will not be allowed to move their own furniture into the units, the city gave the project the go-ahead.

In other words: Pay no heed to its name; technically it’s not a condo building.

No wonder the protesters feel that Trump and Co. have railroaded the city into approving a project that clearly violates the spirit of the zoning regulations.

To be fair, though, the protesters don’t entirely have the moral high ground. One can be fairly sure that the very same people who want the law enforced to the letter in this instance screamed just as loudly when the federal government began enforcing pre-existing immigration laws after 9/11.

As usual, the law is being used by each side as a cudgel, a means of getting what it already wanted, and so those who don’t want to see this building go up are newly gung-ho about zoning regulations that, in other contexts, almost everyone agrees are antiquated.

Also, as usual, the side with the most money appears to have won the day, a feat for which no apologies were made at the unveiling.

“Thanks to the protesters outside for helping to make this job so successful,” said Mr. Trump with a smirk. “We’ve already gotten more than 3,200 applications.”

Looks like the building’s opponents are going to have to try their luck stopping the next big-budget luxury project.

Is a house a metaphor? Robert and Lee Dalzell would say so. In The House The Rockefellers Built, they argue that Kykuit, the mansion that John Rockefeller Jr. (“Junior”) began building for his father in 1906, is laden with meaning. What exactly it means, however, is less evident than the fact that the authors—a professor of history at Williams College and a former reference librarian—are convinced something is at stake, something the reading public ought to care about. I’m not so sure.

Undoubtedly, the Dalzells show that Kykuit, which overlooks the Hudson River in Westchester County, is no ordinary house. By 1912, its estate comprised more than 2,000 acres of land, with 20 miles of roads, a golf course and some 90 houses, most of which were rented out to the estate’s 200 or so outdoor employees—who not only maintained the grounds but ran a dairy, raised chickens and other livestock, grew vegetables and flowers, operated a stable and guarded the estate’s perimeter from intruders. In the 1920’s, a “playhouse” was added for Junior’s children, with an indoor pool, a gymnasium, a billiard room and squash courts. This was no mere country getaway—it was a largely self-sustaining establishment that at its height bore some resemblance to a fiefdom in feudal Europe.

Building Kykuit was the pet project of Junior’s. As the son of the richest man in the world, he seems to have been bent on emulating the class pretensions and stuffiness of the British aristocracy while surpassing them in grandeur. The Dalzells are more charitable about his motives: They say he wanted Kykuit to be “modest and unpretentious—no opulent palace, certainly—yet still beautiful, its architecture and contents displaying the highest, most noble values.” To that end, “when suitably mature ivy plants were found in England, they were imported. … Clipped trees, some in the shape of animals, were imported from Holland. … Six orange trees said to be over two hundred years old and not even, according to [Junior’s landscape designer], to be rivaled by those at Versailles, were shipped in from a château in France.” (Maybe I spend too much time at Ikea, but this hardly fits into my idea of modest and unpretentious.)

If this book were merely a prurient look at how this almost unfathomably wealthy family lived, it would succeed. There’s plenty of voyeuristic pleasure to be had in learning the details of the Rockefellers’ daily lives and their myriad grand residences. But the Dalzells’ tone is bizarrely overripe, almost fawning, as if this were the stuff of epic drama. For instance: “As fate would have it … feelings were nearing fever pitch just as plans were being made for the delivery of the mammoth granite bowl. …” Or: “Literally scores of decisions had to be made, some minor, some not. Where would the heating plant go, in the basement of the house or in the coach barn? Should iron, copper or brass pipe be used for the plumbing system?”

What does this tell us? That even when you have a lot of money, building a house is a hassle? In the end, all this chronicle offers are a few juicy anecdotes about the extravagances of the rich—and even those are buried in a great deal of tedious detail.

Adelle Waldman is a writer living in Brooklyn.

Yet another memoir of a privileged young woman’s search for love in the big city. One dreads the tone of complaint: “How could this happen to me? I’m smart, successful and attractive—how can I be single?” The real question is how the story can be interesting to anyone but the author, who will surely conflate her personal investment in the outcome of her romantic liaisons with their intrinsic appeal to readers.

In fact, Amy Cohen has pulled it off: She’s produced a thoroughly unobnoxious, surprisingly touching book about living through her 30’s, always hoping for but never finding the one thing she wants more than anything else: a man with whom to start a family.

The Late Bloomer’s Revolution may not be an important book, but it’s a good one, a funny, understated and unbitter account of coping gracefully not just with life’s major tragedies (although Ms. Cohen encounters her fair share of those) but with its cumulative smaller disappointments.

Like any writer who decides to lay bare her travails in love, Ms. Cohen (a former Observer contributor) tells some cringe-inducing stories. As the book opens, she’s in her late 20’s, an aspiring screenwriter in L.A. She cooks a dinner for a guy—bakes him a cake, even—only to have him stand her up. She tells her mother, “If I had any self-respect, I would have called and said, ‘Fuck you! You lying piece of shit! Go to hell!’ But I didn’t. Instead I ate the entire cake …” And left five messages for the guy. And swallowed his lame excuse when he called a week later.

A few years later, Ms. Cohen is back in New York, recently fired from a glamorous job writing for a television sitcom, recently dumped by her boyfriend and reeling from the loss of her adored mother—who died of a brain tumor. Then she gets a rash that prevents her from leaving the house for almost a year (“By mid-October, I’d been inside for over two months and was starting to understand all too well the unstable paranoia of rural vigilantes”). One begins to feel that Ms. Cohen has had a raw deal.

But she perseveres with humor and charm. When her widowed father decides to get back into the dating market, he’s inundated with eager widows and divorcées. “It was not uncommon to visit his apartment only to have the doorman call up to say, ‘A lady just left a Bundt cake downstairs,’” Ms. Cohen writes. “Or to have a neighbor who was almost eighty send flirtatious letters written in girlish script, promising to invite him over for her famous Wiener schnitzel as soon as she returned from vacationing with her great-grandchildren in Austria.”

Ms. Cohen must cope with all the well-meaning people who can’t understand why she hasn’t just found someone. “Even though my sister had dated a bit before she met her husband fifteen years ago, as I would describe a date to her I would feel that I was describing nothing short of life in a foreign land,” she writes. “I could just as easily have been describing … whether to cook goat or monkey before my tribe went on a hunt.”

There’s no epiphany waiting for her in the final chapter, and that’s part of what makes The Late Bloomer’s Revolution seem like a mature take on a familiar dilemma. There’s no self-help mantra, no quick fix. In many ways, this disarmingly entertaining book is about learning to ride a bicycle at age 35. And to cook. And to play tennis. And to appreciate the people she does have in her life. In a wry, unpreachy way, it’s about pushing forward even when you don’t get everything you want.

Which is what sets it apart from many other memoirs of its kind.

Adelle Waldman is a writer living in Brooklyn.

Alison Rogers is a very likable person.

It’s a good thing, because her new book, Diary of a Real Estate Rookie, is only loosely about real estate. That is, it’s about real estate the way the NPR program Car Talk is about cars. While full of potentially useful information, what the book really comes down to is personality, and Ms. Rogers, like Click and Clack, is a winner. She’s a plucky Harvard grad (minus the obnoxious sense of entitlement that sometimes engenders), with a sharp wit, a lot of heart and a clear-eyed perspective on everything from luxury condos to class disparities to her own mood swings.

In 2005, Ms. Rogers, who formerly launched and edited the New York Post’s real-estate section, quit her safe corporate journalism job to strike out on her own in the world of real estate. Her initial plan was to flip houses in New Jersey. When that didn’t work out, she got her New York realtor’s license and became a real-estate agent in the city. Along the way, she wrote about her adventures in a weekly column for Inman News. This book is an expansion of her columns.

If the material sounds less than mouth-watering, it’s because you don’t yet know Ms. Rogers. She has turned a book about becoming a broker into a beach-read fun account of risking everything to change one’s life, a story with something valuable to say about the lofty topic of how we live now, especially in New York.

“As I write this, I’m eating dinner at my desk, which is also my coffee table; there’s no desk in this apartment, and I wrote most of this book sitting on my living room floor,” she tells us of the cramped $500,000 studio she shares with her husband.

Unfortunately, the mortgage on the apartment is about $2,000 a month, which at times presents a problem. Ms. Rogers borrowed $16,000 to finance her business ventures, and at one point in her first year she provides a detailed account of her finances. Her monthly income: $3,500; monthly expenses (not including taxes): $8,100. Naturally, the shortfall was a bit worrisome. “Woo hoo, I’m losing $60,000 a year!” she writes.

This is after she realized her first plan—to find and renovate underpriced houses in Newark, N.J., to create decent and affordable middle-class housing—was fatally flawed. “[Your partners] didn’t tell you it’s impossible in the first place,” an experienced agent tells her. “They’re just trying to pimp you out. If you get lucky, they make money, and it doesn’t hurt them if you fail.”

When it sinks in that the idea on which she has quit her job and borrowed as much money as she could get her hands on is never going to work, Ms. Rogers cries the whole train ride back to the city. “I was so upset that I called my mother, who isn’t the right person to call when you’ve just fucked up a career, not because she doesn’t have sympathy but because she’s a Southern judge, and her tolerance for stupidity is small,” Ms. Rogers writes.

Why did Ms. Rogers do this to herself?

Well, for classic American reasons: “I wanted what so many people want: a better income, a better life, room to raise my family near great schools, a job where I didn’t get ass-draggy just thinking about starting my day,” she writes. “I felt I had little to show for my 18 years of corporate work; if I had been a cop, at least I would be nearing retirement by now.”

And, O.K., quitting a safe job doesn’t rank up there with the most heroic acts of all time (I don’t recall any such tales recounted in The Iliad or The Epic of Gilgamesh), but for most of us regular people, who aren’t destined to lay siege to enemy cities or slay monsters—but who do, however, have interest piling up on our credit cards—it’s one of the scariest things imaginable.

And it’s pretty hard to imagine anyone who could read this book and not sigh with relief when Ms. Rogers makes her first sale. That, along the way, we learn a few things about buying, selling, renting and renovating real estate (“my first piece of advice is … marry a plumber”) is nice, too.

Adelle Waldman is a writer living in Manhattan.

Rick Moody’s fiction has always had a strong topical streak: He’s as concerned with particular aspects of contemporary American society—the barrenness of mass consumerism, say, or the tragically limited economic and aesthetic scope of the lower middle-class, or the dangers of nuclear power—as he is with the inner lives of his characters.

The relationship between this bankrupt and dehumanizing social backdrop and the personal dramas that Mr. Moody renders with empathy and precision has never been quite clear. That is to say, is the Hood family, in The Ice Storm (1994), doomed because it’s trapped in a tacky 1970’s upper-middle-class void? Or is the dysfunction innate—specific to these particular personalities—and simply set in a suburban Connecticut milieu as empty as it is affluent because, after all, everyone has to live somewhere? Or is the truth somewhere in between?

Mr. Moody has so far avoided giving answers to these questions. His method has been to produce deeply felt delineations of both social conditions and internal forces and then simply place them side by side. The reader can decide how the two are connected. In some circles, this is considered sophisticated: Mr. Moody doesn’t spell everything out.

I suspect that he hasn’t tackled the issue for himself—and it shows in his recent collection of novellas, Three Livelihoods. While engaging enough, the stories give short shrift to the character-driven elements that account for the power of his novels, relying instead on an easy topicality to create the illusion of greater literary weight. Along the way, even Mr. Moody’s prose suffers.

In the first novella, The Omega Force, Dr. Van Deusen is a wealthy, senile and alcoholic retiree who becomes convinced that the resort island on which he lives is a base for terrorists. As a narrator, Van Deusen is appealing only in his buffoonery; in real life, you’d cross to the other side of the street if you saw this guy coming. “My wife is my ally and my best friend,” he says, circling around the subject of his addiction to drink, “except when she misplaces items that properly belong to me, or purposefully removes items from the house under the misapprehension that this will in some way keep me from practicing bad habits or pursuing lifestyle choices that she considers unhealthful.” A pompous and self-deceived narrator can be an excellent conceit, both funny and revealing. The problem in The Omega Force is that Mr. Moody doesn’t seem to try very hard. The voice is only mildly funny, and it falters. Mr. Moody is inattentive, as if he’d decided that topicality is enough: Because the novella takes on an Important Subject—paranoia after 9/11, especially among Republicans—it doesn’t have to do much else.

The second novella, K&K, centers around a lonely office manager who becomes obsessed with angry notes left in the employee suggestion box that she superintends. The moral of the story is sophomoric: To be well adjusted to suburban, corporate life is to be not only lonely and sexually frustrated, but pathological. Mr. Moody is capable of much greater sophistication, but this cheap and easy “point” gives him a reason not to bother much with character. Depth is sacrificed on the altar of the Foucauldian cliché that sanity is actually insanity.

The final novella imagines a future in which most of Manhattan has been destroyed by a dirty bomb. Much of the remaining population has become addicted to a new drug, Albertine, which brings back memories in Proustian detail. The Albertine Notes is an entertaining sci-fi piece, but again, the writing is lazy. Kevin Lee, a denizen of this dystopia, is a journalist researching an article about Albertine. The novella is supposed to consist of the notes he’s made for his article, yet Lee seems to be speaking not as a journalist would, to his contemporaries, but to us, Mr. Moody’s contemporaries—a failure of craftsmanship for which sub-plots involving time travel and memory loss don’t sufficiently account. Upon reading some old police files, Lee writes: “Good thing those records were stored on a server in Queens. Since One Police Plaza is dust.” It’s not just that the point has already been made 50 times—Manhattan is destroyed, everything’s gone, no subways, no nothing—but the sentence fragment, used this way, is a juvenile attempt at portent.

Rick Moody is talented, but in this collection, he’s clearly resting on his laurels.

Adelle Waldman is a writer living in Manhattan.

Most of us know how the story of the original Penn Station ends: The breathtakingly grand neoclassical structure—designed to be a suitably splendid entryway to the nation’s largest city—was razed by the cash-strapped Pennsylvania Railroad in the 1960’s and replaced by the current charmless depot that we, unfortunately, know so well today.

The beginning of the story is equally compelling in historian Jill Jonnes’ new account, Conquering Gotham, subtitled A Gilded Age Epic: The Construction of Penn Station and Its Tunnels.

Great achievements of the past have a way of seeming inevitable after the fact. That’s certainly true of the tunnels that link Manhattan to New Jersey (i.e., the mainland United States). Conquering Gotham does an admirable job of conveying just what an engineering challenge the construction presented, as well as the urgency of the need by the late 19th century.

At that time, the only rail connection between New York and the rest of the country came into the city from the north, across the Harlem River, to the current Grand Central Terminal. This lone railroad, privately owned by the Vanderbilts, was inadequate to the needs of the growing city, Ms. Jonnes says.

The Pennsylvania Railroad was the nation’s largest, yet its trains came to an abrupt end in Jersey City. By 1901, 80 million rail passengers disembarked in New Jersey and were ferried into the city each year.

“With each passing decade, the situation became more untenable, more disastrous,” Ms. Jonnes writes. Sometimes, in the winter, the Hudson was too icy to navigate; at other times, the river was simply log-jammed by the boat traffic.

Alexander Cassatt, who became president of the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1899, was determined to find a means of getting its trains into the city. He flirted with a bridge across the Hudson; after all, the Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883. But by 1899, it was still the biggest bridge ever built, and the mile-wide Hudson would require one almost twice as large.

Ultimately, Cassatt didn’t want to shoulder the entire cost of a bridge—estimated at $100 million—since the Pennsylvania Railroad would be required by federal charter to share access with its competitors. (It’s rather mind-blowing that, at that time, private corporations undertook such mammoth projects without any public funding.)

In 1901, Cassatt decided to build tunnels instead, but this was no simple matter: A separate attempt begun in the 1870’s to connect New York and New Jersey had been stymied by one disaster after another as the silty riverbed proved unpropitious for tunnel-building. The half-completed tunnels were abandoned in 1891, and the man who championed the doomed project died bankrupt.

Nonetheless, Cassatt laid out an ambitious plan. The Pennsylvania Railroad, which also owned the Long Island Rail Road, planned to spend $40 million to $50 million to build 16 miles of tunnels, running from Weehawken, N.J., underneath Manhattan and then under the East River to Long Island City, with a new Penn Station at the system’s center.

Not only was the undertaking financed entirely by the railroad, but the company fought with the city for permission and wound up agreeing to pay New York an annual franchise fee of more than $75,000, to rise to more than $110,000 annually after a decade.

Cassatt hired Charles McKim, an architect who designed much of the Mall in Washington, D.C. The classically inclined McKim was given a great deal of financial leeway: His Penn Station would be the fourth-largest building in the world, built of glass and Milford granite, with a 150-foot-high domed ceiling and 60-foot Doric columns.

Altogether, the project took seven years to complete, and the cost rose to $100 million. Cassatt, who had staked his reputation on the project, died before its completion.

Conquering Gotham is a well-written and well-researched account of an astoundingly ambitious undertaking. Ms. Jonnes skillfully weaves together the multifarious aspects of the project, from the technical complexities and political wrangling to the personalities of Cassatt and McKim.

It’s a bit rich at times. She occasionally veers toward hagiography, presenting the Pennsylvania Railroad and its president as embattled pillars of rectitude in a corrupt world. When the railroad tried to buy up land around 32nd Street on the cheap before its plans were made public, word got out.

“Sensing his corporate enemies gathering, Cassatt felt forced to press forward before he was truly ready,” she writes.

You feel sorry for the poor guy—until you remember that he was no neophyte, but rather the president of the nation’s largest railroad in an era in which the railroads wielded unprecedented economic and political power.

Still, it’s a good story, well told. Knowing how it ends doesn’t detract, but rather lends pathos. It’s difficult to imagine reading this book without sighing over the untimely demise of all that grandeur.

Adelle Waldman is a writer living in Manhattan.