The organizers had secured the location at the last minute (Mr. Clinch had said he would only mount the exhibit if it could be on the iconic boardwalk), and the floor was still covered in interlocking foam rubber squares.

The photographer, 45, stood in the center of the room, greeting friends. A Leica M6 was slung over his shoulder like a guitar. “I have it with me all the time,” he said. “It’s kind of my main axe, you know?” Dirty-blond and mutton-chopped, wearing jeans, a vest and an untucked shirt, Mr. Clinch reminisced about the days before he had an all-access backstage pass to any show he liked. He started to build his concert portfolio, which now includes Bob Dylan, Jay-Z and Radiohead, by smuggling his camera past security in pieces. “I would take the lens off, give it to my girlfriend, who’s my wife now. She’d hide it; I’d hide film. I’d take the camera body and stuff it down my pants. Then we’d get in and I’d have to sneak up to the front and assemble everything back together.”

Outside, a mellow overflow crowd drank beer on the boardwalk, mingling expectantly in the late-summer evening air. Where was Bruce? Speculation deepened with the night. He’d roar in on his Harley. He’d sneak up in his Range Rover. He’d have a posse. He’d come alone.

Andra Napoleon, an attractive, dark-haired woman in a black-and-white polka-dot dress, was circling the exhibit with 10 copies of a letter she had written to Bruce in her purse. Each letter was sealed in an individual red envelope, and each envelope bore large, clear handwriting: “1984 – I was 21, you were 34 – Stone Pony.” The reference, Ms. Napoleon said, was to a night she shared a small table and two rounds with Mr. Springsteen at his fabled shore haunt. He told her about his upcoming album—Born in the USA, it would be called—and she tried to sell him a membership to Jack LaLanne, where she was a manager. “We were hanging out for over an hour, and we just clicked.”

The letter, which she was inspired to write after listening to the title track of Mr. Springsteen’s latest album, Working On a Dream, recounted that evening a quarter-century ago, and hinted at what Ms. Napoleon claimed was a lucrative business proposition. “I wish I could blurt it out, but I can’t!” she said. She had promised her mother that she would tell no one but Mr. Springsteen himself. “I want Bruce to launch it, because it is as big as Bruce.”

Ms. Napoleon’s horoscope that morning in Star magazine, which she said she never reads, but had opened while in line to buy lottery tickets at the 7-Eleven, had read: “Make friends with the boss!”

As the event wound down, this seemed less and less likely. Just as the Transom was wondering whether to skip the last train back to New York, Mr. Clinch got a text from Mr. Springsteen himself. The Boss wasn’t coming. Word on the boardwalk was that he had gotten stuck at a birthday dinner for his mother-in-law.

About halfway through Dan Baum’s brilliant but frustrating Nine Lives, a ventriloquist’s collage of New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina, Tim Bruneau, a young, strong cop hungry for some “boot-in-the-ass” policing, chases a suspect through the back streets of one of the city’s seediest projects. He turns a corner, the action freezes, and you find yourself looking through his frantic yet perceptive eyes.

“The courtyard was full of wiry young men with short dreadlocks, wearing identical white wife beaters and sagged carpenter’s pants. The fucking uniform of the day: What do they do, call each other every morning? They looked at him with no expression, a field of identical statues. But that one—his chest was heaving. When Tim made eye contact, he took off.”

Moments later the scene ends in a devastating, unforgettable instant.

Mr. Baum handles this incident—as he does so many throughout the book—with a breathtaking precision of language, imagery and pacing, as well as first-rate storytelling.

Still, even before that scene, I was exhausted—too many people, not enough plot. So I decided to try what English professors call contesting the narrative: Rather than read straight through, I went character by character. Wilbert Rawlins Jr., the high-school band director who fathers his orphaned students better than his own children; JoAnn Guidos, the proud, busty owner of Kajun’s Pub who started life as John; Billy Grace, the respected fixture of wealthy uptown society who challenges the vast economic discrepancy that is the city’s birthright; and so on. The nine tragic, resilient lives Mr. Baum painstakingly unfurls—in some cases over more than four decades—are broken into vignettes often less than a page long, alternating in no fixed pattern. The entries for all but one character are datelined. 

Because Mr. Baum’s titular metaphor is also his central conceit, a choose-your-own-adventure approach is easy to pull off, though by reading the book in a streamlined, goal-oriented fashion (that is, as a New Yorker), you may miss out on the unique and delicate atmosphere Mr. Baum is trying to re-create. The episodic structure gives Nine Lives a rhythmic, almost musical feel, reminiscent of the distinct yet intertwining melodies of New Orleans jazz. More obviously, it reflects the relaxed, non-directed nature of life in the Crescent City. As he puts it, New Orleans is a “city-sized act of civil disobedience,” its citizens “masters at the lost art of living in the moment.”

That’s half-true: New Orleanians live at least as much in their past as in their present; the future is what they have trouble imagining. This may seem charming when whiling away a steamy afternoon on the front porch with a beer, but when it results in the failure to provide Category-5 protection for the levees despite insistent and dire warnings (still the case today), it’s deadly.

MR. BAUM ARRIVED in the city immediately after the storm, as almost everyone else was leaving, or trying to. He stayed for weeks, then returned constantly over the following two years (sometimes with his wife and writing partner, Margaret Knox, who doesn’t get an author credit, but who’s described on Mr. Baum’s Web site as being responsible for “at least half” of what is released under his name), conducting hundreds of interviews as he tried to rebuild New Orleans story by story.

The first two-thirds of Nine Lives takes place between the mid-1960s and Aug. 29, 2005, and paints every corner of the city, from men repairing streetcar tracks on St. Charles Avenue to a secret transsexual mixer in a downtown hotel to the intricate, year-long process of stitching together an Indian chief’s Mardi Gras costume. The final, gut-wrenching section recounts the shattered days and weeks after Katrina, dredging up the horrific images that were projected onto every television screen in America. But here the victims have names: The woman perched on a roof, inches from the rising floodwaters, is Faye, Belinda Rawlins’ cousin; the one lying on Jackson Avenue with her head smashed in by a fallen streetlight, that was Marie. Tim Bruneau drove her around in the backseat of his cruiser, pleading with any hospital or morgue to take her in. When no one would, he was told by his superiors, “Undo what you did.”

As Mr. Baum writes in his introduction, the media in general were so fixated in those first awful weeks on the disaster itself that they missed the larger story of this “essentially weird” place, and why it’s worth saving.

Mr. Baum has performed a remarkable service in this regard, salvaging not just lives but entire communities in copious, stunningly rendered detail. The writing, always precise and nearly flawless, is a sort of flavored third person, merging the character’s thought and speech patterns with Mr. Baum’s narrative oversight. When this works well, as with Tim Bruneau’s chase scene, it works astonishingly well.

But even the best stories tend to lose their momentum as the shifting Sound and Fury narrative keeps you from settling in. Perhaps this is intentional, an attempt to instill in the reader the sense of dislocation and disorientation of catastrophe. And while it doesn’t quite work at book length, the depth and care with which Mr. Baum has drawn these nine lives demonstrates his understanding of their common dilemma, that is, “how to live in a place that by the rules of modern America has no right to exist.”

Jesse Wegman is managing editor of The Observer. He can be reached at jwegman@observer.com.

It was a quick cab ride 25 blocks north to his kitchen, which, as Times health blogger Tara Parker-Pope noted recently, is exceptionally small: 7 feet by 8 feet, Mr. Bittman claimed, but this seemed generous.

Lanky and loose-framed in blue jeans and a sweatshirt (he has lost 30 pounds over the past couple of years), he rooted through his refrigerator and tossed, among other things, a Ziploc bag full of roasted vegetables on the counter. He had cooked them that morning with Meredith Vieira on The Today Show, where he is a regular guest.

“I have chestnuts!” Mr. Bittman said from halfway inside the fridge. “That’s interesting.”

He emerged and considered for a moment the pile of food on his counter. “I think actually we should … sauté the Savoy cabbage, make it taste good, stuff the monkfish with some stuff, put the monkfish on top of the Savoy cabbage, cook a grain with some chestnuts.”

And there it was. Dinner in three parts, with almost no planning, from the man who has become, like The Joy of Cooking’s Irma Rombauer before him, America’s foremost home cook, the go-to authority on everything from braised spareribs to paratha to pad thai to spaghetti with butter and Parmesan.

With his next book, Food Matters, due from Simon & Schuster in January, he’d like to change the world. But for the moment, some simpler accolades.

“I use him for everything from pancakes (he’s great on pancakes) to grilled fish to things like his great recipe for baby artichokes with olives and tomatoes,” wrote Times executive editor Bill Keller in an e-mail, adding that his old yellow edition of Mr. Bittman’s breakthrough book, How to Cook Everything—which has supplanted Joy on many New Yorkers’ countertops—“is all gravy dribbles, wine rings and sauce stains.”

“It’s the dirtiest cookbook in our kitchen,” said Babbo chef Mario Batali, with whom Mr. Bittman has been gallivanting this fall, along with actresses Gwyneth Paltrow and Claudia Bassols, on the PBS food-porn show Spain … on the Road Again.

The commenters on Ms. Parker-Pope’s blog seemed more interested in what’s between the lines. “Mark Bittman rules!” … “Mr. Bittman looked so cute” … “I have a major crush on Bittman. Is he maried [sic]?”

Answer: Yes. To Kelly Doe, an art director at The Times. Back in the one-bedroom apartment he shares with her, which is decorated in orthodox Upper West Side (floor to ceiling bookshelves, enormous cactus), Mr. Bittman put a pot of water on the stove. His gray hair was shaved close and his round wire-rimmed glasses sat askew on his nose, giving him an air of persistent skepticism.

“Let’s start the chestnuts,” he said. “They’re a pain in the ass.”

MR. BITTMAN, who is 58, has no formal culinary training.

He was born in Manhattan and grew up in Stuyvesant Town; his parents still live there. After graduating from Clark University with a degree in psychology, he drove a cab in New York. (“People find it exciting, but it’s not that exciting.”) But it was the early 1970s, and he had become active in left-wing politics. He moved to Boston, where he worked as a community organizer.

“He was not one of these guys who struck one with their ambition and drive,” said an old friend from that crowd, Naomi Glauberman, also a journalist. “You didn’t say, ‘Oh my God, he’s gonna get somewhere.’”

Mr. Bittman settled in New Haven with his first wife, Karen Baar, who worked for Planned Parenthood (they divorced in 2002). After they had a daughter, Kate, he found himself cooking dinner most nights and realized he was good at it.

He also knew he was a good writer. One day a friend who worked at The New Haven Advocate, a local weekly, put him in touch with the paper’s editor. Mr. Bittman walked in and said, “I want to be your restaurant reviewer.” Told there already was a restaurant reviewer, Mr. Bittman replied, “They suck.”

Hired the next day, he soon began venturing beyond criticism. “I started putting things in like, ‘The restaurant serves what they call “pasta with pesto,” but it really wasn’t. Here’s how you make it.’”

He peddled his work to other publications around the country, with modest success. Editors liked his writing, he said, but “I had no cred whatsoever in the world of food. I’d say, ‘I have this great recipe for monkfish with Savoy cabbage.’ They’d say, ‘That’s great, call a chef. We want his monkfish recipe, not yours.’”

Mr. Bittman may not have been famous, but his voice was familiar, unpretentious and straightforward. In 1992, he sold his first cookbook, Fish, to Macmillan. “As far as I know,” he said, “I was the first American food writer to write about the joys of fresh tuna.”

He tested recipes on his family, which by then included a second daughter, Emma (now a server at David Chang’s Momofuku Ssäm Bar). “I would have friends over for dinner,” Kate remembered, “and he’d be making an enormous squid in the sink. We’d say, ‘Can you make us hot dogs instead?’”

Fish was an immediate hit; suddenly even The New York Times wanted a piece of Mr. Bittman. He began writing a regular column for them, the Minimalist, and working on a cookbook with the chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who shared his philosophy of simplicity, and whose star was rapidly rising in New York.

Around the same time, Macmillan, which had recently given up the rights to The Joy of Cooking, asked Mr. Bittman if he wanted to write a book like that for a new age.

“I said, ‘No! I don’t want to do it like that,’” Mr. Bittman said. Joy at that time was, as he described it, “collegial, like Diderot or Montesquieu.” In other words: “It sucked. Because it had all these different voices and they didn’t agree with each other.”

He preferred to emulate Ms. Rombauer’s original: “A person who knows how to cook telling people in his voice how to cook.”

The publisher agreed, and soon Mr. Bittman was getting up at 5 a.m. every day to write recipes for two hours before taking the kids to school. This took a year. Then came the winnowing.

“We took out the foie gras terrine and the wild boar stew and the bullshit that was part of cooking in those days, and we added—I’m not kidding—grilled cheese, popcorn, tuna sandwiches, hamburger. Like, total, total, total basics.”

HOW TO COOK EVERYTHING was published in November 1998, with an initial print run of 85,000. It sold out by Christmas. Today, the book and its offshoots—including a popular vegetarian adaptation—have sold more than two million copies. A 10th-anniversary edition of the original was released this month.

“We sell a hell of a lot of copies,” said Nach Waxman, the owner of Kitchen Arts & Letters, on the Upper East Side. “The world was ready for a big general cookbook because the famous ones had sort of basically disappeared. The Joy of Cooking, which was a sensation still after all those years … had just lost its legs with these various revisions.”

The tremendous success of Everything, along with the Minimalist, whose weekly deadline he has not missed once in 11 years; his own blog, Bitten; and the various TV and Web appearances, have given Mr. Bittman a scope of influence that he never anticipated.

“I didn’t see an opportunity for me to write about issues in the food world until recently,” he said. “I was just writing about recipes and having my cute little witty New Yorker sarcastic voice. But now I can pretty much find a platform for anything I want to say, so I’m saying what I think.”

What he thinks is that the American diet has been largely destroyed by the industrialization of food production and the massive amounts we eat as a result. “There’s a huge change going on in the way people look at food,” Mr. Bittman said. “I think it’s unavoidable, and I want to be a part of that.”

It’s not a new idea; the journalist Michael Pollan, for one, has covered this ground extensively. But Mr. Pollan doesn’t write recipes.

Food Matters lays out the case—philosophical and culinary—that Mr. Bittman has been making in print and on video over the past year. Like Mr. Pollan’s, it might be boiled down to: Eat less meat. It’s a rule he follows dutifully—no eating animals during the day—and to which he attributes much of his weight loss.

Also: Farmers’ markets may be a good thing, but they’re not going to save the world.

“People buy food in supermarkets,” said Mr. Bittman. “And they’re gonna buy food in supermarkets. So, it doesn’t matter if they buy good meat at the farmers’ market or good broccoli; what matters is they go to the supermarket and buy good broccoli—or even bad broccoli!—instead of meat.

“The grass-fed beef concept is really great,” he went on, “but if you don’t cut consumption, it doesn’t matter. There’s not enough room for grass-fed beef any more than there’s enough room for imprisoned beef.”

It’s the same with seafood. “All this farm-raised stuff, it’s crap,” he said, but he is wary of promoting wild fish. “If I tell you to go eat it, it’s gone.” Mr. Bittman said he cannot update Fish because so many of the 70 species he wrote about have since disappeared.

Not to ruin one’s appetite for dinner or anything! After several trips to the kitchen for knife tests, the monkfish was almost done. Mr. Bittman was waiting it out in the living room, slouching low in his chair and cradling a glass of white wine. He wasn’t freaking out in the slightest.

“As you can tell, I know what I’m doing, but I had no idea exactly what was going to happen. I made plenty of mistakes,” he said. Among them, he didn’t chop the cabbage enough; he forgot to turn the skillet on before searing the monkfish; and he burned his fingers while peeling the chestnuts. None of this bothered him.

“I have no interest in helping people becoming chefs,” Mr. Bittman said. “I have an interest in 50 percent of the people in America knowing how to cook. And whether they cook like chefs or not, I don’t care. It’s probably better if they don’t. It would be better if they cook like me, which is adequately.”

jwegman@observer.com

"It was a slow day and the sun was beating on the soldiers by the side of the road. There was a bright light, a shattering of shopwindows; the bomb in the baby carriage was wired to the radio.”

These are the opening lines, the breathtaking opening image, of Graceland, Paul Simon’s biggest-selling solo album. Listening to them stream effortlessly against the song’s insistent bop, it’s easy to lose sight of the bloody, terrorized scene they depict. But read it on the page, in silence, as Lyrics: 1964-2008 permits you to do, and the extent of Mr. Simon’s genius hits you like a shot.

In a Hemingway-size fistful of words, he creates a world as precise as any—lulls us into it with soothing alliteration (slow … sun … soldiers … side)—and then, literally, blows it up.

Lyrics is both encyclopedic and, as with any book of words set to music, necessarily incomplete. It moves from Mr. Simon’s deceptively simple songs with Art Garfunkel, through the exuberant explorations of his early solo work, to the brilliant yet often inscrutable blockbusters, Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints, and, finally, to the less-well-known but still searching work of the past decade.

What’s remarkable about reading these lyrics strictly as text is how unremarkable they frequently seem; as David Remnick notes in his brief but superb introduction, their power and poetry is inextricably tied to the music they accompany. Who knows which comes first? It’s clear that Mr. Simon writes his words with the music in mind and vice versa. (This may explain why he has never before in his 44-year career released a book of lyrics.)

There are a few clunkers, as you would expect in such a vast body of work, but these pale when set against the stunning quality and consistency of Mr. Simon’s work over the years. He has the rare, transcendent talent of being able to compose natural, sometimes lengthy sentences that scan and rhyme as though there were no other way to write them (“René and Georgette Magritte/ With their dog after the war/ Were strolling down Christopher Street/ When they stopped in a men’s store/ With all of the mannequins/ Dressed in style/ That brought tears to their/ Immigrant eyes”). Even when there are no rhymes at all—as in “America”—Mr. Simon’s control of language and imagery is so masterful that you only notice it on the page.

There is a Nabokovian playfulness to much of his work, phrases and stanzas that are at once abstract and precise, flamboyantly loose and sculpted to within an inch of their life. From “Thelma”: “Last night I slept on a rented pillow/ A silver moon above my head/ A thirsty dreamless sleep released me/ And I reached for the phone by the side of the bed.”

“You have to be a good host to people’s attention span,” Mr. Remnick quotes Mr. Simon as saying about the songwriting process. “They’re not going to come in there and work real hard right away. Too many things are coming: the music is coming, the rhythm is coming, all kinds of information that the brain is sorting out.” The depth of psychological understanding this represents—not to mention the generosity of spirit—is evident throughout this definitive collection. While it may not be a substitute for the real thing, it’s an essential document of arguably the greatest popular songwriter of our time.

Jesse Wegman is managing editor of The Observer. He can be reached at jwegman@observer.com.

I’m proud to say that I’ve never been thrown out of Shopsin’s General Store. This is due primarily to the fact that I’ve never visited it, neither in its two hallowed West Village nooks nor in its current, humbler digs amid the multiethnic scrum of the Essex Street Market. But on a more hypothetical level, I have a gut feeling that Kenny Shopsin—founder, owner, chef and foul-mouthed philosopher—would take a shine to me.

At least, I hope to God he would. The list of those who have crossed Mr. Shopsin and suffered the consequences is long and illustrious; a request for corn chowder, hold the bacon, for instance, will not be granted, but may well get you your soda poured over your head, followed by summary ejection and lifetime banishment.

“From the beginning, I was different from your average grocer,” Mr. Shopsin considerably understates near the beginning of Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin, his brilliant, hilarious and infuriating sociocultural manifesto masquerading as cookbook.

Mr. Shopsin does, technically, run a restaurant, in the sense that he makes food for people to eat on the premises, and in exchange they give him money. But Shopsin’s has always seemed to be a personal proclamation more than anything else.

Together with his wife, Eve (who died a few years ago and to whom the book is solely and charmingly dedicated in top-of-the-eye-chart type), Mr. Shopsin started his small shop in the early 1970s, selling everything you’d expect a general store would. The difference was that he didn’t believe in the American retail edict that the customer is always right; to the contrary, “until they show me that they are worth cultivating as customers, I’m not even sure I want their patronage.” The feeling has not infrequently been mutual. “A lot of people get out of here real fast,” Mr. Shopsin notes with pride.

THE BOOK, LIKE THE store, is an elegy to a dying New York, one where a shop owner can bathe his kids in the sink while he’s making tuna salad, and tell the Health Department to fuck off when they point to the turkey sitting out on the counter all afternoon.

Which sorts of actions should not be confused with an aversion to rules. Mr. Shopsin has established lots of rules over the years, including: no copycat orders (“I don’t like people who can’t think for themselves”); no parties larger than four (“they don’t interact with other customers”); and absolutely no substitutions (this being, perhaps, understandable in light of a menu that has contained as many as 300 soups at a time). But what if you’re deathly allergic to, say, peanuts? See ya! “Go eat at a hospital,” Mr. Shopsin adds helpfully.

Survive all the hazing, however, and you’ll learn that Mr. Shopsin genuinely loves running his restaurant, and he welcomes people who understand the world he’s trying to cultivate. That world is defined by the quality of its relationships—both among customers and between customers and staff. (This may not seem too different from small, locally owned shops all over the country, but you can’t do anything quietly in New York.)

As with many highly principled people, there’s a whiff of protesting too much in Mr. Shopsin’s worldview. It’s not about “us” and “them,” he insists, but of course it’s all about that—he says he can tell whether a new patron is going to “work out” the moment he or she enters the store.

OH, YES: THERE ARE recipes, too. A lot of them, all straightforward and without pretense. Some, like mac ’n’ cheese pancakes, look really good. Instructions are along the lines of what you might expect. (“If you like your eggs more cooked, cook them more.”) But Eat Me isn’t about the recipes, which are just a conduit to get you from one Shopsin treatise to the next.

Those treatises are wonderfully written, though in that regard they’re jarring. Carolyn Carreño, who receives a co-author credit, presumably took Mr. Shopsin’s words from interviews and his own writings and then knitted it all together. While the result is highly readable, it’s at odds with Mr. Shopsin’s righteous bombast. It feels too clean and reasonable, as though someone had stuffed Mr. Shopsin into a nice new suit and combed his hair. There’s something disconcerting about calm, measured sentences from a guy who describes looking up the skirts of the “young girls” leaning over to scoop ice cream, or who says things such as “Bacon pancakes and bacon french toast both remind me of pussy.” You feel as though the book should arrive already spattered in grease and guacamole.

Mr. Shopsin says that the process of putting his book together was similar to raising children, which he says “allows you to go through your life a second time.” It’s a touching observation, and it’s clear that despite the financial difficulties that have plagued Mr. Shopsin and his store from the beginning (hence the multiple moves), his children are all devoted to him, to the shop and to the philosophy that guides it all. He writes without bitterness, “Shopsin’s has never been about making money. It is our lives.”

As for the book, Eat Me is probably the safest way to understand and appreciate Kenny Shopsin: At least he can’t kick you out in the middle.

Jesse Wegman is managing editor of The Observer. He can be reached at jwegman@observer.com.

Had you been asked to assemble the legal team to brief and argue before the Supreme Court a case that would result in "the most important decision on presidential power ever"—as one noted court observer called Hamdan v. Rumsfeld shortly after it came down in 2006—your first choice probably wouldn’t have been the odd couple that found itself at the center of this particular constitutional storm: an irreverent, long-winded defense lawyer with attention-deficit disorder who graduated at the bottom of his Navy class, and a brilliant, bullheaded young law professor who didn’t even know where he was supposed to sit in a courtroom.

But these two men were the core of the team—assisted by several high-powered law firm partners—that took up the defense of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a 30-something Yemeni with a grade-school education who, until 2001, had a day job driving around the world’s most wanted man, Osama bin Laden.

Mr. Hamdan, who was picked up in Afghanistan in the panic-filled months after Sept. 11, was taken to Camp Delta, at Guantánamo Bay, where he soon became the administration’s first target in its attempt to try, by executive-ordered military commissions, the "worst of the worst."

Charles Swift, from the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, was Mr. Hamdan’s assigned defense counsel; Mr. Swift soon realized that the case was far more complex than he could manage alone, so he enlisted the help of Neal Katyal, a Georgetown law professor and former Supreme Court clerk who’d already published a law-review article strongly critical of the commissions.

The Challenge, by Jonathan Mahler, is a step-by-excruciating-step retelling of the three years Messrs. Swift and Katyal spent researching, writing, traveling, interviewing and arguing—both in the courtroom and with each other—as they raced the clock to stop the government’s efforts to try Mr. Hamdan on its terms. Or, as Mr. Swift puts it, "gazing down the barrel of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue."

They were ultimately victorious, in the sense that the Supreme Court ruled in their favor and invalidated the military commissions as they were constituted at the time. But it’s a strange sort of victory in which you must tell your client, "This doesn’t mean you go free. It just means you have a better chance at a fair trial."

Sure enough, Congress subsequently created a commission system that passed constitutional muster. On Aug. 6, the day after Mr. Mahler’s book was released, the commission convicted Mr. Hamdan; he was sentenced to five and a half years, of which he has already served all but a few months.

ON ONE LEVEL, Mr. Mahler’s story is of a piece with a raft of other books about the administration and its behavior after Sept. 11. It’s clear, for instance, that the commissions, which were established essentially in secret, were never intended to provide anything resembling the protections inherent in a civilian trial. The goal, as at least one former prosecutor has since stated openly, was to get as many convictions as quickly as possible, with virtually no regard for procedural niceties such as allowing the accused to be present at all stages of the trial, or prohibiting evidence obtained through torture.

"It was an inversion of how the process of meting out justice typically works," said one prosecutor. "Normally you have the crime first and then you find the criminals. When we showed up, they already had the criminals. We were tasked with finding the crimes."

The book is both exhilarating and exhausting, much as the experience itself must have been. It’s also not, in the end, about Mr. Hamdan, but about Charles Swift and Neal Katyal.

Mr. Mahler is diligent in detailing the immense difficulty both lawyers faced in representing a man who spoke no English, lived for long stretches in what amounted to solitary confinement and had virtually no idea what was happening in his case, let alone in the world at large. Their visits with him at Guantánamo were highly restricted, at best, and each time they returned to a country anxious to make someone pay for Sept. 11.

Both men spent months at a time buried in case law, constantly preoccupied with writing and rewriting drafts of their latest brief. Mr. Swift’s marriage collapsed under the strain, and after the ruling he was essentially fired from the Navy. Mr. Katyal, whose father died of brain cancer during a particularly intense period of litigation, often left his wife alone to care for their three young children.

MR. MAHLER'S PROSE IS clear and sure-footed, but he gets bogged down in the smaller points of procedure, and at times seems to be struggling with his own inner Katyal and Swift—the dogged, punctilious methodologist versus the inspired moral crusader. The problem is that the former too often prevails. Although Mr. Mahler is careful to remind us that for Mr. Hamdan, the pressing issues are not the abstract legal ones but the small indignities of day-to-day life at Guantánamo, the author occasionally loses sight of what makes this—or any narrative—a compelling human drama.

As former Solicitor General Walter Dellinger said of the ruling in Hamdan, "The farther back you stand, the more significant it appears." It’s the same with this book.

As any lawyer knows, the law consists of vast swaths of procedure punctuated, as in opera or baseball, by explosions of drama and intrigue. It doesn’t matter that a good argument can be made for any particular detail in the book; an engaging retelling of a long legal battle must telescope months or years of mindnumbing motions, stays, reply briefs, reconsiderations and the like in order to linger on the good parts. Anthony Lewis’ Gideon’s Trumpet—a masterpiece of the genre, as well as an obvious model for Mr. Mahler—focused on one man’s petition to the Supreme Court, and quoted extensively from the oral argument there, to great effect.

Likewise, The Challenge kicks into high gear as the lawyers prepare for their argument before the Court. Mr. Katyal’s anxiety over what is essentially his first legal argument is palpable; he practices for months before the best legal minds in the country, and beats himself up for days when it doesn’t go well. In the moments before the case is called, he thinks he’s made a terrible mistake by insisting, against all advice, on arguing it himself.

No doubt, the preceding 250 or so pages make the climactic argument at the Supreme Court that much more thrilling. They also create a critical historical record of a watershed moment in American history. Still, one wonders how many non-lawyer readers Jonathan Mahler will have lost along the way.

Jesse Wegman is managing editor of The Observer. He can be reached at jwegman@observer.com.

He was there for a fund-raising gala thrown by Farm Sanctuary, which rescues and protects farm animals. The party was emceed by television host Melissa Rivers, who told the Transom that a difficult pregnancy had ended her brief flirtation with vegetarianism. Still, “I’m not a huge meat eater,” she said, “and if I do, it’s an occasion, and then it sits in my stomach like a brick.”

Actress Ally Sheedy also professed discomfort digesting flesh. “Honestly, I feel like, why do we eat meat at all?” she said. “I do eat fish. I find that a little bit easier.”

Ms. Sheedy was talking with Michele Balan, a comedian in a serious mood. “We tend to blame everything on China and the third-world countries, but in this country it’s just as bad,” Ms. Balan said. “I was horrified at the Kentucky Derby when they shot that horse.”

“They didn’t shoot the horse!” Ms. Sheedy gasped. “They euthanized it.”

Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons lurked behind a pillar with his gazelle-like girlfriend, actress Porscha Coleman. “Every so often I get a glimpse of obvious truth,” Mr. Simmons said softly, “and the obvious truth is the abuse of animals is a horrible thing.”

As the crowd was prodded downstairs for dinner, servers were circulating platters of mock-chicken nuggets. “Usually the waiters steal food,” one said. “Not tonight.”

She also weighed in on the Democratic primary (“I like the black guy, but I like Hillary, too”) and joked about approaching Barack Obama nervously at a Los Angeles fund-raiser and asking, “‘Senator Obama, what are you going to do to reduce the national debt?’”

“And he said a really interesting thing. He said, ‘I’m Kanye West.’”

CBS anchor Katie Couric arrived late and very tired from Chicago, where she’d spent the day shooting a feature for 60 Minutes, and descended the stairs to an after-party with the actor Rob Morrow, who had emceed the event. “I think she’s really funny,” she said of Ms. Silverman. “Really crude. But really funny.”

What was her favorite joke of the evening? “Some of them were pretty outrageous,” said Ms. Couric, who was clad in a shiny, sleeveless gown. “I don’t want to say they were that funny because then who knows what kind of brouhaha it would create?”

Mr. Morrow had introduced Ms. Silverman by declaring that it was him, and not the star Matt Damon, with whom she had been infamously intimately involved, as explicated in a hit video short. “There’s not a lot of people she trusts with her stool,” he explained, in case the audience missed it the first time.

At the party, Mr. Morrow was approached by a wide-eyed woman with blond curls. “Are you really her lover?” she asked, with apparent sincerity.

“No,” Mr. Morrow replied. “I wish.”

Among the vast library of written material produced in the wake of Bruce Springsteen’s three-plus decades of superstardom—biographies, hagiographies, magazine profiles, fan testimonials, academic treatises, lyric exegeses, blog and private journal entries—Greetings From Bury Park may be the first to blame Mr. Springsteen for the writer’s inability to get laid.

“If not for Bruce,” Sarfraz Manzoor writes near the end of his sadly unilluminating memoir, “I might have grown up and settled for the love of a sensible girl.”

Alas, he discovered that “in hoping for the kind of love found in the songs of Bruce Springsteen, at the age of thirty-three I found myself single and alone: a rebel without a clue.”

A British radio and newspaper journalist who grew up in a working-class Pakistani family near London, Mr. Manzoor does struggle mightily with his own identity—he refers to himself as “comfortably British, occasionally Pakistani, and only technically Muslim”—but it hardly seems sporting to take it out on Mr. Springsteen.

AFTER ALL, MR. Manzoor declares that “everything significant that I did or achieved in my life … had its roots in the emotions I experienced” the first night he heard Mr. Springsteen’s music, at age 16. That’s a big statement, and reflective of the sort of absolutism that courses through the book.

For instance, he recounts interviewing the author Elizabeth Wurtzel, a professed Springsteen fan, for a newspaper article. When she turns out to be friendlier than he expects her to be, it simply confirms his “long-held theory that anyone who likes Bruce Springsteen is by definition a nice person.” It’s unfortunate that this scene comes very early on, because it’s difficult to take seriously someone who says such things.

To be fair, his absolutist style may be in part a reaction to his strict Muslim upbringing. His parents, hardworking immigrants who disapproved of the permissiveness of Western culture, could not understand their son’s obsession with this strange, sweaty man screaming about being born in the U.S.A.

But the obsession was, and is, very real. Mr. Manzoor and his best friend, Amolak, a Sikh who introduced him to Mr. Springsteen’s music, call themselves “disciples of Bruce” and quote lyrics “as if they were psalms.” (The religious analogy is often employed by Springsteen fans, and there’s no shortage of it here.) The young men repeatedly ask whether they can call themselves true believers if they fail to follow the values in Mr. Springsteen’s music. Amolak takes the first and most dramatic step, removing his turban and shaving his beard—an act he says is about being true to himself.

For his part, Mr. Manzoor grows dreadlocks, which predictably horrifies his parents, but he promptly cuts them off upon his father’s death. This is one of the more touching moments in the book, an acknowledgment that son and father are more alike than either is able to admit. Or, as he later translates it into Springsteenese, “These days I am a willing prisoner of my father’s house.”

That line is a winking reference to a Springsteen song title—perhaps an inevitable gimmick in a book such as this, but Mr. Manzoor feels compelled to do it at the end of every chapter. Besides being annoying, this manages to turn the very nature of Mr. Springsteen’s brilliance on its head. Mr. Springsteen often begins with a cliché—say, a guy and a girl driving down the highway—and then complicates and personalizes it with precise, unforgettable details (“Fried chicken on the front seat, she’s sittin’ in my lap/ We’re wipin’ our fingers on a Texaco roadmap”); Mr. Manzoor, in contrast, takes what is often a rich personal story and boils it down to a cliché.

He also has an odd and frustrating knack for leaving out the best part of an anecdote. The most unpardonable instance occurs in a London courtroom, where Mr. Springsteen has come to testify in a case against bootleggers. Mr. Manzoor’s editors are kind enough to send him to cover the proceedings, but of course we know why he’s really there. During a break in the action he approaches Bruce, who has been momentarily left alone by his lawyers, and sits down next to him. This is the moment we’ve been waiting for—indeed, some of us have imagined it all our lives. So, what happens?

Bruce sees that he is reading The Grapes of Wrath, and says, “‘That’s a great choice. You’ll learn more from that than any newspaper.’” And here I relate, in near-totality, Mr. Manzoor’s account of the rest of the conversation: “We talked for about twenty minutes. It was strange and yet it didn’t feel strange.” Sorry, did you say twenty minutes?

These sins would be more forgivable if the book were more insightful. Bruce Springsteen’s importance to Mr. Manzoor is no doubt profound, but it takes nothing away from this feeling—well documented by many others—to observe that Mr. Manzoor still does not seem to have absorbed some of his hero’s most important lessons.

Take for instance that woman problem: Mr. Manzoor refuses to date a Pakistani because, he sniffs, she would never understand the meaning of “Born to Run.” Maybe so. But when he insists on this simplistic, idealized notion of love, Mr. Manzoor overlooks Mr. Springsteen’s own recognition, at age 25, of the intrinsically imperfect nature of romantic relationships. “Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night,” the protagonist in “Thunder Road” pleads to the woman he wants to run away with. “You ain’t a beauty but, hey, you’re alright/ And that’s alright with me.”

So sayeth the Boss.

Jesse Wegman is managing editor of The Observer. He can be reached at jwegman@observer.com.

I ordered lunch today from the go-to Chinese restaurant around the corner from my office. It came in a large plastic bag that held a large paper bag filled with all sorts of containers: a white, microwave-safe bowl of chicken with cashews; a box of vegetable fried rice; a tightly sealed bowl of hot and sour soup; a small wax-paper bag with one vegetable spring roll; another small wax-paper bag with those crispy noodles; a Ziploc bag thoughtfully packed with a fork, a spoon, two napkins, one packet of Chinese mustard, one packet of soy sauce and two packets of duck sauce, plus a separately packaged fortune cookie; and finally, in its own stapled brown bag, a pint of homemade lemonade. Total cost: $9.48.

I got through the soup, the spring roll and about half the chicken dish when both my lemonade and my appetite ran out. It was a familiar feeling with this particular cuisine, a premature fullness, a sense that, despite the apparent range of options, I had gotten all I would get out of this meal.

THE FORTUNE COOKIE Chronicles, by New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee, is a multi-bagged endeavor, a global book in the most literal sense, and it both benefits and suffers as a result.

Ms. Lee grew up, with her Chinese-born parents, in what she calls Szechuan Alley, the stretch of Upper Broadway known for its abundance of Chinese restaurants—in particular Empire Szechuan, run by a woman named Misa Chang, who both thrilled and enraged her neighbors in the 1970’s by offering free home delivery as well as free stacks of menus in every foyer. Ms. Lee calls Chang the “proto-spammer,” which means that those multilingual “No Menus Please” signs were the earliest spam filters.

This background seems to have created in Ms. Lee a profound sense of cultural dislocation. “Look at me and you may see someone Chinese,” she writes. “Close your eyes, and you will hear someone American.” It’s true: The book reads largely like the observations of an outsider. To her, an image of Buddha conjures Jabba the Hutt. She is an outsider with a stake, for sure, but unfortunately there are few insights to be gained thereby.

Early on, Ms. Lee comes to the realization that “Chinese” food is an amalgam of culture and history that is not authentically Chinese at all—it is food made by Chinese people who have come to America and are feeding, and also shaping, the American appetite. Perhaps Americans once believed the Chinese ate rats like popcorn, but they came around quickly enough: As Ms. Lee describes, chop suey (“odds and ends” in Cantonese) is “the greatest culinary prank” ever played by one culture on another.

The book is sprinkled with engaging and poignant stories; some you vaguely remember hearing before—say, the Chinese deliveryman who went missing for days and was presumed dead, only to be found alive and more or less well, stuck in the express elevator of a Bronx high-rise. Others you’re hearing for the first time—such as the moving tale of the Chinese couple who buy a restaurant in rural Georgia and wind up losing their children to the state. In this story, as with several others in a similar vein, Ms. Lee’s writing has a familiar, newspapery briskness that is immediately compelling. But when the stories get tedious, the clichés become evident. Rivers “run red with blood,” old ladies with liver spots have “belly-shaking giggles,” fortune cookies are the “Cliffs Notes version of wisdom,” and so on.

Ms. Lee does make some astute observations. Unlike McDonald’s, she writes, which was always a centralized operation, Chinese restaurants are essentially open-source: Their similarity and their success is the result of the constant exchange of workers criss-crossing the country, sharing knowledge—a “global localization” of the cuisine. (She wryly notes that when, after years of failed attempts, McDonald’s finally scored with Chicken McNuggets, two of the four dipping sauces they offered were inspired by Chinese cuisine.)

She also gives due weight to the unique relationship between the Chinese and the Jews in 20th-century America. Beyond the obvious Christmas connection, Ms. Lee points out that the Chinese satisfied the Jews’ desire to have someone nearby who was less American than they were. Today there remain amusing grace notes: Ms. Lee speaks with a “Brooklyn-based Chinese-restaurant consultant” named Ed Schoenfeld; and Kari-Out, the leading American producer of soy-sauce packets, is owned by a Jewish family from Westchester.

And yet, by about halfway through the book, Ms. Lee had worn me out. This was partly due to the breathtaking amount of travel she undertook to write it. For instance, in 2005, 110 people around the country correctly picked five of six numbers in the weekly Powerball lottery—an unprecedented result that was traced to the lucky-numbers list in a mass-produced fortune-cookie fortune. Ms. Lee tells the story with perfect pitch and pacing, in a way that allows you to retell it with the same drama and intrigue. Then we learn that the incident led her to attempt to visit every restaurant that had given out one of the “winning” cookies. This voyage takes her from Nebraska to Wyoming to Louisiana to Rhode Island—and that’s just Chapter One.

Later, spurred by an editor’s suggestion to find the best Chinese restaurant in the world, Lee tromps off to Peru. (Of course.) And France. And Singapore. And London, Tokyo, Australia, Dubai, South Korea, and British Columbia. And Brazil, Mauritius, Jamaica, Rome and San Francisco. And maybe more; I lost count. Not to sound churlish, but did this come out of The Times’ travel budget? Isn’t there a war going on right now?

All this globe-trotting, she writes, was part of “a personal journey to understand myself.” Fair enough, but it’s not clear how much more the reader understands at the end of it all. The charming, engaging person who told the story of the Powerball winners starts to feel like the guy in the bar who is a little too excited about Bob Seger. Partly, it’s that there isn’t much payoff: We learn that the “greatest” (not necessarily best) Chinese restaurant in the world is on the second level of a strip mall outside Vancouver. I will never question the veracity of this claim, nor, I suspect, will I ever have the opportunity to.

The Fortune Cookie Chronicles is best, or greatest, in its less-directed moments; for example, when Ms. Lee recounts the struggles of Chinese immigrants coming to and settling in America, where they are ubiquitous and yet, like the deliveryman stuck in the elevator, invisible.

Beyond that, the book is a light, mostly enjoyable read that goes on too long. But as my fortune cookie says, “It doesn’t matter. Who is without a flaw?” (Lucky numbers: 8, 15, 22, 34, 42, 44.)

Jesse Wegman is managing editor of The Observer. He can be reached at jwegman@observer.com.