Movers and Shakers

SOARING WITH FIDEL An Osprey Odyssey From Cape Cod To Cuba and Beyond By David Gessner | Beacon. 289 pp. $15

"If ospreys had a bumper sticker," writes David Gessner, "it would be, We move for food." Bird migration, of course, isn't quite that simple, and in Soaring With Fidel, Gessner explores its complexities. Equipped with little more than a pair of binoculars, he follows ospreys as they make their way from Cape Cod to Venezuela. He is an amiable guide whose focus is more sociology than ornithology. "I am intrigued by the points where human beings and birds interact," he explains. Making stops at places like Hawk Mountain, Pa., Cape May, N.J., and, in a more exotic turn, Santiago, Cuba, Gessner is as captivated by the "bandit-masked" raptors as he is by the people who watch them. Among the birders he encounters is a group whose experience with ospreys comes mostly via a Webcam trained on a nest in Long Island. ("They say it's like watching paint dry," says one aficionado. "But this is drama.")

Gessner, the author of several nature books, among them Return of the Osprey, doesn't portray himself as an expert, and his regular-guy attitude keeps the book accessible if not authoritative. Perhaps the impetus for migration, he speculates, is much the same as it is for humans: "new places, new territory, new knowledge."

MEN OF SALT Crossing the Sahara On the Caravan of White Gold By Michael Benavav | Lyons. 220 pp. $14.95

There's a long and storied history behind the contents of your salt shaker, and in 2003 Michael Benavav set out to experience a piece of it. Driven by curiosity about the nomadic salt miners of Africa known as the Caravan of White Gold, he embarked on a nearly 1,000-mile trek through the Sahara, from Timbuktu to the mines of Taoudenni, Mali, and back. "It was the kind of trip I was born to take," he writes in Men of Salt, his chronicle of the endeavor.

Traveling through the Sahara with a guide who had no map or compass, Benavav endured lengthy daily marches, sometimes on foot, sometimes on camel, in high temperatures, while subsisting on a diet mostly of dates, nuts and goat meat. He was quickly humbled: "Walking through the desert with a nomad," he writes, "was like swimming with a seal." But Benavav remained steadfast, his sense of humor mostly intact: "After all," he quips, "how seriously could I really take the scene of a Jewish guy raised in suburban Connecticut chasing a camel train across the Sahara with a couple of Muslim tribesmen just to pick up some salt?" Benavav's suffering was not for nothing: His book offers a rare firsthand view of a dying culture and a difficult way of life.

From Our Previous Reviews

· Though New England White (Vintage, $14.95) is "technically a mystery" involving a prominent African American academic couple, its author, Stephen L. Carter, "is only partially concerned with whodunit; he'd rather ponder why any of us does the things we do," noted Jabari Asim.

· The Shadow Catcher (Simon & Schuster, $15), by Marianne Wiggins, features a fictional character named Marianne Wiggins whose "quest to find out how a dying man came to assume her father's identity unexpectedly leads her to the discovery of a long-hidden aspect" of the life of the photographer Edward Curtis, according to Wendy Smith.

· In The House That George Built (Random House, $16), Wilfrid Sheed celebrates George Gershwin, Cole Porter and other legends of classic American song in a musical history "written with authority and enthusiasm," wrote Jonathan Yardley.

· Four Days in November (Norton, $17.95), by Vincent Bugliosi, is an abridged version of Bugliosi's 2007 book Reclaiming History. "To say that Bugliosi wants to strike a nail in the coffin of Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists is putting it mildly," Alan Wolfe said of the original edition.

· Rachel Hartigan Shea described Body of Work (Penguin, $15), by Christine Montross, as "an exceptionally thoughtful memoir about the first semester of medical school" that "conveys the sheer differentness of doctors, if only because of what they've done in anatomy lab."

· Georgina Howell's biography Gertrude Bell (Farrar Straus Giroux, $15) chronicles the life of "a scholar and a spy whose extraordinary career spanned the heyday of the British Empire and culminated in the creation of Iraq," explained Jason Goodwin.

Nora Krug is a regular contributor to Book World.