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Bupkes for Babkas

DOUGH A Memoir By Mort Zachter | Collins. 194 pp. $13.95

Mort Zachter's fondest childhood memories center on the Manhattan bakery run by his eccentric uncles, "an exciting place," he writes, "packed with a choir of customers bickering over babka prices." Zachter's image of his workaholic uncles, who never married or took vacations and lived "like paupers" in subsidized housing on the Lower East Side, belied the truth: They were millionaires. It was not until 1994, however, when one uncle was dead and the other infirm with dementia, that Zachter uncovered this family secret.

Zachter, who'd struggled financially for much of his life -- borrowing money to attend night law school and refinancing his mortgage to help pay for the adoption of his son -- received the news with shock and bitterness. "What kind of people accumulate millions and yet deny themselves the basics they could easily afford?" he asks. In his slim memoir, Dough, he recounts his effort to answer this question, an emotional journey through "the gnawed, brittle, paper-trail remains of a twentieth century New York City immigrant family that never threw anything away."

THE YEAR OF EATING DANGEROUSLY A Global Adventure in Search Of Culinary Extremes By Tom Parker Bowles | St. Martin's Griffin. 374 pp. $14.95

Food critic Tom Parker Bowles's culinary interests were fostered by his idyllic early years in the English countryside, where his father "would grow, raise, or buy" the ingredients for the family meals, and his now-famous mother, Camilla, did the cooking ("show her a flappingly fresh Dover sole or a piece of well-hung beef and she'd produce perfection every time"). His palette, however, always leaned toward the more adventurous, and in The Year of Eating Dangerously, his cheeky, self-effacing travelogue, Parker Bowles shares his exploits tasting the world's most exotic foods. His gastronomic feats include nibbling on silk worm pupae, tasting soup laced with dog meat and tackling percebes, a shellfish whose "finger-sized tube of scaly skin ends with a hard white, claw-like talon." Parker Bowles goes a long way to bring back a simple message: The greatest hurdle in trying new foods is in the mind, not the mouth.

THE DINNER DIARIES Raising Whole Wheat Kids In a White Bread World By Betsy Block | Algonquin. 261 pp. $14.95

Feeding kids has always been a challenge, but today's mothers face a myriad of new obstacles, each one as tough as the most finicky child, writes Betsy Block in The Dinner Diaries: nutritionists ("telling us to expand our offerings of fruits and vegetables"), slow-food types ("telling us to eat locally, and in season"), ethicists ("index fingers jabbing in the air as they go on about factory farming"), and "the 'nicer' adults who actually do serve Pop-Tarts for a snack and who don't understand what the fuss is all about." Part memoir, part how-to, the book includes recipes and tips (her No. 1 grocery shopping strategy: "Whenever possible, leave the kids at home"). Block's war stories and chatty tone will likely resonate with many mothers, but some finicky readers might find her cliché-ridden prose cloying.

From Our Previous Reviews

· With Bridge of Sighs (Vintage, $14.95) novelist Richard Russo "places us in a finely drawn community that's unable to adjust to economic changes," wrote Ron Charles.

· "Part novel, part memoir," Sepharad (Harvest, $15), by the Spanish writer Antonio Muñoz Molina, summons up "an onrush of voices, narrators and journals that bear witness to the violence of the 20th century," wrote Barbara Probst Solomon.

· Andrew Ervin called The Real All-Americans (Broadway, $14.95), a history of the early years of American football by Washington Post sportswriter Sally Jenkins, "required reading for anyone interested in the complex ways that football . . . reflects our national identity."

· Matthew Brzezinski's Red Moon Rising (Holt, $17), a chronicle of the mid-1950s Russian-American space race, will leave readers "not only entertained but informed," according to Bryan Burrough.

· Agent Zigzag (Three Rivers, $14.95), by Ben Macintyre, "is the amazing but true story of a professional criminal who became a highly effective double agent during World War II," Patrick Anderson commented.

Nora Krug is a frequent contributor to Book World.