Cities are like organized religion: richly layered, often paradoxical and uniquely qualified to bring out the best and worst in humankind. A new book edited by Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic, titled The Endless City (Phaidon), conveys the oft-contradictory nature of cities, including their innate ability to both quell and incite social and political conflict. At least, that’s the salutary subtext of the book. Its more arrant objective is to lend fire-and-brimstone urgency to the sharp rise in the world’s urban population within the past century. Even the book’s blazing orange cover, inscribed with eye-popping statistics (75% of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050!) is used to convey the apocalyptic immediacy of its appeal . . .

Graphic novels have been all the rage for the past 20 years, but Art Spiegelman’s groundbreaking Maus, depicting the Holocaust in drawings of Jewish mice and their feline Nazi predators, wasn’t the first original novel told primarily in pictures. Wordless Books examines several little-known artists from the early 20th century who composed “woodcut novels.” The author, who teaches at Vermont’s Center for Cartoon Studies . . .

The stage is almost set for the world’s greatest sporting event, the Olympic Games. As China fends off attacks against its human rights record while battling the unsightly algae on its beaches, it might be heartened by the thought that a Pulitzer prize-winning author could one day invest the 2008 Beijing Olympics . . .

To fall into the clutches of the Soviet Union’s system of arrest, imprisonment and torture was infamously easy for Americans who entered the nation from the 1930s to the 1950s. To get out was well-nigh impossible—short of death—and little help was to be found from U.S. authorities. In The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia (Penguin Press), Tim Tzouliadis, a documentary filmmaker born in Greece but educated and living in Britain, has written a book to raise the ire of decent people everywhere. The outrages and horrors recounted in the book, buttressed by bristling documentation, overcome any shortcomings of its workmanlike writing style . . .

Joe Nick Patoski draws a portrait of Willie Nelson based on 35 years of covering his subject. He does an especially good job with Nelson’s early years, describing the difficulty of breaking into the music scene. Unfortunately, as the book continues, it often reads as if the journalist has stitched together his various

As Russia shakes off the torpor of the ’90s and resumes its place as an economic power, a new thriller by Brent Ghelfi returns readers to the seedy underbelly of post-Soviet society. In Volk’s Shadow—a sequel to Ghelfi’s 2007 book Volk’s Game—the grim, battle-hardened anti-hero of the first story returns, this time in search of a Faberg egg that turns out to be a red herring in a deeper plot concerning atrocities carried . . .

In 1961 Allen Ginsberg, who proclaimed just about everything to be holy in his seminal poem “Howl,” left America for India. What he brought back would become essential to American counterculture. Deborah Baker’s A Blue Hand: The Beats in India (Penguin) is exceptionally detailed regarding what happened and what did not. In the tradition of the Beats, if something did not happen, it still did. In Blue Hand, Baker found a rare path to biography, paying close attention to Ginsberg’s 15-month quest for enlightenment in India, using what might have been his own way of writing the book, had he done so. Blue Hand is a well-researched, elegant biography written in Ginsberg’s tradition of an open field of composition, where everything counts as long as it can be accounted for in one sitting and with no revision.

Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov wanted to feed the world, but died of starvation in the Soviet Gulag. British journalist Peter Pringle reconstructs Vavilov’s attempts to revolutionize agriculture by breeding hardier crops through plant genetics. Pringle paints the dapper, courageous Vavilov as a real-life Indiana Jones . . .

The economic validity of culture-led regeneration has been at the heart of a polemical debate in recent years, especially in Europe, where municipal authorities in cities such as London, Bilbao, Rotterdam and Dublin have invested in their cultural infrastructure to drive urban regeneration. American cities, too, are seeing the benefits of branding themselves as creative centers: We need only to look at the fact that it’s an art museum that has become Milwaukee’s defining landmark . . .

Roxy Music was too slippery and evasive to comfortably fit into any of the usual niches of their time or ours. They flirted with glam and skirted art rock without fully committing themselves to the conventions of either. They were avant-garde and pop. The voice of Bryan Ferry was at once ironic and romantic. American audiences were baffled, at least until a touch of Roxy seeped into the mainstream through their influence on The Cars and other new wave acts...