The fat cats are running the country. Robber barons on corporate welfare—big oil, energy, mining, lumber, agribusiness—are freely polluting with little or no penalties and raising costs for consumers to keep shareholder earnings high.

In his riveting and painfully apocalyptic book Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy, Robert Kennedy Jr. says corporate capitalists are eviscerating America's free-market system, which promotes competition between clean-running industries and holds polluters accountable. Without a free market, Kennedy says, there can be no democracy.

Kennedy details the rampant cronyism in Bush's White House, where profits come before public health and safety. Our corporate-run government is the machine that puts industry lobbyists on the payroll and funnels large contributions to political campaigns. Protagonists include House of Representatives majority leader Tom DeLay, former bug exterminator who vowed to get rid of "pesky pesticide regulations" and considered DDT as "safe as aspirin"; Newt Gingrich, of the "greenwashed" language legislation attacking "big government and excessive regulations"; former Halliburton CEO and big oil ally Dick Cheney, who directed President Reagan to veto a wilderness bill for the first time in American history; and Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, a former co-chair of the Colaition of Republican Environmental Advocates, a lobbying group for auto, coal mining and development interests, who opened nine million acres of Alaska's North Slope to oil and gas development.

Bush's dream team: their dreams, our nightmares. A 2001 nightmare became reality when the Environmental Protection Agency bowed to White House orders to stop filing new cases against giant agribusiness meat farms for illegally releasing emissions of the deadly gases sulfide, ammonia, methyl mercaptan, methyl sulfides, particulate matter, and airborne animal allergens affecting the public with "severe respiratory problems, gastrointestinal diseases, eye infections, nosebleed, nausea, miscarriage, and psychological problems."

The anti-environmental blueprint for the nation was drawn up in George W.'s Texas, where vast wastelands occupied by unregulated polluting industries make the La Brea tar pits look like heaven. Kennedy cites a Houston study that estimates health care costs at between $2.9 and $3.1 billion in a city that leads the nation in childhood cancer and asthma. Childhood asthma yanks at Kennedy's parental heartstrings because three of his sons have the disease, and says "on bad-air days, I watch them struggle to breathe."

Kennedy also scrutinizes corporate-driven national security, in part because he lives 11 miles from the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant, which has an evacuation plan so "comically absurd" that his neighbor Chevy Chase considered using it in a stand-up routine. Pitted against 260 elected officials, 35 municipalities, 56 environmental and civic groups, and labor unions who want the plant shut down is the Nuclear Energy Institute, a lobbying group that pours several million dollars a year into the Republican Party. The government has also handed off the responsibility for protecting the public against terrorist attacks to the nuclear power industry, which Kennedy says has done next to nothing.

While many New Yorkers liken their recycling habits and reverence for green spaces to a second religion, the White House's cynical policies belittle those efforts. As Kennedy so astutely observes, Mr. Bush "is allowing his corporate cronies to steal America from our children." And probably from our children's grandchildren. That could be the worst crime of all.

Zoya Blume is hovering in the midlands between childhood and adolescence—a wise 12, small for her age but older than her years. She and her mother inhabit an apartment they've inherited from her staid grandmother, in an unnamed city with a Manhattan-like feel. Zoya's mom is a warm, bright whirlwind of a woman who understands when to bend the rules, and favors bright colors and honesty. When she has to go away for a week, she leaves a special diary for Zoya to keep—and a magician friend as a babysitter.

That first separation can be a traumatic experience for a child—especially, as in this case, when it echoes an earlier separation that was permanent. Adopted at four, Zoya has only vague memories of her Russian birthplace and birth parents, supplemented by the sketchiest of information from her elders. Being left with Leon (aka The Astounding Armand) and a profusion of curious events around the apartment building all converge in a moment that has her ready to hide under the covers for a few years. Her nemesis, The Buka—the archetypal witch of every child's nightmares—is gaining on her at a dangerous rate of speed.

It's one of those times when one must fall apart or grab life by the gonads. Zoya, a true Cunningham heroine, steps up to the task. She leaves no stone unturned, no creepy noise uninvestigated. She's scared, but she barely lets it matter. (The one who really gets scared, it seems, is babysitter Leon. The cool former love of Mom's wins his young charge over with a laidback style and a quick schooling in the secrets of magicians, even as he mutters, "I didn't see this coming," with each crisis.)

Zoya, Leon, and best friend Quinn—daughter of a gypsy fortuneteller—transcend a series of daunting obstacles together. A stray cat has kittens in the bathtub; secrets about Zoya's birth family come to light; there are encounters with a grandmother as ferociously dark and bleak as mother is light and open, with difficult building super Mr. Uzzle, and with a neighbor that Zoya and Quinn are wont to call the Disgusting Boy. Most terrifying of all is Zoya's gradual realization that her mom is undergoing exploratory surgery. Her absence is extended by three days, during which Zoya has a birthday.

This is Stone Ridge author and memoirist Cunningham's first venture into young readers' territory, and hopefully won't be her last. She keeps the plot swinging right along, but doesn't condescend to a younger readership. She seems to really recall at gut level what it's like to be 12, to miss Mom awfully, and to hover just shy of the edge of discovering adulthood—along with everything else in that eventful week, Zoya must face her first dance. Zoya's journey resonates like the journeys of young adventurers in classics like The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis and Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. Like every child in a classic tale, her courage in facing herself and the world reaps rewards and revelations. Bright boys will enjoy the no-nonsense Zoya just as much as girls. If you don't have a child to buy this book for, borrow or rent one.

Fabrice Midal begins his book by letting his readers know exactly where he stands on his subject, Chögyam Trungpa, the reincarnated lama from Tibet and one of the most illustrious and controversial Buddhist teachers. Midal writes: "I wrote this book in the hope that, at a time when people are so disoriented that they are open to all sorts of charlatans, the depth and brilliance of Chögyam Trungpa's vision may help them to rediscover their true path." While this is a noble hope, it is also a bit odd in light of the fact that his subject encouraged disorientation in ways that were sometimes so extreme that, almost 20 years after his death, they are still felt and pondered.  Chögyam Trungpa's outrageous behavior—excessive drinking, sleeping with his students, asking students to adopt an Oxford accent, wear military uniforms, and wait on him like liveried servants—can certainly be seen as ways to throw people way off of their conventional understandings, and thus open them to the radical teachings of the Buddha. But since Trungpa is viewed as a no-holds-barred-ego-slayer, anything that he did can be understood (some may say excused) in this light.

In 1970, Trungpa moved to the US and was greeted by what Midal calls "Hippie America." Trungpa immediately began his subtle war on people's ideas by pointing out the aggression in his students' desires to become "enlightened." He had a remarkable capacity to communicate in English and was very direct, even funny, trying to jolt people out of their complacency by saying things like, "You are put into the big dungeon and boiled like lobsters, and you work until you die." He was also a remarkable artist, pilling together Western forms such as Beat poetry and drama, and Eastern forms such as calligraphy and flower arranging, into one dynamic dharma activity.

Trungpa's relentless quest to "turn ego on its head," which included many books (Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, Shambhala: Sacred Path of the Warrior, The Heart of the Buddha, The Myth of Freedom, Journey Without Freedom, Dharma Art, and Meditation in Action, to name a few), and attracted thousands of students. He was also a master organizer: he established Naropa University in Boulder, spearheaded huge organizations such as Shambhala, developed dharma arts programs, and worked with some of the leading voices of his day, including Allen Ginsberg and Ram Dass.

Midal's book takes the reader through the various aspects of Trungpa's life and teaching, and shows how tirelessly this teacher worked on behalf of his students' awakening. Midal interviewed many people who were close to Trungpa, some well-known such as the Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön. Midal does a wonderful job of painting a portrait of Trungpa's life and vision. Reading the book, one can almost imagine what it might have been like to study with Trungpa. And what a trip that would have been!

However, as much as Midal tries to allow for complexity, his book reveals that he has placed Trungpa high on a pedestal, thus missing the most compelling point of dharma practice and Trungpa's teaching: that there is no difference between Buddhas and ordinary beings. Trungpa himself said, "With regard to your inquiry about my lifestyle, you must understand that I regard myself as an ordinary person." As he wrote in one of his final poems, "it is time to be a human being."

The Pinhook is a piece of the world we have not stepped too hard on," says author Janisse Ray. In geologic terms, Pinhook is a "pocosin"; an enormous wetland reaching from Northern Florida to Pogo's famed Okefenokee. But this waterlogged tract isn't merely a "dreary dismal...too deep for a human to wade in, too shallow for a boat to draw." It's a vibrant place of wildness Ray's come to know with intimacy, respect, and grace.

Ray is an environmental activist as well as an award-winning author. (Her Ecology of a Cracker Childhood won the American Book Award.) Her connection to land is passionate, but in this age of drill-for-oil-on-the-wildlife preserve, it's conjoined with a keen awareness of the worldly issues that work against it. The theme of wholeness versus fragmentation threads through the book the way catnettle vine weaves through palmetto scrub. Information mixes liberally with awe; the book is by turns soberly informative and fiercely elegiac. Ray's prose is fresh and many chapters present a duet of voices that read like the contradictory urgings of love and reason: "How can I hate roads? They are the way we pass through this world, the way we visit each other, the way we connect places. They are the formula by which my beloved comes home to me."

"In 1979, C.R. Ferris determined that in Maine, each kilometer of I-95 displaced 130 pairs of breeding birds, which translated into 62,400 pairs of breeding birds along the 480 kilometers of 1-95 in the state."

Ray celebrates wildness in details small and large. We learn of the "wonking" baby alligators and the clinking song of the cricket frog, the fruit-bearing gallberry bush and the jessamine vine that flowers yellow at the slightest hint of spring. There are people here too: the preservationists who helped save the swampscape, locals, farmers, and moonshiners.

"The world," Ray says, "is a globe of leaf green continents amid five blue green oceans, land we knife into smaller and smaller scraps." At 120,000 saved acres, Pinhook is a rare scrap made larger; it's part of the largest area of protected space east of the Mississippi.

One could argue that saving this kind of land must have been easy. It's swamp--who'd want it anyway? Swamps can be drained, and the timber companies, building contractors, and chemical companies wanted it. But because of the efforts of Ray and her fellow conservationists, they won't have Pinhook—instead, the titi bushes will have it, and the slash pines, and Suwanee cooters.

And so will the people. It's a lesson in the value of pulling back versus pushing forward, of slowing down instead of moving faster, and of prioritizing wholeness in our world—and subsequently, in ourselves. These are concepts some upstate New Yorkers, like the principals of the Belleayre Resort and Awosting Reserve, would do well to note.