Jason West came to national prominence first as the young Green Party mayor of New Paltz, then for allegedly violating the law by performing same-sex marriages without a license. His media celebrity resulted in an offer to write a book about his political ideas and opinions. West, who acknowledges lacking scholarly or expert knowledge, makes a number of controversial factual claims and arguments, but his book contains neither footnotes nor a bibliography. Still, West's passionate concern with the lack of social justice, which informs almost every page of his book, could well motivate his readers to become more politically active.

Dare to Hope begins with a powerful indictment against corporations that use their resources to insure their interests prevail at the expense of those of the vast majority of Americans. Since corporations have fundamentally corrupted the established political system, he exhorts Americans to rebuild their democracy from the bottom up. He believes local communities can start to enhance democracy by changing our winner-take-all voting system to one of instant-runoff voting and proportional representation. On the environmental front, West champions such things as reed beds for sewage treatment and decentralized clean energy rooted in solar and wind power to combat global warming.

West supports the revival of the union movement, while recognizing that unions need to develop new strategies to deal with the spread of multinational corporations. He makes trenchant criticisms of the myth of the free market in an economy dominated by corporations that seek to prevent competition and solicit government subsidies and, when necessary, bailouts. West describes the ravages wrought by unaccountable globalization, neoliberal "reforms," and trade agreements such as NAFTA, which he maintains has caused a "global race to the bottom."

Jason West certainly has bold ideas, but the reality does not always live up to the rhetoric. He cites his own election in 2003 as giving hope to people. Nonetheless, his election occurred largely by chance. Capitalizing on an atypical split within the local Democratic Party, West achieved a 71-vote margin of victory over the incumbent mayor. To his credit, West complains he won the mayoralty with only eight percent support from eligible voters. A viable electoral strategy has to be built on more than fortuitous circumstances, as witnessed by Green Party defeats in 2004.

West soundly criticizes capitalist excesses, but his political judgment remains questionable. To fight corporate greed, he advocates using "whatever tactic suits the situation at hand," including illegal acts of violence against property. For example, he condones blowing up a halfway constructed dam that would, if built, flood a valley and displace communities. West also seems unaware that the kind of electoral reform he favors can be a double-edged sword now that the extreme right has a sizeable, mobilized base. At the national level, West eschews forming strategic alliances with Democrats, insisting that no significant difference exists between Democratic and Republican agendas. No matter that in many crucial areas, including civil liberties, civil rights, judicial appointments, reproductive rights, health care, and environmental protection, the differences are often blatant. In general, West tends to minimize the threat from the right, which seriously endangers decades of social-democratic gains, however far from perfect they may be.

Hope, if it is not to be mere illusion, needs to be rooted in an accurate understanding of social reality. While West points to real problems and often offers reasonable short-term solutions, his book is marred by exaggerated claims and dogmatic analysis. But if you can overlook fatuous assertions like "when we don't vote, it's because we're smart enough to see through the candidate's bullshit," Jason West provides us with a fervent polemic on behalf of democratic and environmental reform.

In the space of a decade, billionaire real estate kingpin Donald Trump has gone from "short-fingered vulgarian"—an epithet coined by Spy magazine—to lovable curmudgeon-capitalist, thanks to a hit TV show, commercials that lampoon his egotism, and a "Saturday Night Live" appearance in which he mocked his own signature comb-over as resembling a deceased squirrel. This calculated image makeover has obscured the fact that Trump remains a destructive force in the world of business, reconfiguring the Manhattan skyline and further inflating building prices. After all, he's so funny.

A pity that Wall Street financier Jay Gould (1836-92) lived before the invention of television, and was unable to finesse an equally unsavory reputation. When he succumbed to tuberculosis at age 56, the newspapers of the day gleefully marked his passing. The London Standard, for example, called him "a wrecker of industries and an impoverisher of men." Only decades before, fellow businessman Cornelius Vanderbilt had called him "the smartest man in America."

So wherefore such venom? While he headed premier railroads of the era, including the Erie, and eventually owned the New York World newspaper, Western Union, and the Manhattan Elevated, Gould is best known for less honorable circumstances—specifically, a notorious 1869 gambit to corner the American gold market, which involved hounding President Ulysses Grant himself. The scheme failed, and momentarily downsized Gould's empire. But for 14 brokerage houses it spelled doom, and destroyed the livelihoods of hundreds of investors on a day known in American financial history as "Black Friday."

Absent a reality show makeover, the late Jay Gould has perhaps the next best thing: a tireless champion in scholar Edward J. Renehan Jr., whose masterful biography attempts to rescue the self-made man from the stockades of history. Through impressive scholarship, drawing on obscure documents, letters, and books, Renehan traces Gould's life from his youth in the Catskills town of Roxbury to adulthood in the Manhattan of the Gilded Age. Renehan presents a complicated man who believed early on that he was destined for greatness and spent his remaining days fulfilling that destiny, advancing swiftly from land surveyor to tanner to collector of railroads.

The author refuses simplistic portrayals; he depicts Gould as not only a gimlet-eyed businessman, but a devoted family man, orchid grower, and philanthropist. Notably, Renehan has a gift for demystifying the world of mergers and hostile buyouts, turning the wheeling and dealing into gripping drama by illuminating the human motivations behind such shady deals. We meet Gould's contemporaries Zadock Pratt, Daniel Drew, and James Fisk, Jr., all brought to life through Renehan's colorful, exacting prose.

But in his zeal to depict Gould as a man pilloried unjustly by history, Renehan glosses over the downside of the tycoon's accomplishments: We read only once of Gould's union-busting efforts and nothing of underpaid workers living in poverty or coping with everyday safety hazards caused by cost-cutting managers. Renehan defends Gould's merciless dealings as pioneering financial feats that are now simply commonplace on Wall Street. Yet in his final summation of the man the New York Times called "the Mephistopheles of Wall Street," he can only declare that the brilliant Gould was no better or worse than his fellow robber barons. Faint praise indeed.

Whether you are won over by this humane portrait of Gould depends upon your faith in social Darwinism and your stomach for unbridled capitalism. While unable to save his subject from eternal demonization, Renehan nonetheless has restored Gould's place in American financial history.

New Age gemologists believe that lapis, the indigo-blue philosopher's stone and legendary substance of alchemy, enhances powers of speech and clairvoyance by stimulating the throat and brow chakras. Lapis fittingly conveys the themes and textures of Robert Kelly's 63rd book (nearly one for each of his 70 years), a poetry collection of disparate voices that encompasses the mysteries of language and profundity of sacredness. In a recent interview with Poets & Writers Magazine, the author likens its strategies to the beautiful, regenerative "conglomerate" lapis lazuli, which "looks like one thing, but it's made up of many things." Kelly, who writes every day, also notes that the word-title sounds like làpiz, Spanish for pencil.

Recipient of an American Book Award and cofounder of several influential literary magazines, including Chelsea Review and Sulfur, Kelly currently directs the poetry-writing program at Bard College, where he has taught for more than four decades. The poet, essayist, fiction writer, and translator is a second-generation inheritor of Image Poetry, an experimental, modernist movement established by Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and others of the Black Mountain School tradition. In keeping with these practitioners, Kelly's body of work tests the boundaries of words and imagery as forms of transmutation, his material compelled by literature, art, philosophy, geography, and religion. Lapis extends this project, with some selections occasioned by reading Yeats and Plato, viewing the paintings of Matisse and Piero della Francesca, traveling through Europe, and contemplating angels, saints, and cloistered monks.

Arranged chronologically, the verses in Lapis above all succeed at locating the miraculous in the ordinary—in cloud drift and snowfall, string and sand, shoe stores and butcher shops. Kelly plumbs the depths of memory, his war-years youth recollected in a time of continuing barbarism, in "The Quiz," "Maturity," "An Ancestor Who Fought at Gettysburg," and others. Elsewhere, persona poems spoken in the voices of outlaws, eccentrics, and hermits ("John Dillinger," "Private Eye," "Emily Dickinson") intersect with those of biblical figures, priests, and prophets. Commencing with "Good Friday 1997," in which Christ ascends the mount and "[s]tumbles under the deadweight of our [consumer] desires," a provocative suite of poems devoted to the passion converge in the leaping lyric "Man on Cross," rendering "Triduum, they say, the sacred / Three-Day / Good Friday to Easter Sunday." in three numbered sections.

Ever inventive in Lapis, Kelly uses characteristic compositional strategies in a range of ways, often dividing single poems into multiple, supportive units that create manifold meaning. Composed of 30 interlocking lapidary epigrams, "Dirt Roads" reads like a bag of fortune cookies, as in: "we live of course / by other people / their deaths their agonies." "Vitriol" serves as an anagram for stanzas that follow from the word Virtue through Leprosy. Even the most formal selections shatter recognizable conventions, as when the approximately equivalent-length lines and four quatrains of "Essences" depart from pattern in a final isolated epiphany that describes a dove delivering Earth to humanity "in its vastly strong and fragile beak."

A pervasive subject as well as motif, language—"the first and last of all our wounds"—sparkles in Lapis like splotches in a gemstone. "Nothing to write with / but other people's words / ... to live in their language / the way mitochondria / live in us," concludes the narrator of "Political Poem." Kelly also investigates the origin and lyricism of spoken words in selections such as "The Secret Orator" and "The Doctrine of English Verbs." Words appear in the form of classified newspaper ads, passenger-train graffiti, love letters, and in the act of reading, in which "the eye goes right to the most dangerous" ("Seeing"). As Kelly enunciates in this ambitious conglomeration, language becomes alchemy for turning life into art.

It's summertime once again in Hoboken, New Jersey, a town that's a little short on excitement for friends Bruno Ugg, Loretta Fischetti, and Nick Itch. But then something interesting appears on the sidewalk by the park; it's a chalk picture, and an astoundingly gorgeous one at that. "The colors were sort of magical," says Nick, the story's protagonist, "and it didn't seem flat—you could look deep into it."

The children soon discover more pictures, many of which appear to be copies of famous paintings by the great masters. The identity of the sidewalk artist is a mystery. And an even bigger one is that Henrietta, Nick's six-foot-tall, 266-pound chicken, has been sketched into some of the drawings.

Quicker than you can say "van Gogh's ear," the three have begun their own dabblings. The chalk artist turns out to be none other than famous screever Lucy Casserole, who fans their interest by agreeing to give them art lessons. She proves to be the art teacher we all wish we'd had. Go to a small art museum for your first visit so you won't get overwhelmed, she tells them. Breathe and stretch before you draw. Close your eyes and sketch a squiggle, then squint at it and draw what you think it resembles: a bird, a whale, a house.

There are few authors who could inject a giant chicken into a story without laying a jumbo-sized rotten egg, and Daniel Pinkwater is one of them. And he hasn't just done it once. The Artsy Smartsy Club, which is targeted towards middle-grade readers, is the third of his books for children to feature the town of Hoboken and a certain oversized hen.

Like much of this author's sizable oeuvre (he's written 80 books for children and adults), this is a tongue-in-cheek work. Henrietta's responsible for much of the fun. She chicken-dances through the book, adding colorful splashes of surrealism to an otherwise largely realist world. Dressed as a nun, she's the children's escort to the Frick Collection just across the Hudson River. "Sister Wendy!" The museum guard says to her. "What an honor to have you visit our museum!" Henrietta even puts the surprise into the surprise ending, revealing some artistic gifts of her own.

Pinkwater is a Dutchess County resident and has illustrated many of his own books, though his wife, Jill Pinkwater, gets the credit for this one (and kudos as well—her illustrations are marvelous). He's also a frequent commentator and children's book reviewer for NPR's "All Things Considered" and a general, all-around silly fellow. A recent review of a canine-themed children's book included participation by his Inuit sled dog, Lulu, who not only woofed at appropriate moments, but clearly spoke her name as well. (The trick to this, Pinkwater disclosed, is to give a dog a name it can say.)

Though Pinkwater seems to have a very short list of Things to Take Seriously, this book makes it obvious that art is right at the top of it. And whether you're old or young, have clean hands or hands smudged with paint, it will be enormously difficult to read this book without experiencing a massive urge to grab a pen, a sable brush, or a piece of sidewalk chalk and find a surface to use it on. The voyage of discovery that Loretta, Bruno, and Nick embark upon carries with it a sense of excitement so tangible, so joyful, and so compelling that there's no doubt that it's Pinkwater's own. And after reading The Artsy Smartsy Club, it will be yours, too.