Book Reviews

“Day Out of Days: Stories”

By Sam Shepard (Alfred A. Knopf, 282 pages, $25.95)

Images of severed heads recur throughout Sam Shepard’s collection of short stories, “Day Out of Days.” Several tales deal with a man who finds a severed, talking head that asks to be carried to a nearby lake and thrown in. One story, titled “Timeline,” is a list of dates followed by police-blotter occurrences of decapitations near the Mexican border. A cell phone plays a prominent role in “Land of the Living,” the book’s most fully realized story, which tells of a family vacation in the Yucatan overshadowed by accusations of an extramarital affair. There’s an elegiac quality to many of the stories: Some are mere fragments, poems or just snippets of dialogue; all of them are helped along with a large dash of the kind of autobiographical detail that fairly begs the reader to ask: Who is Sam Shepard? More specifically: Who is he now? A kind of cowboy Samuel Beckett, the cerebral Irish playwright, Shepard got his start writing wildly experimental plays in tumultuous mid-1960s New York and went on to win the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for drama for “Buried Child.” But his matinee-idol looks got him into movie roles, and he’s probably better known now for acting and his marriage to Jessica Lange than for his literary endeavors.

Michael Astor, Associated Press

“The New Frugality: How to Consume Less, Save More, and Live Better”

By Chris Farrell (Bloomsbury, 240 pages, $26)

Chris Farrell, like many other recession-watchers, points out that being frugal is often synonymous with being green. Here’s the good news: Being frugal is not synonymous with being cheap. Buy the good bike, the low-energy-use appliance; they’re better made and will last longer. Just don’t be reckless, with your life or your habitat. “The New Frugality” includes tips on college savings plans, shared home equity, home insurance, investing, borrowing and retirement. It’s full of Web sites, books and organizations to help the reluctant American channel his inner New Englander. The spirit of our most famous frugalista, Benjamin Franklin, hovers over pages full of practical tips, much like Poor Richard’s Almanack. “’Tis easier,” the original saver wrote, “to suppress the first desire, than to satisfy all that follow it.”

Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

“The Power of Half: One Family’s Decision to Stop Taking and Start Giving Back”

By Kevin and Hannah Salwen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 242 pages, $24)

Give it up for the Salwen family. Inspired by 14-year-old Hannah, who had “become increasingly upset about the imbalance of opportunities in the world,” the family sold their 6,500-square-foot Atlanta home and donated half of the profits from the sales price to alleviate poverty in two dozen villages in Ghana (a place they had never been). The Salwens had been drifting apart, and this new project brought them closer. In the process of learning to discuss global issues and making decisions about how and whom to help, the Salwens also learned how to talk with each other about their lives. The authors — Hannah and her father, Kevin — hope the book inspires other families to give half: not necessarily to sell their home but, say, to watch half the amount of television and spend the time saved volunteering. You feel lighter reading this book, as if the heavy weight of house and car and appliances, the need to collect these things to feel safe as a family, are lifted and replaced by something that makes much more sense.

Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times