DISCOVERIES

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Kabul in Winter

Life Without Peace

in Afghanistan

Ann Jones

Metropolitan Books: 336 pp., $24

EVERY woman must read this book. Ann Jones, who has often written on women and violence, went to Kabul after Sept. 11 and joined a humanitarian group working for women in Afghanistan. At the time, 70% of them suffered major depression, nearly two-thirds contemplated suicide and 16% had tried it. In “Kabul in Winter,” Jones writes of widows starving because they can’t leave home without a male escort. Women tell her of being sold repeatedly as prostitutes by their husbands or being jailed for escaping old men they were forced to marry at age 15 or younger. She describes the rubble of modern Kabul and the country’s history of violence: the internecine feuds, the battle against British colonialism and the rise of fundamentalism, with the Taliban’s lofty goals reduced to banning toothpaste and oppressing women. She is disgusted, sarcastic, grim about Afghanistan’s bloody past and the West’s role in it, including our love affair with the mujahedin. At first, her rage is off-putting, but there’s no denying by book’s end that it’s warranted. Women’s rights in the U.S. are not so unassailable that we can afford to ignore the struggles of Islam’s women.

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The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine

Steven Rinella

Miramax Books: 320 pp., $23.95

WHEN Steven Rinella was a boy in western Michigan, he liked to read about Ice Age hunters preserving their mastodon meat “by weighing it down to the bottom of ponds with intestines packed full of gravel” or Comanche Indians drinking “the warm and curdled mother’s milk from the stomachs of freshly killed buffalo calves.” He dreamed of “clawing my way back into the past, back to a time when things were more real.” Rinella, who grew up hunting, fishing and scavenging, will kill and eat anything. If you’re a vegetarian, like his long-suffering girlfriend, this isn’t your book, but if you rue the “depersonalization of food production,” or you’re tired of chemical ingredients, he will make you howl. When he stumbles on a copy of Escoffier’s “Le Guide Culinaire,” he’s found the “Kama Sutra of food,” a hands-on cookbook for the non-squeamish who want to know how to dismember a turtle. He decides to spend a year collecting ingredients for an Escoffier dinner he will serve to his hunting buddies, a la “Babette’s Feast.” Bored with the same old antelope, elk and porcupine, he goes after the outre game Escoffier requires: stingrays, eels, exotic rabbits. Rinella, who has eaten piranhas in Argentina and conch in Mexico, achieves his personal best in the kitchen, cooking for his friends. “There’s that old saying,” he writes, “ ‘You are what you eat.’ If that’s the case, then I’m many of the animals that live in this world, and I don’t want to give any part of myself up.”

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Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent

The Importance of Everything and Other Lessons From Darwin’s Lost Notebooks

Lyanda Lynn Haupt

Little, Brown: 278 pp., $24.95

A naturalist “comes to understand the biological life and ecological relationships of a particular place with some depth and seeks to use this understanding to forge an appropriate relationship with earthly life.” writes Lyanda Lynn Haupt. Aware that much has been written about Darwin, she is concerned with what turned the 22-year-old rich kid on the Beagle into what one of his professors called a “finished naturalist.” She believes this conversion from “mere insect collector to a biological visionary” took place in the four years Darwin spent studying birds in South America before reaching the Galapagos. This resulted in his little-known book (not published until 1963!) “Ornithological Notes.” The “Notes,” she writes, “impart calm instruction on how to watch, how to think, how to twine beauty with science, and objectivity with empathy.... How to deepen an understanding of oneself in the face of a wild, exuberant, natural world.”