Powder Burn: Arson, Money, and Mystery on Vail Mountain, by Daniel Glick (PublicAffairs, $25). Here's what you know about the Vail fire: On October 19, 1998, somebody splashed a diesel-and-gasoline mixture around five buildings and four ski lifts, lit a match, and torched the tony resort to the tune of $12 million. Three days later, the Earth Liberation Front claimed it had committed the arson "on behalf of the lynx,"whose habitat stood in the path of Vail's expansion. Now forget everything you know. In his gripping and entertaining investigation, journalistDaniel Glick turns Vail inside out to get the real story behind the costliest act of ecoterrorism in U.S. history. He doesn't solve the case—more than two years on, nobody's been charged, and the resort expanded anyway—but he discovers, in addition to ELF's animal-rights activists, no shortage of likely suspects in a company town where the company, Vail Resorts, seems to have raised enmity attraction to an art form. Who could've dunnit? The real question, as one exasperated cop asked the feds, is "Who couldn't have done this?" There are the enviros, who lost a crucial court ruling three days before the fire; the ski bums, who see Vail Resorts killing mountainfreak culture; the local business owners, who seethe as it muscles into their markets; and even the company itself, which emerged from the fire with newer, bigger, insurance-funded facilities. Glick brings this cast of oddballs together in an alpine Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil that may infuriate Vail Resorts but will delight anyone who's paid $6.50 for a slopeside latte. —Bruce Barcott

Looking for Lovedu: Days and Nights in Africa, by Ann Jones (Knopf, $25). Floating down the Zambezi in a canoe, Ann Jones, an American travel writer in her fifties, agrees on a whim to join up with Kevin Muggleton, a strapping young British photographer, for what he calls "the old 'Cape to Cairo' sort of thing." As a literary pretext for their journey, Jones fastens on a legendary matriarchal tribe known as Lovedu and its rainmaking queen, thought to reside somewhere in South Africa. There are decidedly comic moments as the macho Muggleton wrestles their army-surplus Land Rover across the Sahara (Jones can barely see over the steering wheel) and into the Congo's endless mud wallows. But Africa soon cripples the vehicle and undoes them both, Muggleton with malaria and Jones with encounters by turns poignant and horrific: In Mauritania, a girl tries to hand over her baby sister; in Mali, the people, who are starving, express astonishment that a woman could live "more than half a century."When Muggleton drops out in Nairobi, Jones picks up two female companions (a Kenyan and an Australian expat), and the book becomes a meditation on the life of most African women, who "do something like eighty percent of the work," but have no legal rights. In the conclusion to this elegant, ambivalent travelogue, the Queen of Lovedu, Modjadji V—who reigns in an oasis of preserved forest from her "red leatherette La-Z-Boy recliner"—captures the resignation of such women when she tells Jones, "I am not happy, not unhappy. I am just a person of my people." —Caroline Fraser

Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals, by Joy Williams (Lyons Press, $23). Justly celebrated for her fiction (State of Grace, The Changeling), Williams here collects her essays, often intentionally intemperate tirades on "our species' selfishness, sentimentality, and global death wish," as expressed in our mindless propensity—as she sees it—to propagate, eat meat, and build condos on wetlands. There are flashes of eloquence, but Williams on her soapbox is hardly Swiftean; nor do these rants have the manic edge of an Ed Abbey. "Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp" addresses a middle-class "you"—as in, "Why make a fuss when you're so comfortable? Don't make a fuss, make a baby. Go out and get something to eat, build something. Make another baby." Williams writes that she developed this style—"strident and brashly one-sided"—on purpose, but surely no one means to be so tedious. Just when you want to give up, along come two grounded and engaging essays: "One Acre," on selling (and saving) her much loved Key West property, and "Hawk," an anguished recollection of her German shepherd who, at age nine, attacked her and had to be put down. For Williams at her best, look to these more mature essays or to her new, brilliantly mordant novel about animal-obsessed teens, The Quick and the Dead.—C.F.

River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, by Peter Hessler (HarperCollins, $26). Every day for two years, this Peace Corps volunteer walked through his small city in western China to shouts of "Waiguoren! Waiguoren!"—"Out-of-country person! Out-of-country person!" With River Town, Hessler proves that sometimes it takes an out-of-country writer to create a classic portrait of a country. The book chronicles his stint at a second-rate teacher's college in Fuling, a Yangtze River town doomed to be half-erased by the Three Gorges Dam. Bumbling at first through awkward silences and unintended offenses, the young teacher soon has his students polishing their obscene English phrases and mounting subversive productions of Don Quixote. But teaching is a sidebar to his own education. As he roams Fuling, Hessler offers subtly rendered vignettes: fighting with a shoeshine man, escaping the attentions of a prostitute, drinking tea with the Luckiest Man in All of Fuling, and attending masses given by Father Li, a Catholic priest who survived the Cultural Revolution. With uncommon insight, Hessler reveals China as more complicated and yet more understandable than we've been led to believe—a place where there are two distinct histories, man's and nature's: one "a creature of cycles," the other aiming "always at straightness—progress, development, control." Never is Hessler's complex China, or his book, anything less than magnificent. —B.B.