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'The Holy Tortilla and a Pot of Beans'

By Carmen Tafolla (Wings Press, $16)

Carmen Tafolla stands on the shoulders of several centuries of storytellers.

About 15 years ago, the San Antonio poet, essayist, children's author and fiction writer was down in the Rio Grande Valley, searching for inspiration.

During an interview with a woman in her 90s, the writer asked why la vieja had stayed so long with her husband, who liked to drink and then scream and then beat up people who got in his way.

"En esos dias (In those days)," the old woman replied, "nos casamos pa better o pa worse (we got married for better or worse)."

"And then she said, 'And I got stuck with worse,' " Tafolla recalls.

Best known as a poet — 1976's "Get Your Tortillas Together," with Reyes Cardenas and Cecilio Garcia-Camarillo, is considered a touchstone of Chicano literature — Tafolla occasionally has turned to the short-story format, which she calls "front-porch storytelling."

With the help of San Antonio's Wings Press, Tafolla, 56, has just gathered together more than 20 years of her short stories, many previously published, in a collection titled "The Holy Tortilla and a Pot of Beans."

Here is the story of Chencho, whose passion for life drains away when his cow kicks over a pot of his famous homemade beans, and of Federico, who learns from his wife Elfiria, a "good girl," the true meaning of the term, and of Diamante and Willie and Juana and Black Leather Lu.

'Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China'

By Philip P. Pan (Simon & Schuster, $28)

Many in the West have assumed that capitalism will inevitably lead to democracy, that free markets will spawn genuine freedom, but as China prepares to host the Olympics and celebrate its own emergence as a world power and economic behemoth, its government has continued to crack down on dissent.

In his compelling new book, "Out of Mao's Shadow," Philip P. Pan points out that in China "independent labor unions and churches are still illegal, and the party still exercises firm control over the courts."

The economic boom has left many behind, he writes, and the nation's problems are "obvious to anyone willing to see: the stifling limits on political and religious freedoms, the abuse of power by privileged officials, the sweatshop conditions in the factories, the persistent poverty in the countryside, the degradation of the environment, the moral drift of a cynical society."

In this volume Pan, former Beijing bureau chief for The Washington Post, examines the current state of the world's most populous nation, looking at both the growing personal freedom its citizens now enjoy and the Communist Party's continued monopoly on power. He notes that prosperity has raised people's expectations and access to information, even as it's helped the government forestall democratization: Many citizens who might once have become dissidents have grown increasingly focused on their private lives and the opportunity to make money quickly, while party officials, who "can often determine who succeeds and fails in the new capitalist economy," wield "tremendous leverage over the emerging class of private businessmen and entrepreneurs that might otherwise support political change."

It is Pan's achievement in "Out of Mao's Shadow" that he makes the dark side of China's glittering economic growth palpably real to the reader by showing the fallout of these changes on the lives of individual citizens, just as he shows the potent effect that a few brave individuals — speaking up on behalf of civil liberties, freedom of the press and government accountability — can have on the party's conduct of day-to-day business.

— The New York Times

'Palace Council'

By Stephen L. Carter (Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95)

Late in "Palace Council," the book's hero, Eddie Wesley, asks a White House staff member about the effect that he, Eddie, has had on President Richard M. Nixon.

He is told that his name does not come up in White House conversation. "People have other things on their minds, Eddie," the staffer says deflatingly. "Not everything is about you."

But "Palace Council," the third novel from Stephen L. Carter, a professor at Yale Law, intends that statement as a preposterous lie. In this book, everything is about Eddie. That includes the workings of Harlem's high society, the betrayal of Cold War nuclear secrets, the radical student underground of the 1960s, a secret American agenda in Southeast Asia and, last but hardly least, Nixon's inner thoughts. When Nixon has to decide whether to resign, Eddie Wesley is the sounding board he seeks.

Eddie is an important black literary figure who wins two National Book Awards and becomes part of the American public school curriculum during the course of the novel.

Oddly enough, this may be the most authentic, realistic aspect of Carter's novel. He himself is a renowned scholar and knows what it's like to be treated accordingly. But he is not enough of a novelist to make this credible on paper. Nor can he keep the adulation from sounding excessive when it is directed at Eddie. Since "Palace Council" is predicated on Eddie's strategic importance in post-World War II American history, it therefore has plausibility problems from the very start.