A whipsawing stock market has been keeping many of us busy along with June s weddings and graduations. While the unceasing rain in much of the country has meant more time for reading, it also delayed the start of summer. Now, though, with the prospect of sunnier days and more leisure time ahead, here's a chance to expand your reading list with some notable new books that our writers and contributors have enjoyed including business reads and titles for relaxation.

Here s our latest crop of staff picks:

Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It

Author: Joshua Cooper Ramo

Reviewed by: Anne Kadet, Senior Writer, SmartMoney

Geostrategic advisor and former Time editor Joshua Cooper Ramo says we've entered a super-scary era marked by unprecedented risk and unpredictability. Even worse, lumbering Western nations are stuck on a worn-out approach to problem-solving that aggravates crises. Rather than dealing with the chaos, we approach this new world order as if it's a big game of pool, where logical strategies bring predictable outcomes. Among the results: economic meltdown, environmental disaster and a bungled war in Iraq. In his search for alternatives, Ramos explores people and organizations that seem to thrive amid chaos. This is the fun part of the book: We meet venture capitalists, terrorists, hackers, videogame designers and a South African doctor successfully treating AIDS. Unfortunately, the supposedly "revolutionary" approaches that Ramo distills from his excursions tend toward the sort of vague generalities one encounters in an introductory meditation seminar. And his policy recommendations (universal health care, more education spending) are depressingly familiar. Read it for the stories, not the solutions.

Author: Neil White
Reviewed by: Robert J. Hughes

In 1993, Neil White, a writer and magazine publisher, seemed to be all you'd want in a good-looking and prosperous southern gentleman with a happy home. But his wants outstripped his means. To keep up appearances, White committed fraud by kiting checks ("an occasional financing technique"). After he was found out and convicted, White was sent to a federal prison, in Carville, La., on the banks of the Mississippi, that was like no other: It was also the last leper colony in the continental U.S. (The government treated lepers as less than human and figured it was okay to have them live alongside felons and murderers.) White describes his year of imprisonment as he grew to understand the facts of those living with leprosy (known as Hansen's disease), which helped him overcome his self-pity and the wayward sense of entitlement that had led to his illegal schemes. This poignant and very readable memoir introduces us, of course, to White's eccentric fellow prisoners, including a noted bodybuilder and an innovative doctor. More important, we meet the leprosy patients who taught White the value of appreciating life as it comes, not as one wishes it to be.

Author: David Liss
Reviewed by: Will Swarts, Reporter, SmartMoney.com

America, it seems, has always been a country of speculators. In another of his historical thrillers, this one set in the early days of our American republic, author David Liss goes back to 1792 and places hard-drinking accidental detective Ethan Saunders amid actual events surrounding Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and the founding of the Bank of the United States. Financial chicanery and dirty doings in the markets mix closely with the volatile politics and shifting loyalties of the fledgling United States where, Liss demonstrates, the more things have changed, the more they stay the same.

A Memoir of Crash and Survival

Author: Robert Sabbag
Reviewed by: Matthew Heimer, Deputy Editor, SmartMoney

Late at night on Father s Day in 1979, an Air New England turboprop crashed in a forest on Cape Cod with eight passengers aboard. By some combination of luck and aerodynamics, everyone but the pilot survived including Sabbag, a writer who was "half a celebrity" at the time thanks to his best-selling cocaine-trade expos "Snowblind." Three decades later, Sabbag revisited the crash and its aftermath, tracking down other survivors, their families and friends, and paramedics and civilians who responded to the disaster. The recounting of the crash itself, a harrowing and lightning-fast read, doesn t take up much space here; the rest is a meditation on the relationship between memory and trauma and on the small-world connections among the survivors. Oddly enough for a "memoir," other people come across much more vividly on the page than Sabbag himself does; it seems he s still struggling to decide exactly what to say about his own life-altering night.

Author: Elmore Leonard
Reviewed by: Brad Reagan, Staff Writer, SmartMoney

The latest crime novel from Elmore Leonard starts as a love triangle of sorts, featuring laconic bank robber Jack Foley, diminutive Cuban killer Cuando Rey and Dawn Navarro, a professed psychic who nonetheless needs Foley's help to get at Rey s fortune. Leonard junkies will recognize these characters from previous books, and he clearly enjoys letting them play off one another. The triangle quickly expands to become something like an octagon, with each character working a different angle, even if none of them take it all too seriously. The plot doesn t quite fit together neatly but, as always with Leonard, the fun is in eavesdropping on the banter between streetwise players. To pluck just one snippet, listen in as Foley compliments the tanned midriff of a B-actress not exactly mourning the death of her wealthy husband:

"You must spend a lot of time in the sun."
"Alone by the pool," Danialle said, "with my grief. Thanks to you I m beginning to feel like myself again."
"I haven t done anything."
She glanced at him. "Are you sure?"

Among Leonard s famous "10 Rules of Writing" is: "If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it." "Road Dogs" shows the old master, now 83, still practicing what he preaches.

How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better
Author: Christopher Steiner

Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller

Author: Jeff Rubin

Reviewed by: Sarah Morgan,

If you re not worried enough about the future, check out these two books about how increasingly scarce oil could fundamentally reshape the global economy. Start with Rubin, who lays out the case for why oil prices will get more volatile even as they climb inexorably higher, dragging the world economy along on a boom-and-bust ride. If Rubin convinces you that the price of oil has caused the current recession and will cause the next and has given you the broad-stroke outline of how globalization is about to be thrown into reverse, move on to Steiner. Steiner offers an enthusiastic and detailed description of the way we ll live in a post-oil future. For Steiner, the decline of the suburbs, the end of air travel, and the re-localization of manufacturing and agriculture are all fantastic news. Steiner s optimism (even in the face of a world without sushi) is infectious. But Rubin (even with his alarming predictions) is the better writer.

Author: Beth Kobliner

Reviewed by: Kelli B. Grant, Senior Consumer Reporter, SmartMoney.com

Today s graduates may be strapped for cash with an average student loan debt of more than $23,000 and few jobs in sight but Kobliner s guide is one worth giving to the recent grads in your life (or their shelling out $16 for). Kobliner has updated her 1996 original "Get a Financial Life" and her new version offers necessary and timely advice for today's finance novices. She provides a quick and dirty how-to on everything from picking a checking account and reducing debt to buying a home and investing. It s an ambitious task for a 300-page book, and not without its failings (it's geared more toward financial neophytes in their 20s than to 30-somethings). But even with its few gaps, many readers will find everything they need here for starting out on the right financial path.

Author: David Collins
Reviewed by: Thomas E. Weber, Editor, SmartMoney.com

We ve all had to suffer through the financial crisis, so we may as well at least get some beach reading out of it. In "Maxxed Out," when a ghostwriter teams up with a fictional mogul to produce a guts-and-glory business book, the result is an inside look at financial hubris and crime. But despite sprinkled mentions of subprime loans, the story doesn t feel ripped from today's headlines. Instead of a scurrilous 21st-century hedge-fund titan or a Madoff-style charlatan, billionaire Robert Maxx here is a real-estate dealmaker meant to evoke Donald Trump. Such a character might seem a tad '90s compared to our current crop of outsized financial scandal-mongers, but the story at least includes a cautionary tale about the perils of leverage. And it s more than diverting enough to distract from a down-market day.

Author: Donald McRae
Reviewed by: Robert J. Hughes

The re-examination of life and career is thrust upon many people today, whether through their being bought out or laid off. But such personal quandaries are nothing new in America. Think of renowned lawyer Clarence Darrow, whose dazzling courtroom legerdemain is familiar even 80 years after his most famous trials. In the 1920s, well into his 60s, Darrow worried about what would make his life more meaningful. He wanted to write (he'd already published a novel), wondered about his ongoing affair with an ambitious journalist, anguished over his legacy. Then he found himself taking on a vital role in a series of sensational trials (including Leopold & Loeb and Scopes) that cemented his reputation as the century's most brilliant and courageous lawyer. Author McRae, who has written widely on sports, gives us an absorbing look at this important decade in Darrow's life, and draws a subtle portrait of the private and public man. With novelistic skill McRae also manages the singular feat of creating almost unbearable suspense about the trials' outcomes even when we already know how they ended.

The Extraordinary Story of a Band of U.S. Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan

Author: Doug Stanton

Reviewed by: Robert J. Hughes

Who'd have thought that one of the most potent weapons in the arsenal of the U.S. military was inadvertent horsemanship? Shortly after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, a band of Special Forces soldiers was dispatched to Afghanistan to battle the Taliban and Al Qaeda there. In order to fight the enemy on Afghanistan's legendarily difficult terrain which has stymied foreign warriors throughout history many of the soldiers learned to ride the region's small, tough horses, although the training of these men was better suited to wheeled vehicles that long ago replaced four-legged beasts on battlefields. Stanton captures the chaos and the urgent improvisatory nature of urban warfare, and describes the series of events, from early victory to subsequent ambush, with a flair for the broad dramatic stroke (the book has been sold to Jerry Bruckheimer Productions, which developed "Black Hawk Down"). There are a lot of players here, and sometimes it's hard to tell some of these valiant men apart, but together they emerge as an extraordinary band of brothers.