The rich may be popping their heads out of burrows to start spending, and the markets may be on the rise, but even in a recovery, you can always use an economic roadmap. Here, among new books our editors and writers have chosen, are a common-sense guide to protecting your portfolio and advice on how to fix the financial system. We ve also got a guide to offbeat sightseeing for nerds with wanderlust, a look at how we squander our food, a novel about the Mexico and the McCarthy era and, in case you were thinking of isolating yourself, Stephen King s newest thriller, in which a Maine town confronts what happens when a mysterious force cuts it off (literally) from the rest of America.

By Robert Pozen
Reviewed by Robert J. Hughes

To everyday consumers, too big to fail has become a dubious mantras. Where is the fairness in a government bailout of large banks and corporations that leaves regular people wondering when things are going to turn around for them.

Here, author Pozen, chairman of MFS Investment Management, a lecturer at Harvard Business School and a contributor to The Wall Street Journal, provides an analysis of the financial arrangements the government has used to bolster the economy, with proposals for shaping the economic landscape, all of which may help investors better understand the shifting marketplace. (SmartMoney is a joint venture between Dow Jones and Hearst. The Wall Street Journal is a unit of Dow Jones.)

In four parts and 14 chapters, Pozen details complex economic issues in clear prose: the U.S. housing slump and its affect on the global financial crisis; the slump s impact on stock and bond markets; last year s bailout of financial institutions, and the future of the American financial system.

This is a book for investors who want to understand the details of our financial landscape, and who also want to consider arguments on restricting mortgage-lending practices, whether financial derivatives and hedge funds should be regulated or the revival of loan securitization, among others. Pozen also includes a helpful glossary of terms that should help even seasoned investors.

The Little Book of Safe Money

By Jason Zweig
Reviewed by Alexandra Scaggs

This is a little book with big advice. Jason Zweig, who writes The Wall Street Journal s weekly Intelligent Investor column, doesn t promise investors the moon, but in language that everyone can understand, he offers solid, common-sense steps to protect and improve their portfolios.

In "The Little Book of Safe Money," Zweig breaks down the specifics of broad investment areas financial assessment, types of investments and investment psychology. But his broad theme is that the single most valuable holding in an investor s financial arsenal is his or herself. Investors potential income will outperform all of their other holdings or investments, Zweig emphasizes. That means investors should hedge against themselves; bankers, for example, shouldn t invest mostly in financial stocks.

He also has readers take a second look at many super-popular investment classes. Ultra-leveraged ETFs? Only for professionals. Hedge funds? Only if you do serious research. And emerging markets, which many regard as a failsafe in a recovering global economy, don t translate into hot returns. If you have an uncontrollable urge to jump into the developing world, he writes, book a flight to Rio.

Such advice is consistent with the big idea of Zweig s book: If an investment looks to good to be true, it probably is. And he offers a useful process to help readers remember it.

By: John Graham-Cumming
Reviewed by Thomas E. Weber

Somewhere around the time of the original dot-com bubble, the rising influence of the geek in the U.S. economy became clear. Since then, geeks have gone from a staple comic-relief character in movies and television to an undeniable culture force. So perhaps it s only natural to have a geek-centric travel guide.

Visiting Las Vegas, for instance? Skip the Liberace Museum and instead check out this recommendation from The Geek Atlas: the Smithsonian-affiliated Atomic Testing Museum, where visitors can see a multimedia presentation in the Ground Zero Theater.

From Paris (the institute of Louis Pasteur) to Palo Alto, Calif. (the garage where Hewlett-Packard got started), this entertaining guide by John Graham-Cumming (www.jgc.org, a technology entrepreneur and writer, provides a rundown of off-the-beaten-path destinations sure to please any geek or for that matter, any armchair travel buff.

Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal

Author: Tristram Stuart
Reviewed by Jami Makan

Think twice before throwing away the half-eaten sandwich on your plate or the vegetables buried in the back of your refrigerator. Waste describes the social and environmental effects of squandering food at every stage of the supply chain. According to author Tristam Stuart, each person in Britain fritters away enough food to supplement the diets of two malnourished people elsewhere; in the U.S., livestock eat twice as much as Americans themselves, contributing to food shortages as far away as Pakistan.

The result of this and other excesses: You, and everyone you know behave murderously towards fellow humans, Stuart concludes. He considers the roles played by profits, laws, treaties, cultural differences and even human psychology. He is especially critical of supermarkets, which deliberately stock more food than they could ever sell in order to create an impression of infinite abundance.

"Waste" is arranged like a textbook, with an appendix of tables and graphs, a bibliography and exhaustive endnotes that span 132 pages in the back. Unfortunately, much of "Waste" reads like a textbook too. But while it lacks the narrative drive of "Fast Food Nation," the book does have interesting bits, such as the description of expensive machines that scan carrots on high-speed conveyors and zap off those that aren t straight enough.

Stuart offers some simple solutions to the problems of food waste: Don t purchase what you don t need, support businesses that donate excess food to charity, eat all the parts of an animal, and so on. The problem is more complex than the solutions, but without even steps like these, he says, nature is bound to get its revenge.

By Barbara Kingsolver
Reviewed by Carly Tushingham

A lacuna can be a cave, a space between objects or the piece of a story that s missing. That sense of something missing, of emptiness, pervades the first half of "The Lacuna," Barbara Kingsolver s first book since her bestselling 2007 locavore memoir-cum-manifesto "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" and her first novel in almost a decade.

The Lacuna begins through the journal entries of one Harrison William Sheppard, the child of a gold-digging Mexican mother and an absent American father, who is stuck between families, friends, jobs and countries. Sheppard s ability to mix dough leads him to cooking for artists Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo. Working in their household introduces him to Stalin opponent Leon Trotsky, and he becomes his translator. After Trotsky s assassination, Sheppard returns to the U.S. to begin a writing career.

Harrison s flat, emotionless descriptions of his somewhat aimless life in 1930s Mexico have a sense of the lacuna of the novel s title, but the diary rarely engages the reader. It s as if the narrator and author Kingsolver aren't trying.

When the novel does kick into high gear, as anticommunist paranoia erupts north of the border, so does Sheppard's story (and Kingsolver's telling of it).

Kingsolver captures the chilling atmosphere of the fearful McCarthy era as Sheppard's past friendships with known communists begin to catch up with him. And a life that seemed so simple, bland and aimless has more complexity, color and even drive than he much less anyone else would care to experience.

Under the Dome

By: Stephen King
Reviewed by Robert J. Hughes

All politics is local. Especially in Stephen King s gripping new novel in which an ordinary Maine town populated with ordinary folk who are able to rise above or unleash their personal demons is suddenly and horrifically trapped under an invisible electronic dome, cut off from the rest of America.

This is good news for certain nefarious town leaders, who hate the liberal road the country has chosen. They are not only able to grab power, they conveniently are able to secede from the nation. As they run things their way, events turn uglier. Imagine a hothouse situation where people in confinement must come to terms with dwindling supplies, frazzled nerves, unbridled corruption. Now imagine it on a bigger, grander scale: King s "Under the Dome" is Sartre s "No Exit" as a millennial American version of hell is other people.

"Under the Dome" is a companion piece to one of King s most enduring novels, 1978 s "The Stand," about conflicting survivors of a deadly viral outbreak. Here, though, the large cast of characters inhabit a town rather than a devastated national landscape. The stakes are similar, though: good and evil, acceptance and retribution, fascistic isolationism and democratic community.

King remains a first-rate storyteller his novel starts out strong and keeps a reader plunging onward through its many chapters. But at well over 1,000 pages, "Under the Dome" may not fit into the average commuter briefcase. This may be one novel that argues for having a Kindle.