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Each week Entertainment Weekly reviews a small selection of popular new books. Titles available for the Kindle reviewed in the October 15th issue include:

Peace Meals: Candy-Wrapped Kalashnikovs and Other War Stories, by Anna Badkhen. Free Press, 2010. Print length: 288 p. NONFICTION. EW's slant: "...gritty memoir of Afghanistan and Iraq that focuses not on front-line reportage but on behind-the-scenes kindnesses of local families, many of whom shared their hearths, and their bread with the foreign journalist." Amazon customer rating: none yet. Kindle edition $11.99 (Hardcover: $16.50). Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Travel books bring us to places. War books bring us to tragedy. This book brings us to one woman’s travels in war zones: the locals she met, the compassion they scraped from catastrophe, and the food they ate. It reveals how one war correspondent’s professional choices are determined not only by her opinion of which story is important but also by the instinctive comparisons she, a young mother, makes each time she meets children in war zones; by her intrinsic sense of guilt for leaving her family behind as she goes off to her next dangerous assignment; and, quite prosaically - though not surprisingly - by her need to eat. Wherever Badkhen went, she broke bread with the people she wrote about, and the simple conversations over these meals helped her open the door into the lives of strangers. Sometimes dinner was bread and a fried egg in a farmer’s hut, or a packet of trail mix in the back of an armored humvee. Sometimes it was a lavish, four-course meal at the house of a local warlord, or a plate of rice and boiled meat at a funeral tent. Each of these straightforward acts of humanity tells a story. And these stories, punctuated by recipes from these meals, form Peace Meals. Following Badkhen’s simple instructions, readers will taste what made life in these tormented places worth living.

Anna Badkhen has covered wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Israel and the Palestinian territories, Chechnya, and Kashmir. Her reporting has appeared in The New Republic, Foreign Policy, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, and Salon.com, among others." - Amazon.

Meeks, by Julia Holmes. Small Beer Press, 2010. Print length: 192 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...leavened by Holmes' wit, never becomes grim melodrama." Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (1 review). Kindle edition $7.96. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"No woman will have Ben without a proper bachelor's suit...and the tailor refuses to make him one. Back from war with a nameless enemy, Ben finds that his mother is dead and his family home has been reassigned by the state. As if that isn't enough, he must now find a wife, or he'll be made a civil servant and given a permanent spot in one of the city's oppressive factories. Meanwhile, Meeks, a foreigner who lives in the park and imagines he's a member of the police, is hunted by the overzealous Brothers of Mercy. Meeks' survival depends on his peculiar friendship with a police captain - but will that be enough to prevent his execution at the annual Independence Day celebration? A dark satire rendered with the slapstick humor of a Buster Keaton film..." - Amazon.

Nemesis, by Philip Roth. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. Print length: 304 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "This would have been a stunning short story." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (8 reviews). Kindle edition $11.69 (Hardcover: $12.99). Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"...this latest in the series far exceeds its predecessors in both emotion and intellect. In general terms, the novel is a staggering visit to a time and place when a monumental health crisis dominated the way people led their day-to-day lives. Newark, New Jersey, in the early 1940s (a common setting for this author) experienced, as the war in Europe was looking better for the Allies, a scare as deadly as warfare. The city has been hit by an epidemic of polio. Of course, at that time, how the disease spread and its cure were unknown. The city is in a panic, with residents so suspicious of other individuals and ethnic groups that emotions quickly escalate into hostility and even rage. Our hero, and he proves truly heroic, is Bucky Canter, playground director in the Jewish neighborhood of Newark. As the summer progresses, Bucky sees more and more of his teenage charges succumb to the disease. When an opportunity presents itself to leave the city for work in a Catskills summer camp, Bucky is torn between personal safety and personal duty." - Brad Hooper for Booklist.

Bad Blood: A Virgil Flowers Novel, by John Sanford. Putnam, 2010. Print length: 400 p. THRILLER. EW's slant: "...he's overseen a brand extension without any discernible lapse in quality." Amazon customer rating: 3 1/2 stars (54 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99 (Hardcover: $14.99). Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"Bobby Tripp was a good kid, working at a grain mill, saving for college. But he killed Jacob Flood, a local farmer delivering his harvest; and then, after Bobby was arrested, he hung himself in jail. The sheriff, Lee Coakley, reaches out for help to Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. She gets Virgil Flowers, the throwback hippie with the hair, the rock-band T-shirts, and a rep as a lockdown investigator...As usual, Sandford delivers a great mystery with action, suspense, humor, and, yes, sex..." Wes Lukowsky for Booklist.

The Reversal, by Michael Connelly. Little, Brown and Company, 2010. Print length: 416 p. THRILLER. EW's slant: "...workmanlike..." Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (49 reviews). Kindle edition $14.99 (Hardcover: $14.86). Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Longtime defense attorney Mickey Haller is recruited to change stripes and prosecute the high-profile retrial of a brutal child murder. After 24 years in prison, convicted killer Jason Jessup has been exonerated by new DNA evidence. Haller is convinced Jessup is guilty, and he takes the case on the condition that he gets to choose his investigator, LAPD Detective Harry Bosch. Together, Bosch and Haller set off on a case fraught with political and personal danger. Opposing them is Jessup, now out on bail, a defense attorney who excels at manipulating the media, and a runaway eyewitness reluctant to testify after so many years." - Amazon.

Worth Dying For: A Reacher Novel, by Lee Child. Delacorte Press, 2010. Print length: 400 p. THRILLER. EW's slant: "It's the first time Child has published two books in a single year, and the strain shows." Amazon customer rating: Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"There’s deadly trouble in the corn country of Nebraska...and Jack Reacher walks right into it. First he falls foul of the Duncans, a local clan that has terrified an entire county into submission. But it’s the unsolved case of a missing child, already decades-old, that Reacher can’t let go. The Duncans want Reacher gone - and it’s not just past secrets they’re trying to hide. They’re awaiting a secret shipment that’s already late - and they have the kind of customers no one can afford to annoy. - Amazon.

Booky Wook 2: This Time It's Personal, by Russell Brand. Harper Collins, 2010. Print length: 304 p. MEMOIR. EW's slant: "...those who were charmed by Brad's previous My Booky Wook...should be similarly entranced by this devilishly hilarious roundup of his fame-era shenanigans..." Amazon customer rating: 1 star (1 review). Kindle edition $12.99 (Hardcover: $13.49). Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Russell charts his rise from crack-house junky to Hollywood star, indulging in sexual excesses that make Caligula seem like a prudish spinster. On his quest to find true love, Russell encountered thousands of women, often three or four at a time (for efficiency), and his dizzying ambition led to chaos and controversy that could have landed him in prison and left the BBC in ruins. This is the story of what happens when insatiable desire meets limitless opportunity and when a punk from the wrong side of the tracks is given the keys to the palace..." - Amazon.

The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood, by Jane Leavy. Harper Collins, 2010. Print length: 400 p. BIOGRAPHY. EW's slant: "...little new info..." Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (9 reviews). Kindle edition $14.99 (Hardcover: $11.99). Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"As she did so memorably in her biography of Sandy Koufax, Jane Leavy transcends the hyperbole of hero worship to reveal the man behind the coast-to-coast smile, who grappled with a wrenching childhood, crippling injuries, and a genetic predisposition to alcoholism. In The Last Boy she chronicles her search to find out more about the person he was and, given what she discovers, to explain his mystifying hold on a generation of baseball fans, who were seduced by that lopsided, gap-toothed grin. It is an uncommon biography, with literary overtones: not only a portrait of an icon, but an investigation of memory itself. How long was the Tape Measure Home Run? Did Mantle swing the same way right-handed and left-handed? What really happened to his knee in the 1951 World Series? What happened to the red-haired, freckle-faced boy known back home as Mickey Charles?" - Amazon.
Note: Given the high price of the Kindle edition compared to the hardcover, this might be a good time to remind readers to utilize the free services of the Kindle Price Drop Tracker where you can sign up to be notified when the Kindle price of this title - or any other Kindle e-book - goes down.