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Michael Agger, associate editor We can't very well expect books to change our lives, but they should certainly poke us now and then. Tom Hodgkinson's The Freedom Manifesto, a sequel to his cult classic How To Be Idle, presents its credos as a lark: Play the Ukulele! Death to the Supermarkets! Stop Moaning! Fling Open Your Doors! But the joshing tone belies a work of crafty scholarship and radical intent. Hodgkinson leafs through various malcontent movements including the Stoics, the situationists, and the back-to-the-landers to "bring three strands of thought together into a philosophy for everyday life; these are freedom, merriment, and responsibility." (Hodgkinson is an existentialist.) He finds his intellectual groove in a bohemian appreciation of the medieval, a time when workers had autonomy, beer was spiced with berries, and merchants were looked down upon as ungodly and crude. This is amusing stuff, and occasionally jolting. I can think of no other book where Marx is correctly labeled a trustafarian and Catholics are praised for their ability to party. It's also a book arriving at an opportune time, as another British import, The Office, has enhanced America's appreciation for the absurdity of work. Hodgkinson's manifesto is, in my estimation, the show's missing manual. Good Germs, Bad Germs. Arthur Allen, contributor Good Germs, Bad Germs, Jessica Snyder Sachs' enthralling synthesis of research into the nasty and nice bugs that inhabit our bodies by the trillions, gives the best explanation I've seen of the "hygiene hypothesis." That's the notion, born in 1989 with David Strachan's article in the British Medical Journal, that the absence of common early-childhood diseases has caused children's immune systems to go haywire, leaving them more susceptible to asthma and other allergic disorders. Sachs fills in the picture with a vivid account of how sanitation, vaccines, and antibiotics have "partially restored humanity's pre-civilized state of health" by reducing the lifetime burden of inflammation—but at a price. The downside is that public health and scientific medicine did their job by "crudely sweeping away life's harmless, immune calming bugs along with the disease causing, inflammatory ones. The result appears to be a redirection of immune aggressiveness to the 'imagined' threats in allergens, and perhaps the body's own health cells." As Sachs effectively moves through the scientific literature, she shows that for good, allergy-free health, we don't need a revival of infection; we do need exposure to colonies of nonpathogenic bacteria, which help produce a "biochemistry of tolerance." The important thing, as Sachs quotes Nobel laureate Josh Lederberg as saying, is to start "thinking of a human as more than a single organism. It's a superorganism that includes much more than our human cells." The Islamist. Reza Aslan, contributor Ed Husain is one of the most gentle, unassuming souls you could meet. So it comes as a bit of a shock to read The Islamist, the gripping memoir of his years as an active member of a radical religious group in the United Kingdom. The book tells the story of a shy, deeply spiritual, British-born South Asian boy who, like so many of his peers, turns his back on the apolitical Muslim faith of his parents' generation in favor of the more politically active Islam of radical movements like Hizb-u Tahrir. Husain gradually becomes one of the movement's principal recruiters, rallying other young British Muslims like himself to transform England into an Islamic state ruled by Shariah law. Ironically, Husain's journey toward puritanical fanaticism comes to a halt after he travels to Saudi Arabia and glimpses for himself what a society built upon Shariah actually looks like. Only then is he able to reconcile his identity as a Brit and as a Muslim, which leads him to a deeper, truer understanding of his faith. This is a wonderful book, one that, in some ways, functions as a who's-who of Islamic radicalism in the United Kingdom. What's more, by recounting his personal experiences inside radical Islam, the book goes further in addressing the question of why so many young British Muslims are turning toward Islamism than the dozen or so academic tomes recently published on the subject. Dark Hope. Emily Bazelon, senior editor During what he calls the "unhappy years" from 2002 to 2006, David Shulman, an Israeli professor at Hebrew University, did some of the harder work of his country's peace movement: clashing with police and settlers to deliver food and medical supplies to Palestinian villages. In his excellent record of these years, Dark Hope, Shulman vividly describes the small bands of Palestinians who live in caves in the Hebron Hills. While they try to tend sheep and goats, as their people have for centuries, Jewish settlers scatter tiny blue-green pellets of poison amid the grazing grounds. Shulman bears "moral witness" to such misdeeds, Avishai Margalit writes in this provocative review. The author knows that the Palestinians also "stagger under a burden of folly and crime," but says, "my concern in these pages is with the darkness on my side." By making Israeli culpability his unrelenting focus, Shulman, who immigrated to Israel from Iowa in 1967, provides abundant evidence to support his argument that Israel's occupation is self-destructive and morally corrosive. It's a sober account, and not exactly fun to read, but all too instructive. Novels in Three Lines. Christopher Benfey, art critic I've been dipping into two offbeat books that combine cleareyed reportage with exotica run wild. Félix Fénéon, an art critic who hobnobbed with Mallarmé, spent much of 1906 writing miniature summaries of news items to fill out newspaper columns. Assembled by his longtime mistress, and tautly translated by Luc Sante, Fénéon's Novels in Three Lines is violent, ironic, and sometimes just plain weird: "Frogs, sucked up from the Belgian ponds by the storm, rained down upon the streets of the red-light district of Dunkirk." More slithering lowlife can be found in Judith Magee's luminous The Art and Science of William Bartram. Long before Audubon, Bartram wandered through Cherokee outposts and Florida river basins, circa 1776, filling his notebooks with quasi-surrealist renderings of bobolinks and frolicking alligators. Bartram's pictures are beautifully reproduced in Magee's volume, and she makes a good case for his scientific expertise. It's easy to see why Bartram's idiosyncratic work stoked the feverish fantasies of Coleridge and Wordsworth. ... 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