Recruit or Die: How Any Business Can Beat the Big Guys in the War for Young Talent
By Chris Resto, Ian Ybarra and Ramit Sethi (Portfolio, $24.95)

It shouldn't only be giant corporations that recruit top talent from college campuses, argue this book's authors (one of whom, Resto, is the founding director of MIT's largest internship program). Smaller companies can do the same, if they understand that college students want more than money and perks; they also want such intangibles as chances to be recognized for their individual impacts and have experiences that expand their personal as well as professional worlds. Drawing on interviews with more than 1,000 students, Recruit or Die offers strategies that can help level the playing field between Wall Street darlings and companies with lower profiles and lesser budgets.

The Coup
By Jamie Malanowski (Doubleday, $22.95)

John Adams called the U.S. vice presidency "the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived." So it's no surprise that Gordon Pope, a onetime hotshot software billionaire and current VP, should want to move up - especially since his boss is sinking in the polls. Exploiting a fetching but tarnished journalist in need of rehabilitation, Pope engineers a supposedly untraceable plot to clear the Oval Office by miring the president in one career-ending scandal after another. Malanowski, the managing editor of Playboy and a Spy magazine vet, delivers in The Coup a Primary Colors for the Bush years, a satirical balance against all the seriousness of today's early presidential campaigning.

The Tin Roof Blowdown
By James Lee Burke (Simon & Schuster, $26)

One of the first crime novels, if not the first one, backdropped by Hurricane Katrina finds Iberia Parish sheriff's detective Dave Robicheaux (Pegasus Descending) being dispatched to a decimated, suddenly lawless New Orleans to search for serial rapists, a vigilante with more potential for harm than some of the local looters, and a priest with a serious morphine habit. This is the sort of book - filled with poignancy and human weakness, replete with a hope unbroken by tragedy - that proves the adage about how any story can be told effectively through the lens of crime fiction.

C.C. Pyle's Amazing Foot Race: The True Story of the 1928 Coast-to-Coast Run Across America
By Geoff Williams (Rodale, $25.95)

Endurance contests (dance marathons, flagpole sitting, etc.) were very popular during the 1920s, but none was so audacious or potentially grueling as the Los Angeles-to-New York footrace organized by fast-talking sports promoter C.C. Pyle in the year before the Great Depression struck. Enticed by a $25,000 prize, 199 runners lined up at the starting gate; a remarkable 85 made it to Madison Square Garden (a distance of 3,423.5 miles) almost three months later. Williams is swift off his mark with commentary about this race's era and the wrenching miles ahead of the racers, and finishes strong with personality studies of Pyle and the contest's long-shot winner, part-Cherokee Andy Payne.

Ipse Dixit: How the World Looks to a Federal Judge
By William L. Dwyer (University of Washington Press, $25)

The title couldn't be more obscure (translated from Latin, it means "he said it himself"), yet the author holds a prominent role in Pacific Northwest legal history. It was U.S. District Court Judge Dwyer, after all, who ruled in 1991 that the northern spotted owl was a "threatened species," and that timber sales would have to be reduced in mature wooded areas where the birds lived. Prior to that, this Seattle native had successfully defended lawmaker John Goldmark against charges that he was a Communist, represented employees of the Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer during the fight over a joint-operating agreement between those two papers, and sued Major League Baseball to gain Seattle an expansion franchise team, the Mariners. Ipse Dixit features the thinking of Dwyer (who died in 2002) on matters ranging from the importance of libraries to the future of America's legal system.