.Vodka, Orphans, and Dragonflies

If you don't read these books, you're missing out.

Millions of Mexican fans were stunned to learn that their favorite teen idol was linked to a sexual-slavery ring. In Girl Trouble (Rayo, $12.95), Christopher McDougall briskly traces the true career and largely fugitive life of Gloria Trevi, Mexico’s most popular singer in the ’90s: a smokin’-hot Monterrey-born Madonna. … He never expected to score so big on the TV quiz show, Who Will Win a Billion? … Nor did uneducated foundling orphan Ram Mohammed Thomas ever dream that his win would land him behind bars. Vikas Swarup’s hilarious debut novel Q & A (Scribner, $24) is a lesson about urban survival, with grit glistening among the laughs. … Tuberculosis among the early Native Americans? Medieval men’s cavities filled with rosary beads? The Archaeology of Disease (Cornell University, $39.95), by Charlotte Roberts and Keith Manchester, details how skeletal discoveries at archaeological sites reveal much about illnesses in earlier eras and how they were treated. Dead men do tell tales. … Unwanted because he was born with cerebral palsy, Ruben Gallego spent his youth in Soviet orphanages, placed there by his grandfather, a Spanish Communist Party official. Gallego’s slender and grippingly stylistic memoir Black on White (Harcourt, $22) mixes moments of sunlit warmth with shafts of vodka-flavored gloom. … When dragonflies mate, the male clamps the female’s head with an appendage in his tail. It isn’t pretty; nor are lizard-eating spiders or writhing blister-beetle larvae, but David Attenborough’s Life in the Undergrowth (Princeton, $29.95) captures the bug-and-insect world with unforgettable images.

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