History

Seven Los Angeles buildings that experts say have played significant roles in the lives of local African Americans have been placed on the National Register of Historic Places, authorities have announced. The listing follows a yearlong study of some 4,000 parcels in South Los Angeles by consultants hired by the city's Community Redevelopment Agency.

It's a good thing Frank Bruni is such a talented writer, or "Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater" would be a lot tougher to digest. The outgoing restaurant reviewer for the New York Times writes frankly about gargantuan binges and drastic weight-loss strategies in this alternately rollicking and sobering memoir. A book of comic excesses and culinary appreciation, it ends on a cautiously optimistic note: Bruni mostly has his eating under control, but doesn't take it for granted.

James Hatano turns off one of the Palos Verdes Peninsula's oceanfront drives and onto a hidden dirt road, just as he has for more than 50 years. He guides his Buick LaCrosse up a gentle hill to the fields where he raises cacti and flowers. While he works, Hatano can look out at the Pacific and see whales and dolphins. As he chops off a beavertail cactus paddle, he gazes across Palos Verdes Drive West to where construction crews are putting the finishing touches on the 582-room Terranea resort with its nine-hole golf course, 25,000-square-foot spa and three pools.

The 19th century laborers pooled their money to build the biscuit box of a church along Offutt Road in the southwest corner of Baltimore County. Atop a stone foundation they put four walls, eight windows, a peaked roof, three rows of pews, a pulpit for inspiration and a wood stove for warmth -- and called the thing done. It can hardly have been much to look at when it was completed in 1887, and it surely isn't now. But that could change if the Friends of the Cherry Hill African Union Methodist Protestant Church make good on their plans to turn it into a museum dedicated to local black history.

The Pattern in the Carpet A Personal History With Jigsaws Margaret Drabble Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 368 pp., $25 "These fragments I have shored against my ruins," T.S. Eliot wrote in "The Waste Land." In "The Pattern in the Carpet," Margaret Drabble uses the jigsaw puzzle, its history and its pieces, as her own fragments assembled against the ruins of depression. Ostensibly set out as a history of jigsaws and her experience with them, Drabble's mini-project wavers between the meticulously detailed and the desultory, broken up by all manner of feverish digressions.

Daunting as it may be to assemble a centuries-spanning assessment of any country, even one with a fairly linear march through history, how does one approach a culture as unstable, contradictory and contested as ours? Where do you start? Where do you stop? And how, exactly, do you know when you're done? That was the task faced by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, editors of the gargantuan "A New Literary History of America" (Harvard University Press: 1,096 pp., $49.95). By their reckoning, "new" means as recent as Barack Obama; "literary" means anything from Emily Dickinson's poetry to hip-hop's wild style; and "America" means the United States, not the two continents that stretch across a hemisphere.

When you stay at a Doubletree Hotel, little sets it apart from other mid-priced business/leisure hotels except the warm chocolate chip cookies at check-in -- more than 10 million a year, by the chain's count. But it's not the promise of a chewy nibble that's likely to catch your attention when you enter Doubletree's Arctic Club in downtown Seattle. Rather, it's the property itself: an immaculately restored, nearly century-old social lodge so specific in its Gold Rush details that you want to pull down one of the many vintage maps from the lobby walls, jump on a dog sled and head for the Klondike.

The women are lined up in a row--straight backs, dark starched dresses, sober faces. They clutch long-handled brooms to their sides, bristles up, as if they were rifles. The black-and-white photo is dated 1886. A cleaning crew? Unlikely. For one thing, the women are too well dressed. For another, they look ready to march into battle or, at least, a parade. "Isn't it neat?" asked Laura Verlaque, collection manager at the Pasadena Museum of History, which counts the photograph of the Pasadena Broom Brigade in its archives.

It's only fitting that Tombstone, Ariz., which gained fame for a shootout, has a rough-and-tough gunslinger grave site. Check out the political commentary on the epitaphs of Billy Clanton, Frank McLaury and Tom McLaury, killed as they battled Wyatt Earp and his posse at the O.K. Corral. Want a taste of headstone humor? Try this: "Here lies Lester Moore / Four slugs from a .44 / No Les / No more." And this one recalls George Johnson (wrongly sentenced to hang for buying a stolen horse)

Several politicians in South Korea and Japan have begun exploring the possibility of a joint history textbook between their nations and China. But given the lingering differences over issues ranging from past wars to current territorial claims, the proposal faces numerous hurdles. Members of South Korea's ruling Grand National Party met informally in Seoul this month with counterparts from the majority Democratic Party of Japan. One of the main topics was whether a joint history textbook could now be developed with government cooperation.