The joy of Witold Rybczynski’s 14th book lies in its explaining the almost heroic tasks of preparing land for builders to use. His teacher is his former student, now the head of a land development company.

Last Harvest: How a Cornfield became New Dalesville. Real Estate Development in America from George Washington to the Builders of the Twenty-first Century, and Why We Live in Houses Anyway. By Witold Rybczynski. 320 pages.

The tabloid columnist Pete Dexter has made half a career of insufferably cheap shots, not all of them very pertinent. He doesn’t grow on you the way Steve Lopez does. Still, you never know when he’s going to hit a home run.

Paper Trails: True Stories of Confusion, Mindless Violence, and Forbidden Desires, a Surprising Number of Which are Not About Marriage

Just when you thought it was safe to come out of the ‘70s revival, two new films have arrived to immerse us anew in the bad hair, bad faith and low-grade paranoia of the period.

The Hoax. A film by Lasse Hallström. www.lassehallstrom.com.
Zodiac. A film by David Fincher. zodiacfilm.blogspot.com.

Here is one of the necessary tools of modern life: a primer on how to impress one’s professors, one’s students, one’s friends and one’s enemies with the least effort and maximum results when chatting about books. There’s just one problem….

Comment parler de livres que l'on n'a pas lus (How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read).
By Pierre Bayard.
Minuit, 198 pp., 15 euros

Here’s a plot with no hope but a tawdry ending: Three ladies of a certain age go shopping for sex in late-‘70s Haiti and get both more— and less— than they bargained for. Audiences get less.

Heading South (Vers Le Sud). A film directed by Laurent Cantet. Playing at the Ritz at the Bourse, Fourth and Ludlow Sts. (215) 925-7900.