"Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City," by Jed Horne. (Random House, $16.) Horne is a metro editor at The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, which won two Pulitzer Prizes for its hurricane coverage. In this "splendid mix of reporting and commentary," as David Oshinsky called it in The New York Times Book Review, Horne describes the storm and its aftermath. He has harsh words for the Bush administration, but his focus is on local politics and culture, and he explains, Oshinsky continued, "why things fell apart so completely in New Orleans." In a new epilogue, Horne concludes that "the city that care forgot was itself learning to forget."

"The Song Before It Is Sung," by Justin Cartwright. (Bloomsbury, $15.99.) Cartwright's ninth novel fictionalizes the troubled friendship between the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the German aristocrat Adam von Trott, a Rhodes Scholar in prewar Oxford who was involved in (and executed for) a conspiracy against Hitler in 1944. The men's political rift (the Berlin character thinks the von Trott character is deluded about Nazi Germany, but does he really believe what he says?) raises questions of loyalty and fate, which carry into the present in the person of another character, an academic writing a book on the relationship.

"The Argument: Inside the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics," by Matt Bai. (Penguin, $16.) This book, a "sharply written, exhaustively reported and thoroughly depressing" (in the words of The Times' reviewer, Nick Gillespie) account of the largely Web-driven "netroots" wing of the Democratic Party, grew out of articles Bai wrote for The New York Times Magazine. "While sympathetic to the new progressives, Bai describes a movement long on anger and short on thought," Gillespie said. A different take on contemporary politics can be found in "Homo Politicus: The Strange and Scary Tribes That Run Our Government" (Broadway, $14), by Dana Milbank, a columnist for The Washington Post. A work of mock anthropology centered on a creature called Potomac Man and analyzing his culture and habits, the book is full of fascinating details and you-couldn't-make-this-up quotations, like Ari Fleischer's assertion that "the burden is on those people" who think Saddam Hussein "didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are."

"Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music," by Glenn Kurtz. (Vintage, $13.95.) Kurtz studied guitar at the New England Conservatory of Music and pursued a solo career, but gave it up as he realized he lacked the ability and drive to become the next Segovia. After earning a Ph.D. in comparative literature, Kurtz took up the guitar again, this time aiming not at a career but at a sustaining experience.

"Shining at the Bottom of the Sea," by Stephen Marche. (Riverhead, $14.) Marche, a Canadian novelist, has assembled a literary anthology from the North Atlantic island of Sanjania, complete with editor's introduction, biographical notes, criticism and more than a dozen short stories from several periods. However, there is no such place: Marche has invented Sanjania's geography, history and national character, and written the stories that take it from 19th-century British rule to the troubled present.

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