Romney, Bachmann, Gingrich or ... uh ... Taft? Suppose for a moment that when the 6-foot, 300-pound William Howard Taft, 27th president of the United States, lost his re-election campaign in 1912, he didn't go on to become chief justice or fight prohibition as head of the American Bar Association. Imagine instead that out of defeat or embarrassment or plain ol' sleepiness, he just took a little 99-year catnap. In Jason Heller's new novel, Taft 2012 (Quirk, Jan. 17), Big Bill's back and ready to win back the hearts of American voters. In line with typical Quirkian revisionist-historical plotlines, Taft is his usual conservative Republican self — but he's also fascinated by flavored water, the perpetuity of baseball and the existence of "dignified vaudeville" WKRP in Cincinnati. Oh, and he has a Twitter account (@taft2012 if you care to follow). No zombies to speak of here, but plenty of silly revelations and hypothetical political in-fighting to convince you that, given the real-life alternatives, Taft wouldn't be so bad.
Taking a macro approach to America's urban farming movement, Breaking Through Concrete (University of California, Jan. 30) puts the spotlight on 12 organizations that have gone from small-biz gardener to city-agriculture revolutionary. The vibrant, gorgeously photographed volume shares myriad green-thumbed success stories, from a Seattle community garden program to a farm therapy program in Santa Cruz, from a Brooklyn rooftop garden to an agriculture school for inner-city Detroit teens. Philadelphia's Greensgrow Farms gets a shout-out, too, for its pursuit of a low-income CSA that would support Fishtown's diverse immigrant population. Laced among Concrete's dozen stories are helpful how-tos, on everything from raising urban livestock and building a green roof to the tedious process of changing zoning codes, should you be ready to turn your urban-farming dream into an economically fruitful reality.
From the department of Perfect Hipster Stocking Stuffers, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Tiny Book of Tiny Stories: Volume I (It Books, Dec. 6) has fallen off the gift-guide radar. Maybe because it's so adorkably wee, best-of compilers refuse to take it seriously. But they are foolish! Through a collaboration with hitrecord.org, Gordon-Levitt's first crop of reader-submitted, illustration-focused stories (volumes 2 and 3 are forthcoming) is often magical and never laborious: Stories max out at a sweet sentence or two (see: "King Midas often wondered what would happen if he touched himself"; "The outsider stood beside/ The little low tide, as it dried/ And he sighed as he decided, 'We'd be better off inside'"). Buy it for your brooding-artist cousin, but then selfishly decide to keep it for yourself.
