Leisure reading

'Leap'

By Sara Davidson

Random House, $25.95

This book, subtitled "What Will We Do With the Rest of Our Lives?" speaks to the boomer generation. It's a follow-up to "Loose Change," also by Davidson, about the boomer's coming-of-age.

Davidson — a boomer herself — refers to her own experience in both books, as well as those of many she has interviewed, including Carly Simon, Tom Hayden, Tracy Kidder, Gloria Steinhem and Jane Fonda.

Reading her book is reminiscent of reading Gail Sheehy's books on the various stages of life. Like Sheehy, Davidson weaves her conversations with other people throughout the book, commenting as she goes. The result is an unscientific bundle of opinions. — Dennis Lythgoe

'Mommy Wars'

Edited by Leslie Morgan Steiner

Random House Paperback, $14.95

If you didn't read this book when it first came out in hardback in 2006, well who can blame you?

The title, "Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off," is pretty off-putting. As it turns out, the title is also inaccurate.

This is a collection of 27 essays by women who, for the most part, don't think there is a "war." Not only is there no "war" but, in fact, no clear difference in lifestyles between the moms who wrote these essays.

In truth, the writers are describing how each woman found her place somewhere on the continuum of hours working v. housekeeping and caring for children. A more accurate title would have been: "Nice Essays About Achieving Balance." — Susan Whitney

'Toussaint Louverture'

By Madison Smartt Bell

Pantheon, $27

Madison Smartt Bell is an English professor who has written 12 novels — many of them about race and war. He has spent much time writing about Haiti — producing a fictional trilogy, "All Soul's Rising," "Master of the Crossroads" and "The Stone that the Builder Refused" — about the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1803 that transformed the colony into a nation of freed blacks and mulattos.

It's natural, then, for him to follow it up with a biography of a black man who was born into slavery, lead a slave revolt, became a slave owner himself, supported Louis XVI but ended his life in a French prison.

Toussaint Louverture, the only successful leader of a slave revolt in history — in Saint Domingue — was an interesting man — and Bell does a masterful job telling his story. — Dennis Lythgoe