Dave Eggers, Matt Groening, Ken Burns, and Conan O'Brien agree: The Onion, that scrappy mag ruthlessly satirizing madcap modern life and earnest newspaper journalism, is funnier than reality. Dispatches from the Tenth Circle: The Best of the Onion carries on the proud, shameless tradition of Our Dumb Century, which won the 1999 Thurber Prize for American Humor. If a real, dumb newspaper wrote a feature story about hell, you bet its headline would be the boosterish one imagined by the maniacs at the Onion: "Tenth Circle Added to Rapidly Growing Hell." When one reads in this book the headline "Arabs, Israelis Sign 'Screw Peace' Accord," one wonders whether The Onion has not, alas, anticipated the news. Their style of yuks is not for softies: the headline "Loved Ones Recall Local Man's Cowardly Battle with Cancer" may not strike the funny bone of the recently bereaved, but it's a dead-on parody of the sort of sentimental slop that cops major journalism awards in our dumb news era. If you can laugh at the preposterous world around you, and muster the courage to tear down without building up, this book is for you.

To unite the "uniquely American genres of folk music such as blues, gospel, country, Western swing, Cajun, zydeco, Tejano and Native American" under the designation of roots music and to attempt to explore such a diverse category sufficiently is to invite charges of folly or hubris or both. But this large volume, the companion text to a four-part PBS series of the same name, boldly does so and largely succeeds. While the 11 essays cover material that has been studied in-depth elsewhere, together they make a convincing case that the tradition of "pre-rock" folk music is worthy of respect and reinvestigation. Singer Raitt's claim that "without roots music there would be no... modern popular culture today" might be overstated, but there's no doubt that the form has been profoundly influential (as well as increasingly popular). Profiles of artists like Hank Williams, B.B. King and Emmylou Harris and careful considerations of the role roots music played in American culture are interspersed with interview excerpts, time lines and song lyrics. Manuel Pe¤a's "Musica Tejana: The Music of Mexican Texas" is especially good. Aside from the excellent essays, the book stands out for its selection of rare and fascinating photographs. A rich and thoughtful investigation of "vernacular" music, this is essential reading for neophytes and connoisseurs alike. (Nov.)Forecast: With the PBS series this fall bound to attract a large audience, this should be a big seller. It should also have a long shelf life as a reference work and a gift book.

This ultimate compilation of all-things-baseball includes such fan-talizing topics as Little Known Rules, Trick Plays, Quotes of the Game, and Funny Moments. Test your baseball IQ with real-life game situations and official scoring dilemmas, then read how umpires, managers, and other baseball authorities called the play. Experience the game's zaniest moments, its most intriguing anecdotes, its most colorful players, and all of the action behind the scenes as well as on the field. It's all here: the questions and answers, the stories and stats - everything but "The Star-Spangled Banner" - making Baseball Bafflers and entertaining and engaging celebration of the Great American Sport. A wide range of experts compiled these golden moments, from sports journalists to retired players, to trivia experts and devoted fans, making it a must-have for armchair umpires everywhere.

Did you know:

• That Woodstock was initially proposed as “Three Days of Peace, Love, and Monster Trucks”?
• That Dr. Seuss experimented with numerous titles before settling on The Cat in the Hat, including The Manatee
• Who Uses Profanity and The Horse Going Through a Painful Divorce?
• That before settling for a zip-up cardigan, Mr. Rogers insisted on starting each show in his Dallas Cowboys half-shirt?
• That James Bond’s famous self-introduction was originally, “Bond. James Bond. James Susan Bond.”?
• Or that John Gray’s bestseller was originally titled Men Are from Mars, Women Won’t Shut Up?

Illustrated with album covers, book jackets, scripts, photographs, everyday objects, and other artifacts, Rough Draft is a visually stunning, hilariously funny parody of pop culture from the writers whom Time magazine calls “wildly inventive.”

From the creators of the highly popular Web site thesmokinggun.com-a wildly entertaining collection of previously unpublished documents (court transcripts, FBI files, morgue and police reports, etc.) that hilariously illuminate some of the most important, scandalous, or bizarre news stories of recent years. Including:

• What Sid Vicious told police when they found him with the corpse of his girlfriend at the Chelsea Hotel
• How Martha Stewart threatened and berated her neighbor's landscapers ("f***ing illegal aliens")
• A CIA memo on the use of "trained cats" as assassins
• Ted Kaczynski's request for a sex change
• The confidentiality agreement that Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman required their household staff to sign
• The most twisted JFK conspiracy theory ever
• Burt Reynolds's debts to toupee companies as revealed in his bankruptcy papers
• And hundreds more.