PEOPLE OF THE REEDS (223 pp.)—Gavin Maxwell—Harper ($4.50). ARABESQUE AND HONEYCOMB (224 pp.) —Sacheverell Sifwe/l—Random House ($6). “The best book,” says the Talmud, “is the world.” The good travel book mirrors two worlds, the one the traveler visits, and the one he brings with him. These double worlds are fascinatingly mirrored in two new travel books about the exotic lands of Iran and Iraq. Nomads of the Waters. For Gavin Maxwell, a former British army major, travel in southern Iraq meant travail.

A young boy made an adorable 911 call that went viral. His mom and a police officer politely scolded him, but the internet can't get enough of it. Childhood pranks are inevitable. And, for whatever reason, one of the more popular ways for children to troll their parents and other adults in their lives is to call the police when there’s no real emergency going on in their home. Many kids often used the tactic of calling 911 to bring unnecessary chaos to their households.

At the beginning of last week there were three live leaders of Chicago gangland —Big Shots, in gangster parlance. They were Alphonse (“Scarface Al”) Capone, whose dominion reaches out from the South Side of the city, and his two long standing enemies, Joseph (“Joe”) Aiello and George (“Bugs”) Moran, both of the North Side. For weeks all three had kept public and police (who sought them on vagrancy charges) guessing as to their whereabouts.

Actor who won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as football player Rod Tidwell in the film Jerry Maguire. His other credits include As Good As it Gets, Men of Honor, Red Tails and Norbit. He stars as OJ Simpson on the FX series The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story. Before Fame He attended four different high schools as a teen and became class president at three of them. Trivia He appeared in four episodes of the TV series MacGyver from 1989 to 1991, playing the character Billy Colton.

This week, two strange spates of death-by-drinking made news, when dozens of people died from drinking possibly-poisoned beer in Mozambique and another large group was struck down by bad liquor in India. The idea of “poisoned” or contaminated unlicensed alcohol may strike American readers as a problem for people elsewhere in the world to worry about, but the U.S. actually has an extensive history with deaths from poisoned alcohol — and that’s not to mention the thousands of deaths a year that, even today, can be traced to alcohol poisoning from supposedly safe, legal drinks.