Briefly noted.(four books)(Brief Article)

Martha Inc., by Christopher M. Byron (Wiley; $27.95). Though gleefully heralded in the press as a hatchet job, this biography of Martha Stewart turns out to be surprisingly evenhanded. The author's mixture of distaste and respect for his subject is informed by his own contact with her: nodding acquaintances for years, they briefly were friends after Byron wrote an admiring article. But when his questions headed in uncomfortable directions Stewart's enthusiasm for the book turned to hostility. Byron, a business columnist for the Post, is most persuasive when he describes her professional maneuverings -- particularly her genius for using any partnership to her advantage, from her marriage to her Kmart deal. Byron sifts the now familiar elements of Stewart's personal life -- impoverished upbringing, bullying dad, cohorts of betrayed friends -- and arrives at the plausible if predictable conclusion that character problems like ruthless egotism are at the root of her business success. Given that her net worth is $650 million, we should all have these problems.

The Dressing Station, by Jonathan Kaplan (Grove; $25). Kaplan could have had a lucrative practice as a doctor in England, but he tossed it away to become a battlefield surgeon in some of the world's most remote war zones, including Kurdistan, Mozambique, Burma, and Eritrea. In this refreshingly unsentimental memoir, he offers a vivid look at what it's like to practice medicine in places where there are always too many casualties and not enough resources. His descriptions of surgery are unflinching, and, while the narrative drags when he's away from the front line, he's never away for long. As a result, Kaplan gives us a remarkable self-portrait of the war junkie. He seems most alive when he's reinflating a collapsed lung using only a rubber glove or performing a skin graft with a safety razor, and though he lets us see close up the devastation of ...