GERTRUDE BELL:Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations.By Georgina Howell.Farrar, Straus & Giroux.481 pp. $27.50
HOW DOCTORS THINK.By Jerome Groopman.Houghton Mifflin.307 pp. $26
THE LOST WORLD OF JAMES SMITHSON:Science, Revolution, and the Birth of the Smithsonian.By Heather Ewing.Bloomsbury.432 pp. $29.95
GLUT:Mastering Information Through the Ages.By Alex Wright.Joseph Henry Press.296 pp. $27.95
AIMEE SEMPLE MCPHERSONAND THE RESURRECTION OF CHRISTIAN AMERICA.By Matthew Avery Sutton.Harvard Univ. Press.351 pp. $26.95
DOMINION OF MEMORIES:Jefferson, Madison, and the Declineof Virginia.By Susan Dunn.Basic.310 pp. $27.50
The next big debate in the global warming arena is going to be about climate engineering. But efforts to manipulate the climate and weather have a long history of exaggerated claims and beliefs, and a dangerous tendency to become militarized. Even if they succeed, who will control the global thermostat?
A small Kenyan village is the laboratory for celebrity economist Jeffrey Sachs’s ambitious scheme to lift Africa out of poverty. Can big money buy the continent’s poorest people a better future?
Leonhard Euler is seldom remembered as one of the Enlightenment greats, but he should be. His discoveries changed the course of mathematics forever, and 300 years after his birth his ideas continue to resonate in classrooms and laboratories.
Sprawl-bashing only obscures what's really going on in the American landscape—and what can be done to improve the quality of life.