In Concrete Reveries, writes reviewer Geoff Manaugh, philosopher Mark Kingwell offers only a glimpse of what makes him "an original thinker with provocative ideas."
Reviewer Stephanie E. Schlaifer looks at Brenda Wineapple's account of the quarter-century relationship between poet Emily Dickinson and political activist Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
Hew Strachan on Targeting Civilians in War: "Desperation drives even democracies to target civilians in order to coerce the enemy to surrender."
What makes people volunteer to help others? Reviewer Darcy Courteau tries to find some answers in a study by two sociologists.
Reviewer Remuka Rayasam finds Anita Jain "more interested in stringing together amusing anecdotes than in making a sincere attempt at cross-cultural understanding" in her account of her hunt for a suitable husband.
Writing about Daniel Gardner's The Science of Fear, Evelin Sullivan concludes that "for the sake of our survival, one fear ought to become stronger: that of being afraid of the wrong things."
In his minute analysis of Albert Einstein's works, writes reviewer David Lindley, Hans C. Ohanian "reveals himself to be the kind of strictly logical, step-by-step physicist that Einstein plainly was not, and Ohanian's inability to cope with that difference almost seems to have turned into a personal animosity."
Edward Tenner reviews a biography of Buckminster Fuller, "preppy nerd and buttoned-down bohemian, green guru and globe-trotting jet fuel consumer, a college expellee who relished honorary degrees [who] proclaimed a new cosmos of structural lightness and left a personal archive of 45 tons about it."
T. R. Reid reviews a "warts-and-all history of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, one of the darkest moments in the 180-year history of the Mormon Church."
Aaron Mesh on Hollywood's controversial attempts to portray the last days of Jesus Christ on film.