Mark Reutter says books such as John Stilgoe's Train Time are "of interest because they reveal a mindset that is part of the problem that the author is trying to correct."
Sarah Courteau considers the thesis of Eric Wilson's Against Happiness, that happiness is “an obsession that could well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse.”
Daniel Akst looks at a paean to an underappreciated metal: corrugated iron.
Flora Lindsay-Herrera reviews Uncertain Peril, which examines the brave new world of genetically modified foods and Doomsday seed vaults.
"Like most good histories," writes reviewer Mark Jerome Walters, "Scott Weidensaul’s fascinating account of birding in America dispels many myths."
Winifred Gallagher inspects two books on dirt: both offer rich details, but she finds one more scholarly, the other "livelier...riddled with gossipy anecdotes about the rich and famous."
Gary Alan Fine discovers why it's so hard to keep secrets nowadays.
Brooke Allen reviews Janet Malcolm's book on Gertrude Stein and her long-time companion Alice B. Toklas, in which Malcolm "comes close to declaring Stein an artistic fraud."
In a new book on the American Civil War, reviewer Robert Wilson finds it was "the shared suffering" of the North and South that "finally made the nation one again."
A new biography of explorer Henry Morton Stanley, says reviewer Rebecca Clay, uncovers "the truth behind the myth," and "paints a sympathetic portrait of the ultimate self-made man."