Paperback
The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies — How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths, by Michael Shermer. Shermer seeks to answer the question of why “so many people believe in what most scientists would consider to be the unbelievable.” Kirkus Reviews
Nonfiction
The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, by David McCullough. Travelers before the telephone era loved to write letters and journals, and McCullough has turned this avalanche of material into an entertaining chronicle of several dozen 19th-century Americans who went to Paris. Publishers Weekly
Twenty-Five Books That Shaped America, by Thomas C. Foster. For his 25 selections, Foster gravitates toward texts that bolster the folksier conception of Americans: rough-hewn, individualistic, fun-loving but concerned about family, full of prejudices but generally assimilating. Kirkus Reviews
The Long Journey Home, by Margaret Robison. A talented poet and teacher, Robison writes movingly of her growing up in a troubled southern Georgia small town; marrying a talented man who became increasingly alcoholic and abusive; and her own collapse into deep mental illness. Barnes & Noble
Will Shortz Presents the Puzzle Doctor: Sudoku Mania, by Will Shortz. The puzzle master is back with yet another book, this one featuring the popular numbers game.
Fiction
Vaclav and Lena, by Haley Tanner. A love story about “two unforgettable young protagonists who evoke the joy, the confusion, and the passion of having a profound, everlasting connection with someone else.” From the publisher
The Jefferson Key, by Steve Berry. At the start of Berry’s ingeniously plotted seventh Cotton Malone novel, the former U.S. Justice Department agent manages to thwart an attempt to assassinate the U.S. president outside a midtown-Manhattan hotel. Publishers Weekly
