INSIDE LARRY & SERGEY'S BRAIN
By Richard L. Brandt
Portfolio, 244 pages. $24.95

'Searching and organizing all the world's information is an unusually important task that should be carried out by a company that is trustworthy and interested in the public good."
--Larry & Sergey's...

1. Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence (Knopf). This is Pamuk's most domestic, most realist, most elegiac, and most emotional novel so far, shedding indispensable light on his previous monumental efforts such as Snow (2004), My Name Is Red (2001), and The Black Book (1994). Kemal Basmaci is the scion...

DOCTORING THE MIND: IS OUR CURRENT TREATMENT OF MENTAL ILLNESS REALLY ANY GOOD?
By Richard P. Bentall
NYU Press, 364 pages. $29.95

"Conventional psychiatry, which reached its zenith with the neo-Kraepelinian movement, has not only failed to deliver tangible benefits for patients (antipsychotics...were an accidental discovery) but...

CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY
Directed By Michael Moore

Until Sicko (2007), Michael Moore's movies, from Roger & Me (1989) onward, showed a progression in radical questioning. We expected each movie to take us to the next logical step, and although each time he would refrain from going all the...

LOST IN THE MERITOCRACY: THE UNDEREDUCATION OF AN OVERACHIEVER
By Walter Kirn
Doubleday, 211 pages. $24.95

A natural-born child of the meritocracy, I'd been amassing momentum my whole life, entering spelling bees, vying for forensics medals, running my mouth in mock United Nations, and I knew only...

CASTLE
By J. Robert Lennon
Graywolf Press, 224 pages. $22.00

We were assured that as soon as the age of Bush-Cheney was over, we would return, in the age of Obama, to a purity before we went down the dark path of torture. Nothing could be further from...

"All illegal aliens present in the United States on the date of enactment of our bill must quickly register their presence with the United States Government -- and submit to a rigorous process of converting to legal status and earning a path to citizenship -- or face imminent deportation."

FREE: THE FUTURE OF A RADICAL PRICE
By Chris Anderson
Hyperion, 274 pages. $26.99

DIGITAL BARBARISM: A WRITER'S MANIFESTO
By Mark Helprin
Harper, 232 pages. $24.99

Does free have to mean diminished quality of content? Is the enticement of free only a marketing ploy, or does...

Cheap: The High Cost Of Discount Culture
By Ellen Ruppel Shell
Penguin Press, 296 pages. $25.95

American consumers are being taken for a ride. Ellen Ruppel Shell, in her persuasive new book, argues that "Shoddy clothes, unreliable electronics, wobbly furniture, and questionable food have become the norm. We...

$20 PER GALLON: HOW THE INEVITABLE RISE IN THE PRICE OF GASOLINE WILL CHANGE OUR LIVES FOR THE BETTER
By Christopher Steiner
Grand Central, 276 pages. $24.99

Forbes magazine writer Christopher Steiner has set up a useful heuristic device--the escalation of the price of oil in two-dollar...

The very idea of a speech addressed to more than a billion diverse people, with different grievances against America, seems ludicrous. My advisers have been after me to do this, from before I was elected president, but I have finally decided that no speech can fail to be patronizing, condescending,...

Review: Engaging the Muslim World by Juan Cole

Palgrave Macmillan, 282 pages. $26.95

Engaging the Muslim World exposes the fallacies of recent myths constituting Islam Anxiety, and offers the first real alternative course of pragmatic engagement. While faulting the Muslim world where fault is due, it also understands its...