This winter, curious readers have been blessed with the publication of two books on the religion. In Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear, the New Yorker writer and Pulitzer Prize winner offers a comprehensive history of the religion, digging up plenty of dirty secrets in the best tradition of investigative reporting. Beyond Belief, written by Jenna Miscavige Hill — niece of Scientology’s current leader, David Miscavige — is in many ways the opposite: It doesn’t have Wright’s historical breadth, but it does give the personal details of day-to-day life in one of the religion’s most high-profile enclaves that Wright’s book lacks.

While Going Clear is much more hard-hitting than Beyond Belief, both make it clear that Scientology is a frighteningly repressive, conformist institution that has done all sorts of bizarre and nasty things, ranging from the merely immoral to the flagrantly criminal. Just as clear is the fascination that Scientology has held for (possibly) millions of adherents over the years, as well as its undeniable impact on the modern world. You’ll probably be shocked and disgusted after reading these books, but you’ll also come away with an understanding of how Scientology embodies much of the subconsciousness of postwar America, channeling our fascination with science fiction, authoritarianism, and self-help into a religion that represents many of our best and worst tendencies.

Arguably the Most Awful Thing L. Ron Hubbard Did, Out of Many Candidates

By the time you reach the end of Going Clear, you’re likely to think that there’s not a single awful thing that L. Ron Hubbard didn’t do. From adultery to kidnapping, theft, pathological lying and child abuse, it’s all here. It’s hard to choose the single most despicable deed, but this is my pick: With the publication of Dianetics in 1950, Hubbard’s career was finally beginning to take off after a series of failures, and he realized that in order to reach the next level it would be more advantageous if he were not married (at the time he was with his second wife, Sara Northrup Hollister). But he also realized that divorcing his wife would be a bad career move, so he found a simple solution: Hubbard asked Sara to commit suicide to further his career. When Sara, understandably, declined the offer, Hubbard then abducted both her and their child, attempted to have her committed to an insane asylum, and then claimed to the FBI that she was a communist, a serious allegation at the height of the Red Scare. Ultimately, Hubbard was given a divorce due to Sara’s “gross neglect of duty and extreme cruelty.” Point: Going Clear.

Strangest Form of Child Abuse

Miscavige Hill was a church member from age seven, when she was asked to sign its infamous “billion-year contract.” (Since all Scientologists know that we live one lifetime after another, forever, just pledging one lifetime is hardly a sign of dedication.) She details all sorts of acts perpetrated on her by the church as a youngster, from brainwashing to hours of manual labor to being forced to stare for hours at Hubbard’s “policies” written on the wall. Here’s one of the oddest: Miscavige Hill attended one of the church’s schools, where classes featured an OCD-level focus on looking up words. As Hubbard explained, all failure to learn derives from not knowing the meaning of words, so it logically follows that students who are having trouble must look up every single word they don’t know. Because of this, Miscavige Hill and many of her fellow students came to dread school, which was essentially hours of searching through the dictionary that made it impossible for her to actually learn anything. Point: Beyond Belief.

Freakiest Tom Cruise Moment

You knew we couldn’t get through a feature on Scientology without mentioning Tom Cruise, right? As Wright reports in Going Clear, Cruise is an admirably dedicated member, even helping so-called pre-clears take the steps necessary to reach the status of “clear,” a major milestone in one’s progress through the church. Wright explains that on one such occasion, Cruise was unable to get a reading from a pre-clear on the church’s e-meter in order to begin a session. In a sweet-but-unseemly moment of personal generosity, he offered the pre-clear a snack from an array of goodies the church provides its Hollywood elite with. As the pre-clear sat in amazement, Cruise offered up all sorts of treats, not realizing that he had been given special treatment and that normal members of the church subsisted on barely adequate, tasteless offerings. The most bizarre of the special dispensations made for Cruise? The church planted a field of wildflowers in its rural California enclave so that he and then-wife Nicole Kidman could run through them, apparently a long-held fantasy for the couple. Point: Going Clear.

Most Heartbreaking Moment

Miscavige Hill makes being raised by the Scientologists sound like something out of 1984: The kids are encouraged to rat out one another; they get “chits” for minor infractions that quickly add up to draconian punishments (a mere three chits means you have to clean your room well enough to survive a white glove inspection); they are made to endure painfully hot saunas and drink cups of vegetable oil for bizarre health rationale; and their school, named “Chinese school” after Hubbard’s experience with the Chinese, was a not-so-subtle form of brainwashing. As she tells it, Miscavige Hill did her best to endure these trials, but she had it worse than most: Her parents were high-ranking functionaries, which meant that she was separated from them for months at a time, and when they did visit they received whitewashed reports of how she had been treated. This all adds up to the book’s saddest moment, when Miscavige Hill and a friend decided to run away. Trying to escape on tiny legs and with their pockets stuffed full of croissants, they have no chance whatsoever, but that still doesn’t stop the grown-ups from humiliating them by blaming the ruination of a song and dance show on the little girls. Maybe instead of pulling out all the stops to punish them, they might have wondered why the girls felt pushed to such a drastic step. Point: Beyond Belief.

Biggest WTF? Moment

In Scientology no one is too young to work, nor, apparently, is anyone too young to do jobs they’re ridiculously unsuited for. Case in point: As a child, Miscavige Hill was appointed to perform medical duties for her fellow Scientologists. Fortunately, Scientology’s cure for most ailments involves eradicating bad thoughts from one’s system and hiding oneself away behind closed doors, à la the 18th century, so there was only so much damage our young doctor could do. But, as Miscavige Hill points out, had one of her “patients” been seriously ill, there’s a good chance she wouldn’t have realized or would have known what to do. She might have had a death or a lifetime disability on her hands — thank God nothing happened. Point: Beyond Belief.

A Few Final Facts About L. Ron

Lawrence Wright has done his research, and it really shows. Among other revelations, he tells us that on numerous occasions Hubbard declared, “I’d like to start a religion. That’s where the money is.” (Wright also explains that self-help is only so lucrative, because once you solve a person’s problem you lose their business — but with religion you can have them for their whole life, or a billion years.) He also informs us that upon hearing of the apparent suicide of his son Quentin, he exclaimed, “That little shit has done it to me again!” Even by the time Hubbard was becoming an infirm old man and Miscavige had taken over day-to-day operations of the church, he could still spend: ensconced in a mobile home in California, he reportedly received $1 million from Miscavige every week. Scientology may tell us the secrets of where all our bad thoughts come from, but it surely can’t tell us how an old man in a trailer can spend $1 million every week. Point: Going Clear.

Result: TIE. But there’s enough Scientology wackiness to fill a library, let alone these two books. Both are essential reading.

A thought-provoking investigation into which truths feel most meaningful to us

Ron Currie Jr. begins his second novel with a clear invitation to call him a liar: “Everything I’m about to tell you is capital-T true,” he claims, and then proceeds to relentlessly throw that statement in our faces. Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles is presented as the memoir of one Ron Currie Jr., but very quickly we doubt that it is — while the book’s Currie, taken for dead, recuperates in Sinai after a failed suicide attempt, his manuscript sells millions of copies based on the erroneous public belief that he died tragically. This narrative intertwines with one much more authentically autobiographical: Currie’s father’s death from cancer (the title refers to the nicotine patches people use to try to quit smoking).

If this sounds like melancholy stuff, well, at times it is, but in Currie’s capable hands, this wide-ranging novel balances its poignancy with hilarity and outright wonder. It even gets vaguely utopian in the novel’s fascinating third strand, when the author turns his attention to the Singularity, the theorized techno-apocalypse that will come from runaway artificial intelligence, which Currie the narrator thinks is a sort of salvation. It all ties together in a thought-provoking investigation into which truths feel most meaningful to us, those that come from “real life” or those we get from stories.

Narrated in short bursts — often just a paragraph in length — Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles slips past with beguiling ease but is not easily forgotten. This robustly entertaining, lightly philosophical quest proves Currie’s widely lauded first novel, Everything Matters! was no fluke.

A love story for our hysterical, borderless times

Manil Suri’s enormous, hysterical opus tells two seemingly disconnected stories: a plausible apocalypse and a broken marriage. It’s the near future, terrorists are exploding dirty bombs, the globe is descending into chaos, and India and Pakistan are on the brink of nuclear war. What worse time for Sarita’s husband, Karun, to run off without a word? And why is a gay Muslim named Jaz following her? Might it have something to do with Sarita and Karun’s two years of unconsummated marriage?

Suri has wisely set this larger-than-life, Bollywood-esque tale in the megacity Mumbai, the vastness of which makes it an utterly insane place for a vulnerable woman to go off in search of a man in the midst of total chaos. It’s the perfect locale for Suri to unfurl his expansive canvas, from blockbuster movies that incite nationalist fervor to a Hindu shrine to a child born with extra arms, plus a hair’s-breadth escape made on elephants — The City of Devi does not skimp on action. Yet the core of this book are Sarita, Karun and Jaz, all flawed, interesting and quite human enough to carry Suri’s oversized tale. In the end it becomes evident that this is a love story for our times, blending nationalities, religions, sexualities (yes, reader, there are three-way sex scenes here), all set amidst a manic frenzy whose energy is equal to our world’s.

This winter, curious readers were blessed with the publication of two books on the infamously secretive (and litigious) religion. In Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear, the New Yorker writer and Pulitzer Prize winner offers a comprehensive history of the religion, digging up plenty of dirty secrets in the best tradition of investigative reporting. Beyond Belief, written by Jenna Miscavige Hill — niece of Scientology’s current leader, David Miscavige — is in many ways the opposite: It doesn’t have Wright’s historical breadth, but it does give the personal details of day-to-day life in one of the religion’s most high-profile enclaves that Wright’s book lacks.

While Going Clear hits harder than Beyond Belief, both make it clear that Scientology is a frighteningly repressive, conformist institution that has done all sorts of bizarre and nasty things, ranging from the merely immoral to the flagrantly criminal. Just as clear is the fascination that Scientology has held for (possibly) millions of adherents over the years, as well as its undeniable impact on the modern world. You’ll probably be shocked and disgusted after reading these books, but you’ll also come away with an understanding of how Scientology embodies much of the subconsciousness of postwar America, channeling our fascination with science fiction, authoritarianism, and self-help into a religion that represents many of our best and worst tendencies.

Arguably the Most Awful Thing L. Ron Hubbard Did, Out of Many Candidates

By the time you reach the end of Going Clear, you’re likely to think that there’s not a single awful thing that L. Ron Hubbard didn’t do. From adultery to kidnapping, theft, pathological lying and child abuse, it’s all here. It’s hard to choose the single most despicable deed, but this is my pick: With the publication of Dianetics in 1950, Hubbard’s career was finally beginning to take off after a series of failures, and he realized that in order to reach the next level it would be more advantageous if he were not married (at the time he was with his second wife, Sara Northrup Hollister). But he also realized that divorcing his wife would be a bad career move, so he found a simple solution: Hubbard asked Sara to commit suicide to further his career. When Sara, understandably, declined the offer, Hubbard then abducted both her and their child, attempted to have her committed to an insane asylum, and then claimed to the FBI that she was a communist, a serious allegation at the height of the Red Scare. Ultimately, Hubbard was given a divorce due to Sara’s “gross neglect of duty and extreme cruelty.” Point: Going Clear.

Strangest Form of Child Abuse

Miscavige Hill was a church member from age seven, when she was asked to sign its infamous “billion-year contract.” (Since all Scientologists know that we live one lifetime after another, forever, just pledging one lifetime is hardly a sign of dedication.) She details all sorts of acts perpetrated on her by the church as a youngster, from brainwashing to hours of manual labor to being forced to stare for hours at Hubbard’s “policies” written on the wall. Here’s one of the oddest: Miscavige Hill attended one of the church’s schools, where classes featured an OCD-level focus on looking up words. As Hubbard explained, all failure to learn derives from not knowing the meaning of words, so it logically follows that students who are having trouble must look up every single word they don’t know. Because of this, Miscavige Hill and many of her fellow students came to dread school, which was essentially hours of searching through the dictionary that made it impossible for her to actually learn anything. Point: Beyond Belief.

Freakiest Tom Cruise Moment

You knew we couldn’t get through a feature on Scientology without mentioning Tom Cruise, right? As Wright reports in Going Clear, Cruise is an admirably dedicated member, even helping so-called pre-clears take the steps necessary to reach the status of “clear,” a major milestone in one’s progress through the church. Wright explains that on one such occasion, Cruise was unable to get a reading from a pre-clear on the church’s e-meter in order to begin a session. In a sweet-but-unseemly moment of personal generosity, he offered the pre-clear a snack from an array of goodies the church provides its Hollywood elite with. As the pre-clear sat in amazement, Cruise offered up all sorts of treats, not realizing that he had been given special treatment and that normal members of the church subsisted on barely adequate, tasteless offerings. The most bizarre of the special dispensations made for Cruise? The church planted a field of wildflowers in its rural California enclave so that he and then-wife Nicole Kidman could run through them, apparently a long-held fantasy for the couple. Point: Going Clear.

Most Heartbreaking Moment

Miscavige Hill makes being raised by the Scientologists sound like something out of 1984: The kids are encouraged to rat out one another; they get “chits” for minor infractions that quickly add up to draconian punishments (a mere three chits means you have to clean your room well enough to survive a white glove inspection); they are made to endure painfully hot saunas and drink cups of vegetable oil for bizarre health rationale; and their school, named “Chinese school” after Hubbard’s experience with the Chinese, was a not-so-subtle form of brainwashing. As she tells it, Miscavige Hill did her best to endure these trials, but she had it worse than most: Her parents were high-ranking functionaries, which meant that she was separated from them for months at a time, and when they did visit they received whitewashed reports of how she had been treated. This all adds up to the book’s saddest moment, when Miscavige Hill and a friend decided to run away. Trying to escape on tiny legs and with their pockets stuffed full of croissants, they have no chance whatsoever, but that still doesn’t stop the grown-ups from humiliating them by blaming the ruination of a song and dance show on the little girls. Maybe instead of pulling out all the stops to punish them, they might have wondered why the girls felt pushed to such a drastic step. Point: Beyond Belief.

Biggest WTF? Moment

In Scientology no one is too young to work, nor, apparently, is anyone too young to do jobs they’re ridiculously unsuited for. Case in point: As a child, Miscavige Hill was appointed to perform medical duties for her fellow Scientologists. Fortunately, Scientology’s cure for most ailments involves eradicating bad thoughts from one’s system and hiding oneself away behind closed doors, à la the 18th century, so there was only so much damage our young doctor could do. But, as Miscavige Hill points out, had one of her “patients” been seriously ill, there’s a good chance she wouldn’t have realized or would have known what to do. She might have had a death or a lifetime disability on her hands — thank God nothing happened. Point: Beyond Belief.

A Few Final Facts About L. Ron

Lawrence Wright has done his research, and it really shows. Among other revelations, he tells us that on numerous occasions Hubbard declared, “I’d like to start a religion. That’s where the money is.” (Wright also explains that self-help is only so lucrative, because once you solve a person’s problem you lose their business — but with religion you can have them for their whole life, or a billion years.) He also informs us that upon hearing of the apparent suicide of his son Quentin, he exclaimed, “That little shit has done it to me again!” Even by the time Hubbard was becoming an infirm old man and Miscavige had taken over day-to-day operations of the church, he could still spend: ensconced in a mobile home in California, he reportedly received $1 million from Miscavige every week. Scientology may tell us the secrets of where all our bad thoughts come from, but it surely can’t tell us how an old man in a trailer can spend $1 million every week. Point: Going Clear.

Result: TIE. But there’s enough Scientology wackiness to fill a library, let alone these two books. Both are essential reading.

Antiquarian books meet Google in a race to crack a centuries-old code.

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is just the kind of novel you’d expect to come out of San Francisco: a story that combines the bibliophile’s love of a nice, hefty book with the astonishing technology for which the city has become known. Down-on-his-luck web wizard Clay Jannon takes a job at the titular bookstore which, he soon learns, is a front for a library that lends tomes filled with mysterious strings of numbers. Monks have been at work for ages to crack the code in these books, but Clay has a better idea: enlist his tech-savvy friends and let high-powered computers do the math.

Sloan turns this engaging plot into a debate about digital vs. analog, as well as an inquiry into just what our computer-addict brains consider real and virtual these days. Part of the fun of Sloan’s book is how he translates real-world tech phenomena into Penumbra-esque equivalents (Google, for instance, is here run by randomly selected managers who feed their employees via an algorithm). At its heart, the book is full of deadly serious questions about where our technology is taking us and loads of sharp observations about tech culture. One could quibble with the novel’s too-tidy ending and occasional linguistic lapses, but there are more than enough nerdy pleasures to compensate in this thought-provoking, frequently delightful debut. And listening to the audiobook — which allows you to combine the warmth of Ari Fliakos’s bouncy narration with the latest mobile audio technology — is arguably the most appropriate way to experience it.

These books will make you cherish what you have as you realize the awful truth: Bad as things can seem, it’s nothing compared to what they might be.

A passionate, personal inquiry into one's beliefs

Over the past decade, Marilynne Robinson has emerged as one of our most linguistically gifted writers and most interesting thinkers. She has given us the novels Gilead and Home, and she has amplified them with essays and lectures that have revealed her full range as a writer and a thinker. When I Was a Child I Read Books comes to us as Robinson’s widest-ranging collection of nonfiction yet. Here she looks into the global debt crisis, politics, God, her childhood, the morality at the heart of Christianity, while drawing on Thomas Aquinas, the Bible, Jonathan Edwards and Walt Whitman, among numerous others. These diverse subjects are all toward Robinson’s continuing look into theology – a longtime concern of hers – and toward giving us an honest, but not tell-all, sense of herself. What comes across most clearly here is Robinson’s idea of a Christianity that is a valid, deeply felt alternative to the brand of American Christianity that is found readily on TV and in newspapers. Unlike the latter kind, Robinson’s religion is not adverse to science: “Subscribe to Scientific American for a year,” she says, to see just how great God is. Nor is it close-minded: Robinson extols the Ten Commandments but sees them as agents of compassion and generosity, not tools with which to deny rights and demonize others. Ultimately, Robinson calls her book “an archaeology of my own thinking, mainly to attempt an escape from assumptions that would embarrass me if I understood their origins.” Her struggle to escape her prejudices informs ours as well. We are fortunate to have such a fine thinker sharing thoughts on subjects that are affecting us most deeply right now.

he full story of the most expensive manhunt ever conducted

Osama bin Laden was responsible for what is probably the most devastating attack to occur on U.S. soil, outside of the Civil War. So it makes a kind of perverse sense that he would be the subject of the most expensive manhunt ever conducted. It’s this decade-long fight to get just one man that Peter Bergen expertly recounts in his authoritative Manhunt. Notably, Bergen doesn’t skimp on the early phases of this long story, going as far back as the 1990s to show us the foundations of this massive struggle. Bergen’s familiarity with bin Laden’s deep history shines – he’s been on this beat for nearly 20 years and even managed to snag a rare interview with bin Laden in 1997. From there he makes accessible the interesting facts surrounding how the CIA managed to sift countless pages of information in its hunt for bin Laden, building a “horizontal” (instead of hierarchal) blueprint of the terrorist’s associates. It was this innovative strategy that allowed forces to zero in on the terrorist’s hideout, as it was not a lieutenant or family member but bin Laden’s lowly personal courier who eventually led the U.S. to the man himself.
Bergen’s eyewitness accounts of the safe house where bin Laden lived from 2005 till his death are fascinating as only the ugly details of an infamous celebrity can be: Who knew al-Qaida’s mastermind used Just for Men to keep his beard dark or had a hole in the ground for a toilet? Also intriguing are Bergen’s descriptions of bin Laden’s domestic arrangements with his three wives, and the very prosaic struggles he engaged in with them. The final account of the raid that brought the mastermind to his end gives the full story of a climactic, anxiety-ridden day that most only know from sound bites and news reports. That, plus Bergen’s deep look into how the intelligence community functions in this era of globalized warfare, makes this a valuable book to have in mind when assessing the president’s record going into election 2012, as well as for considering future battles in the fight against terrorism.

It’s a little strange, hearing author Anthony Shadid graphically describe the toll a missile exacted on a Lebanese village in House of Stone — strange because one is immediately reminded that Shadid himself died suddenly and much too soon in the Middle East, though he couldn’t have known it as he wrote of victims choking on sand and dismembered corpses. Yet if death continually haunts House of Stone (as a veteran war correspondent, Shadid saw his share of it), the book relentlessly pursues the life that goes on in death’s stead and gives it meaning.

House of Stone‘s narrative concerns the reporter’s efforts to rebuild his great-grandfather’s house in Marjayoun, Lebanon, which was destroyed by an Israeli rocket in 2006. What comes of this effort is part national saga, part family history, and part tale of a stranger in a strange land. Shadid finds no shortage of amazement at the time and money he puts into a house that the Lebanese think should simply be destroyed. Suppliers cheat him, necessary parts prove difficult to find. He must clean human refuse out of the house’s water tanks. Interwoven with Shadid’s trials as he attempts to rebuild the house is an account of the histories of his family and their land, and it is here that House of Stone shines most brightly. It is almost as though Shadid, aware of how much of the story is not told by journalists like himself (“Television and the craft I practice show us the drama, not the impact,” he writes), now makes his best effort to fill in those spots. The result is a book that leverages Shadid’s keen reporter’s eye, complementing it with the emotion and in-depth engagement wrung from a family story. It is a tale of history with a heart, grounded in those familial bonds that we all have in common.

A refreshing, subversive look at a uniquely American scandal

European politicians have been known to be confused by America’s Watergate scandal: “Why,” they ask, “wouldn’t a major political party use all available means to beat the competition?” The truth is that the revulsion surrounding Watergate is a particularly American phenomenon, one that cuts to the core of Americans’ misgivings about power and distrust of government. These are all things that Thomas Mallon expertly evokes in his novel Watergate. As he has done in past novels, Mallon here skillfully creates believable fictional versions of historical persons. His other key strength is that he reminds us just what a weird and upsetting thing the break-ins were forAmerica. Mallon wisely steers clear of the major pivots of the case, opting for lesser-known dramas that give this story a subversive freshness, like he’s giving us the vaulted B-sides of the Watergate album.

As with his 2004 novel Bandbox, Mallon neatly and succinctly defines and coordinates a dizzying cast of characters (112 by the list of “players” that prefaces the novel), keeping the action mixed enough to evoke the chaos of the moment yet clear enough to give the listener a fighting chance. His satisfyingly complex Nixon makes the man at the center of it all sympathetic enough to anchor the book but also evocative of the many compromises the famously misanthropic politician made in order to obtain the nation’s top political position. Watergate is the impressive product of Mallon’s search though the vast archives surrounding the infamous incident — it’s his own characteristically Mallon-esque, very American story about absolute power and absolute corruption.

When Martin Thorn murdered William Guldensuppe as part of a love triangle in turn-of-the-century America, he probably didn’t imagine that he was initiating a new era of tabloid journalism. But as Paul Collins tells in The Murder of the Century, that’s just what happened. The story energized William Randolph Hearst’s news empire, giving the mogul the impetus he needed to finally smash Joseph Pulitzer’s competing paper, in the process initiating the 24-hour news cycle. Researching this book Collins consulted thousands of newspaper articles, and it shows — he tells this story with novelistic detail and tight plotting. He also offers a delightful fondness for strange details of the era, everything from the flourishing market in cadavers to the rats packed in the courtroom’s vents and something called “Telephone Headache Tablets.” Though Collins is far from the first to narrate the Guldensuppe tale — even A.J. Liebling had a go at it under the grizzly headline “The Case of the Scattered Dutchman” — he’s the first to make it into a book, and arguably the first to see the greater role the case played in bringing about an era of narrative-based journalism that follows a story for weeks and months. As befits a book, Collins gives a great sense of the Gilded Age in which the crime took place, building up characters and making for a captivating story. In the end, The Murder of the Century shows that, in the right hands, old stories can be made new.

America, argues author Susan Cain, is a land of extroverts. This will not be news to anyone who has had a teacher or boss badger them to “come out of your shell” and “seize the day,” but what might be surprising is Cain’s unabashed support for the introvert lifestyle. We’ve been socially conditioned to equate “outgoing” with “good,” and Quiet is Cain’s largely successful defense of anyone who ever just wanted to be left alone. Cain makes a good case that America evolved into an extrovert paradise right around the beginning of the 20th century, when Carl Jung invented the personality types “introvert” and “extrovert” and Dale Carnegie built an empire teaching people how to release their inner chatterbox. Once these values became entrenched in the culture – and enshrined at the top of the corporate ladder – says Cain, they became synonymous with success and virtue, forcing introverts like herself to change their ways. Relying on everyone from Warren Buffett to Rosa Parks to make her case, Cain here points out the virtues of introversion, even going so far as to argue that our economy might not be in the pits if there were a few more introverts in the board rooms. Though Cain can occasionally overreach – by the end of the book it seems that all the good people in the world are introverts – this passionate, earnest defense of quiet people is a necessary antidote to the triumph of extroversion in American daily life.

From overcoming cancer to getting a parking space, positive thinking, claims Barbara Ehrenreich, has become our primary strategy for dealing with adversity. This is not a good thing. In Bright-sided, Ehrenreich makes her mordant, comically ironic case that the infiltration of positive thinking into Americans’ daily lives has turned us into a nation detached from reality. As with her previous successful books, like Nickel and Dimed and Dancing in the Streets, Ehrenreich here makes her argument personal, starting the book with her firsthand experience as a breast cancer patient. Ehrenreich then delves into the history of positive thinking, uncovering gems like Napoleon Hill’s Depression-era book Think and Grow Rich!, which she aptly compares to the Oprah-endorsed snake oil The Secret. She also greatly bolsters her case by drawing from Donald Meyer’s 1965 book, The Positive Thinkers, still one of the best books on America’s propensity to optimism.

But Bright-sided is not simply a study of positive thinking in America: throughout the book, Ehrenreich makes a passionate argument that unflinching optimism played a major role in two of the biggest American debacles of the 21st century – the Iraq War and the housing bubble – and she argues that it’s still ruining American businesses, both by creating the cult of the CEO and by walling off said CEOs from reality. Ultimately, in Ehrenreich’s telling, positive thinking is a mechanism of population control endorsed by those in power whom it benefits, while leaving the rest of us with serious messes to clean up. While this seductive thesis doesn’t have all the explanatory power Ehrenreich wants to give it, there is a whole lot of truth here. Ehrenreich has certainly uncovered a powerful clue to the American psyche, and her reality check is something we can certainly benefit from. With Bright-sided one of our most astute, honest critics again exposes some inconvenient truths about how we live – here’s hoping people will listen.

From the Kennedy assassination to Wall Street profiteering, drug culture, and cold war missiles dripping nuclear waste, over the past 40 years no novelist has told America more about itself than Don DeLillo. His sculpted, finely calibrated prose is unmistakable, and his stories demonstrate again and again how fiction can tell us things journalism can’t. In these days of crisis and uncertainty, when people are being asked to reimagine what America means, DeLillo is required reading. He’s a singular talent that has deconstructed old American myths and created new ones to replace them.

In the novel that finally garnered Julian Barnes a much-deserved Booker Prize, one of Britain’s top authors boils down a big, fat book’s worth of thought and detail into 163 mesmerizing pages. The story follows the lovable but dense Tony Webster who, in his 60s, appears satisfied with his largely mediocre life. “Some achievements and some disappointments,” he muses, “It’s been interesting to me, though I wouldn’t complain or be amazed if others found it less so.”

Still, something isn’t quite right: As Webster begins to reminisce about his adolescence in hopes of imposing a “sense of an ending” on his life story, he wonders to himself, “What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully?” In stirring back through his memories to figure that out, Webster recalls his manipulative college girlfriend, Veronica, as well as the tragic suicide of his friend, Adrian, an all-around brain who becomes involved with Veronica after Webster. Barnes here brings to mind his countryman Kazuo Ishiguro for the way he masterfully works the idiosyncrasies of an unreliable narrator to make a common story feel new. Like Ishiguro, Barnes gives us the pleasure of being about to see Webster’s flaws before he discovers them for himself — in fact, the beauty of this fine, lean work is in how Barnes uses this to humanize his narrator. He also uses Webster’s unreliability to carefully lead us up toward a novel-spanning secret, letting us share in the moment of revelation with Webster. What Barns has done with The Sense of an Ending is craft an immensely pleasing story that shimmers with elegant elements irreducible to a single conclusion, ensuring that this book will stand up to multiple readings and lead to extended bouts of conversation with good friends.

Isaacson, who conducted countless interviews with Jobs and his immense network of rich, powerful and incredibly smart friends and lovers, offers us an unprecedentedly close portrait of the man. He starts from the very beginning, with strong portraits of Jobs’s biological parents as well as the adoptive ones who took him in after he was abandoned. He follows Jobs through adolescence, eventually offering a fresh take on the now-familiar saga of his fall from grace with Apple. Some of the most revealing stretches in this book come in the final act, where Isaacson charts out Jobs’ personal and private life as he helmed Pixar, NeXT, and, ultimately, took Apple to the top of the world’s corporate entities.

The book is a treasure trove of Jobs’s mantra-like sayings (“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do”) as well as revealing stories, like the 67 nurses Jobs ran through while being treated for cancer until he found the perfect ones, and the oxygen mask he rips off because it was poorly designed. Although Isaacson doesn’t cover up what a difficult and demeaning person Jobs could be, this is clearly a sympathetic portrait meant to enshrine Jobs more than deconstruct him. That’s fine for a first draft of history, as there will surely be scores of books to offer the critical opinions that Isaacson largely eschews in favor of showing us the man behind the technology virtually all of us are now hooked on.

Isaacson, who conducted countless interviews with Jobs and his immense network of rich, powerful and incredibly smart friends and lovers, offers us an unprecedentedly close portrait of the man. He starts from the very beginning, with strong portraits of Jobs’s biological parents as well as the adoptive ones who took him in after he was abandoned. He follows Jobs through adolescence, eventually offering a fresh take on the now-familiar saga of his fall from grace with Apple. Some of the most revealing stretches in this book come in the final act, where Isaacson charts out Jobs’ personal and private life as he helmed Pixar, NeXT, and, ultimately, took Apple to the top of the world’s corporate entities.

The book is a treasure trove of Jobs’s mantra-like sayings (“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do”) as well as revealing stories, like the 67 nurses Jobs ran through while being treated for cancer until he found the perfect ones, and the oxygen mask he rips off because it was poorly designed. Although Isaacson doesn’t cover up what a difficult and demeaning person Jobs could be, this is clearly a sympathetic portrait meant to enshrine Jobs more than deconstruct him. That’s fine for a first draft of history, as there will surely be scores of books to offer the critical opinions that Isaacson largely eschews in favor of showing us the man behind the technology virtually all of us are now hooked on.

Hannah Pittard’s startling first novel takes one of the most abused forms in all of literature — the “we” narrator — and uses it to craft an elegiac, emotional story about growing up. With notable similarities to Jeffrey Eugenides’s career-launching Virgin Suicides, The Fates Will Find Their Way starts with certainties — Nora Lindell went missing on Halloween — and branches into the much more opaque territories, full of “what-ifs” and “what-might-haves.” Narrated by a group of boys in small-town America, the book uses Nora’s disappearance to let the boys tell their own story of becoming men. As they concoct theories about her fate, their own stories emerge, shifting smoothly between past, present and future. Pittard develops a composite picture of a group of young men on the cusp of adulthood, ably spreading her narrative out over almost a dozen well-drawn characters. Interestingly, as her “we” narrator interrogates the various boys in Nora’s community, The Fates Will Find Their Way develops a compelling take on that most American of landscapes — the suburbs — offering both nostalgia for their safety and simplicity and a warning of their falseness. In its arresting, sometimes purposely unbelievable testimony, it’s a book to send you back to your own adolescence, recalled and seen differently for the experiences of Pittard’s lost boys.

The title of Pulitzer-winning journalist Ron Suskind’s look at the first two years of the Obama White House doesn’t bode well for his judgment of the president. After all, as Suskind himself writes, “Gaining the trust without earning it is the age old work of confidence men.” That’s a damning reference to the confidence Obama inspired in millions of voters during his presidential campaign — confidence that many would now say was ill-gotten — but there’s much more to Confidence Men than its title might indicate. Suskind has written a very even-handed book, one that doesn’t indict Obama for his policies so much as deliver a very detailed, blow-by-blow account of how the politics got done.

Be forewarned, this isn’t a policy book; it’s more along the lines of “palace intrigue,” a novelistic story of the clash of personalities created out of countless interviews with the main players. Suskind is very good at capturing the essence of key figures, like the legendarily arrogant Larry Summers (who sings about himself, “for he’s an unpleasant fellow”). Suskind also creates a robust background, delivering a wealth of quotes from the over 200 people he spoke with while writing the book. (Perhaps the best is Paul Volcker’s “the trouble with the United States recently is we spent several decades not producing many civil engineers and producing a huge number of financial engineers. And the result is fucked bridges and a fucked financial system!”)

Confidence Men has caused a lot of controversy for its factual errors, as well as the pushback from many quoted in the book, and while it’s true that the errors are regrettable, it would be difficult to not expect the establishment to criticize such an inflammatory book. That’s best seen as a measurement of the riskiness of Suskind’s thesis: that Obama’s political inexperience led to a poorly guided, poorly executed economic policy. It’s a question that will be argued over for years, and Suskind gives us a rare, important look at how one of the most promise-laden presidencies greatly under-delivered in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

In 1982, an obscure sci-fi author was commissioned to write his first novel. He was given just one year to do it, a tight deadline in any case but a virtually insane one for an uncertain, first-time novelist. It’s stories like that that become the stuff of legend: The writer was William Gibson, and the resultant book, Neuromancer, became an unprecedented success — not only was it the first ever to take sci-fi’s three top awards, it’s also generally regarded as predicting the world we now live in.

At a time when computers were still rare, expensive and prone to break down, Gibson envisioned a world in which they were ubiquitous, so common that the harshest punishment possible would be to cut off a human from the “matrix” of interconnected computer reality spanning the globe. (Sound familiar?) This is exactly the punishment meted out to über-hacker Henry Dorsett Case, but he’s soon offered a chance to get back into cyberspace. All he needs to do is use his hacker skills to help the seductive and dangerous Molly Millions pull off a little job…Of course, that little job turns into a big mess that ends up taking Case to the heart of the most powerful computer in the world.

Gibson can plot like a madman, and Neuromancer is a flat-out sprint of forward momentum, full of twists and turns. As far as plots go it’s more than enough, but the real draw here is Gibson’s demented vision of a connected globe pushed to Hobbesian extremes and full of exotic drugs, bizarre body modifications, DNA resetting, and an armada of consumer products that add up to one seriously atmospheric, whacked-out future. The fact is that Gibson not only showed sci-fi its future — he also reminded the genre that it could and should have beautiful writing, with fresh descriptions, witty dialogue, and quotables aplenty. It’s likely that no sci-fi novel has aged better than Neuromancer in the three decades since it was published, and if it’s lost something of its capacity to shock (only because we live in the future it predicted) this sci-fi classic has lost none of its capacity to entertain.

What does the fact that strippers get better tips when they’re most fertile have in common with the unreliability of our peripheral vision? In David Eagleman’s telling, they’re both evidence that the unconscious parts of our brain are far more responsible for what we think and do than we realize. It’s the amazing science behind all of these decisions that we don’t realize we make that Eagleman lays out in the first half of Incognito, which is best thought of as two books in one. In the first book, Eagleman compellingly describes a dazzling array of experiments demonstrating just how many of our decisions are dictated by things we’re not consciously aware of. In the second book, Eagleman reaches for altogether different territory, distinguishing himself from the many other neuroscience popularizers. He takes his findings about decision-making and crafts from them an argument that we must revise our notions of blame and justice to reflect each individual’s pre-wired capacity for conscious decisions. Effectively, different justice for all, because each of us is genetically endowed with a different amount of free will. Readers will decide for themselves just how much they agree with his thesis (to say the least, such an idea would be a logistical nightmare to implement), but Incognito is nonetheless a remarkably interesting book. Eagleman is fearless in following this cutting-edge research to its farthest conclusions, making for a book equally rich with hard facts and dizzying possibilities.