The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. By Steven Pinker. Viking; 802 pages; $40. Published in Britain as “The Better Angels of our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes” by Allen Lane; £30Steven Pinker’s exploration, within psychology, neuroscience, politics and economics, of why all forms of violence have seen huge long-term declines is a subtle piece of natural philosophy to rival that of the great thinkers of the Enlighten8ment. He writes like an angel too.
Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America. By Christopher Turner. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 544 pages; $35. Fourth Estate; £25A smart and engaging work of social history that considers sex, psychoanalysis, consumerism and some of the darkest moments of the 20th century.
Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier. By Edward Glaeser. Penguin; 336 pages; $29.95. Macmillan; £25This enthusiastic guide to the blessings of human proximity explains why half of humanity now lives in cities and why 5m more are moving there from the countryside every month.
Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars. By Sonia Faleiro. Canongate; 240 pages; £12.99. To be published in America in March by Grove Press; $15A pitch-perfect conga through the dance bars of Mumbai. The author also explores middle-class marriage in India and its hypocrisies, and the challenges of trying to make it on your own in India’s biggest commercial city.
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. By Elif Batuman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 298 pages; $15. Granta; £16.99A bracing travelogue of literary adventures by a six-foot-tall American-born Turkish academic. Her erudite enthusiasm for Russia’s big, gloomy and occasionally illogical fiction is as vivid as her humour and sense of romance.
People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman. By Richard Lloyd Parry. Jonathan Cape; 404 pages; £17.99. To be published in America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in May; $16A page-turning, if horrifying, read about the murder of a young Englishwoman in Japan and the dubious workings of the Japanese criminal-justice system. Thorough, fair-minded and full of insight.
Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial. By Janet Malcolm. Yale University Press; 168 pages; $25 and £18An unputdownable story that takes in child abuse, sexual taboo and a ringside trial seat in front of the famous Supreme Court “hanging judge”, Robert Hanophy.
Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything. By David Bellos. Faber & Faber; 400 pages; $27. Particular Books; £20A wonderful, witty book about words, language and cultural anthropology by a scholar whose fascination with his subject is itself endlessly fascinating.
The Art of Camping: The History and Practice of Sleeping Under the Stars. By Matthew De Abaitua. Hamish Hamilton; 294 pages; £14.99A memoir of how camping means exploring an unfamiliar place while recreating the safe comforts of home, by an editor-at-large of the Idler and an inveterate fan of guys and poles.
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