Books

Data is being collected about your reading habits — what kind of books you read, whether or not you finish them. Publishers say the information could improve how books are written, but some novelists are skeptical.

In a new book, Nick Turse says the pressure on U.S. forces to produce a body count during the Vietnam War led to mass civilian deaths. "The idea," he says, "was that the Vietnamese, they weren't really people."

The Inquisition revolutionized record-keeping and surveillance techniques that are still used today, says Cullen Murphy. His book God's Jury draws parallels between some of the interrogation techniques used in previous centuries with the ones used today.

The award for the most distinguished children's picture book of the year is announced Monday. The first winner, in 1938, was a book of illustrated animals from the Bible, but the medal has also gone to books like Madeline's Rescue and Where the Wild Things Are.

Bill Macumber, a respected member of his Arizona community, was convicted of a grisly 1962 double murder. Late last year, however, he was released from prison. A new book tells the story of a flawed investigation and legal process that cost Macumber 38 years of freedom.

Lawrence Wright's Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief looks at the world of the controversial church and the life of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, who died in 1986.

In the early 2000s, the get-rich-quick scheme of choice for young college dropouts was online poker. In his new book Ship It Holla Ballas, Jonathan Grotenstein follows two young players as they rake in the dough.

In Dave Barry's latest novel, a bachelor dinner goes off the rails, entangling the groom to be with a colorful cast of characters — everyone from Russian mobsters to Haitian refugees to the fourth-place finisher in the Miss Hot Amateur Bod contest. Oh, and an albino Burmese python.

This month, the book club discusses Michael Crichton's 1969 best-selling science fiction thriller The Andromeda Strain. Writer Richard Preston joins the club to talk about Crichton's writing style, and what it was like to work on Crichton's unfinished final manuscript, Micro.

The Newsweek editor returns with a list of new reads about people with surprising lives — a CIA investigator, a successful businesswoman who started life as a child soldier, and a private-equity pioneer whose domineering personality drove his loved ones away.

In his new book, The Double V, Rawn James Jr. argues that to understand race in America one must understand the history of African-Americans in the military. While the turning point came between the world wars, the struggle began with the American Revolution.

Modern society has become adversarial in its relationship to nature, Yale scholar Stephen Kellert argues, having greatly undervalued the natural world beyond its narrow utilty. In his new book Birthright: People and Nature in the Modern World, he tells stories of the environment's effect on us, and ours on it.