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BOOK REVIEW: When you're at work, you have some idea of the product or service your employer provides. Not so for "The Girls of Atomic City." They had no idea they were helping create Fat Man and Little Boy, the bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII.

BOOK REVIEW: Malcolm X is still controversial nearly 50 years after his assassination. In examining his life from a multitude of perspectives, author Manning Marable brings the reader close to Malcolm's thoughts, deeds, leadership, struggles, conflicts, contradictions, and presence -- which even today seems to have been larger than life.

REVIEW: When the United States of America was just a gleam in our founding fathers' eyes, the country faced some fascinating dichotomies, including human equality versus inhumane captivity and popular will versus monarchal rule. These battles and several others play out in intimate detail in Jon Meacham's excellent "Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power."

BOOK REVIEW: As science reveals more about our place in the universe, sentient beings are ecstatic about Sean Carroll's "The Particle at the End of the Universe" and its view of what might be called the blueprints of reality.

REVIEW: A newcomer to American politics would write off the Republican Party as a gang of xenophobic, racist, theocratic, misogynistic, fiscally irresponsible war-mongers. In "Rule and Ruin," Geoffrey Kabaservice explains how and why this happened.

ARTICLE: Wendell Potter, formerly a propagandist for various avaricious and venal corporations, 'fesses up and reveals the prevarication, lying, deception, and obfuscation of the industries that pick your pocket every day. His 'Deadly Spin' opens the playbook used by corrupt companies, insufferable industries, and the GOP.

OPINION: People see the GOP as an out-of-touch, uncaring, heartless, backward, ignorant, and dangerous group of people who drape themselves in the flag as they pursue an ugly and vicious form of anti-Americanism. The GOP can't figure out why.

ARTICLE: Sense, sensibility, sarcasm, and spot-on skewering of political blowhards and buffoons: welcome to the writing of Molly Ivins. Beginning as a staff writer for the scrappy Texas Observer before moving on to the major-market New York Times, Molly Ivins enjoyed a brilliant career that raised the collective consciousness about US politics.

OPINION: We all know someone who is not quite "all there." The normal human connections with the world are missing, twisted, or distorted. Interacting...

REVIEW: Jonathan Haidt grabs onto the twin time-bombs of American punditry, politics and religion, and does so from an amazingly optimistic point-of-view. He combines...