BOOK REVIEW: How much humor do you expect from an astrophysicist? How much passion? What should be the ratio of fact to fancy in the essays of a scientist? With Neil deGrasse Tyson, you get an enjoyable mixture of levity and reality on a subject that might hold the key to your future.

BOOK REVIEW: Every presidential election is deemed crucial to America but with the choice of Obama versus the obviously unqualified Mitt Romney, it was more than crucial; it was imperative. In the detailed yet fast-paced 'The Center Holds,' author Jonathan Alter takes you inside the campaigns and reveals some of the evil forces backing the GOP.

OPINION: On this 4th of July, wouldn’t it be a dream come true for the U.S. and many World Citizens if President Thomas Jefferson, the author of our Declaration of independence and Bill of Rights, came back at this pivotal time to coach us on getting our Grand Experiment in Democracy back on course?

BOOK REVIEW: The deterioration of our country during the past three-and-a-half decades makes for a broad canvas but author George Packer provides insightful detail and hits some emotional high points. There was an incredible battle in the United States from around 1978 until right now, a conflagration that did not emphasize armed conflict but which decimated large chunks of the basic goodness of our nation.

BOOK REVIEW: Want to know how and why Washington is such a mess? Two respected analysts of governmental policy, one from the progressive Brookings Institution and the other from the troglodyte American Enterprise Institute, demonstrate that the GOP is at fault.

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.