Ever since Cain and Abel, societies have been shaken and shaped by brothers who competed with, supported or blithely ignored one another. George Howe Colt, the second-born of four brothers, has plowed through history to describe these powerful and perplexing sibling dynamics. He does so within the framework of recounting the ups and downs of fraternal relationships that prevailed inside his own family.

While Colt’s personal accounts of growing up and finding his place in the pecking order are the most vivid and psychologically revealing, he interlaces them with extended close-ups of brothers Edwin and John Wilkes Booth; John and Will Kellogg (of Kellogg cereal fame); Vincent and Theo van Gogh; John and Henry David Thoreau; and Chico, Harpo, Groucho, Gummo and Zeppo Marx. He found that brothers tend to heighten certain qualities in each other—good and bad—that might have lain dormant if not for that incessant grind of proximity.

George’s older brother, Harry, first served the role of hero. Then, when they were at Harvard together, Harry’s seriousness as a student became a living reproach to George’s hard-drinking, devil-may-care ways. More readjustments lay ahead as younger brothers Ned and Mark came along to fight for their own identities. As the author tells it, harmony now reigns among the Colts. Harry became a doctor, George a writer (whose 2004 book The Big House was also a family history), Ned a reporter for NBC and Mark, “the least competitive of the brothers,” a recycling coordinator at a school for the blind.

Brothers is meant to charm with its stories, not to be a template for predicting behavior. “Over the past three decades,” Colt writes, “studies of intelligence, personality, interests, attitudes, and psychopathology have concluded that siblings raised in the same family are, in fact, almost as different from each other as unrelated people raised in separate families.” Maybe so, but at least they’re around when you need someone to play catch with.

When you read Leonardo and The Last Supper by Ross King, you can’t help but think of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. Both books deal with Leonardo Da Vinci and his famous painting, “The Last Supper”; but where Brown’s book relies on suspense, the strength of King’s book is in its scholarship. Still, having read The Da Vinci Code only added to my enjoyment of Leonardo and The Last Supper.

There is much mystery behind this masterful painting, in part because of Leonardo’s reputation as a heretic, but also because the faded fresco contains the spectral images of Jesus and the Twelve Apostles, allowing us to interpret their placement at the table, their gestures and their facial expressions. This is what makes any book on “The Last Supper” so enjoyable, and King’s book doesn’t disappoint. First, we learn about Leonardo’s life. By the time he began working on “The Last Supper,” he was suffering a sort of midlife crisis. His work on a 75-ton bronze horse was suspended when the bronze was melted and made into cannons to help Italy thwart an invasion by France. The commission to paint “The Last Supper” on the wall of a Dominican convent seemed like small compensation at the time. But Leonardo forged ahead, taking three years to complete what would become a masterpiece equal in acclaim to his “Mona Lisa.”

As for the mysteries within “The Last Supper,” King has a good time exploring Leonardo’s use of mathematics and geometry to bring symmetry and perspective to the painting. And for Dan Brown fans, King spends considerable time delving into the “clues” contained in the placement of the Apostles at the supper table, their facial expressions, the shape and location of their hands and the type of food and drink being served. Among his conclusions: Two of the Apostles were modeled after Leonardo himself, and the food reflects the artist’s vegetarian leanings. One of the most delightful chapters in the book is King’s playful debate with The Da Vinci Code’s claim that one of the disciples in “The Last Supper” was actually a woman—Mary Magdalene, to be exact. I won’t spoil things by giving away his bold conclusion.

I highly recommend Leonardo and The Last Supper, whether you are a serious scholar of art, history or religion, or a casual reader who happens to enjoy all of the puzzles and mysteries that lie behind Leonardo and “The Last Supper.”

When Merriam-Webster announced the new words included in its 2012 Collegiate Dictionary—entries that included “sexting” and “energy drink”—the news was greeted quietly, perhaps because most of us understand how language evolves. Slang makes its way to grandparents; jargon becomes commonplace. Or maybe we’ve exhausted our anger.

Tolerance was in short supply 51 years ago when Webster’s Third New International Dictionary caused the intellectual, journalistic and academic worlds to go nuts over one little word—and a change in the dictionary’s philosophy. David Skinner traces the evolution of this language battle in The Story of Ain’t, a fascinating, highly entertaining cultural history that will enchant an audience beyond word nerds.

Webster’s Third hit shelves in 1961, 27 years after the release of Webster’s Second. In the intervening years, World War II, pop culture and other changes had broadened the language. Plus, many researchers had concluded that defining the “right way” to speak English was, at best, an elusive concept.

Editor Philip Gove decided that Webster’s, the leading dictionary of the day, would fit these less formal times. He updated the literary references, shortened the definitions and steered the book away from its encyclopedic past. Even the pronunciation key was dumped. The response to this new approach was met with an anger that rose to pitchfork-carrying levels when the press release for the new dictionary focused on the premiere of “ain’t.” The sloppily prepared release portrayed the word as a staple of educational speakers, neglecting to mention that “a substandard label was attached” to the word in the Webster’s Third entry.

Despite the title, the scandal over “ain’t” is not the book’s best part. It’s the way in which Skinner nimbly, concisely—and without academic dryness—traces the everyday changes that shaped what came out of Americans’ mouths and into our dictionaries. Ain’t that something?

It’s one of the great lingering conundrums of American history: How is it that the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence was a lifelong owner of slaves?

George Washington freed his slaves in his will, after his relatives talked him out of doing it during his lifetime. Not Thomas Jefferson, in life or death. Instead, he collateralized them to borrow the money to rebuild Monticello, and left writings that were all over the map: pro-emancipation, anti-emancipation and everything in between.

Before the civil rights movement, historians tended to ignore or cover up the reality of Jefferson’s slave ownership. More recent ones have wrestled with it. Author Henry Wiencek, who wrote about Washington’s decision in An Imperfect God, doesn’t think it’s that complicated. In his persuasive Master of the Mountain, he concludes that Jefferson realized quite quickly that slave ownership could be extremely profitable. He consciously chose money over morality and spent the rest of his life pretending otherwise to his liberal European friends. “Jefferson constantly moved the boundaries on his moral map to make the horrific tolerable to him,” Wiencek writes.

Many of Jefferson’s admirers will find this assessment hard to accept. But Wiencek makes a forceful case through a careful description of Jefferson’s records, letters and actions, as well as memoirs by his former slaves and archaeological findings at Monticello. Wiencek argues that Jefferson wasn’t even a particularly kindly master: He was decent enough—usually—to his house servants, but left his field workers to the mercies of overseers whom he himself acknowledged were thugs.

Wiencek is among those who believe Sally Hemings was Jefferson’s slave-mistress and the mother of several of his children, but he doesn’t buy the theory that their relationship was a heartwarming secret romance. Instead, Wiencek goes through the evidence to show that it was likely a more pragmatic bargain.

Master of the Mountain is a remarkable re-creation of Monticello’s economy and culture, and it’s not a positive one. Whether you agree or disagree with Wiencek’s provocative analysis, it’s a book worth taking seriously as we continue to struggle with slavery’s legacy.

The Count of Monte Cristo is a classic tale of betrayal and revenge, penned by the renowned 19th-century author Alexandre Dumas. But it turns out the novel is not merely fiction; key plot developments were based on the true-life experiences of the author’s father. This is the premise of The Black Count, a new book by Tom Reiss that traces the incredible rise and precipitous fall of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, the father of author Alexandre Dumas.

In many ways, the life of the elder Dumas mirrors that of Edmond Dantes, the hero of The Count of Monte Cristo. In the novel, Dantes is falsely accused of being a supporter of Napoleon, who has been exiled from France. Dantes is imprisoned for 14 years before escaping and enacting revenge on his accusers.

While some occurrences in Thomas-Alexandre Dumas’ life were not as dramatic as those of the fictional Dantes, other aspects were even more remarkable. Dumas was born in present-day Haiti to a French nobleman and a black slave. Brought to France by his father, the mixed-race Dumas became a general under Napoleon Bonaparte.

But General Dumas’ fortunes abruptly changed. He was captured in Italy, thrown into a dungeon and left to rot. Though he was finally released, he died impoverished and embittered. Perhaps his revenge was achieved with his son’s writing of The Count of Monte Cristo, which takes a critical look at France’s tumultuous political climate.

The Black Count is a thoroughly researched, lively piece of nonfiction that will be savored by fans of Alexandre Dumas. But The Black Count needs no partner: It is fascinating enough to stand on its own.

Famous people cross each other’s paths all the time and end up exchanging views on various topics. No surprise there. What is surprising about Craig Brown’s Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings is how artfully he strings these meetings together into an unbroken chain. Brown begins with a 1931 traffic accident involving Adolf Hitler and British playboy John Scott-Ellis, then moves on to an earlier encounter between Scott-Ellis and Rudyard Kipling and from there to a meeting between Kipling and Mark Twain, who, in turn, grants a farewell audience to Helen Keller, and so on. Each account involves a person from the former one. By the time Brown writes his last vignette—reconstructing a 1937 tête-à-tête between the Duchess of Windsor and Hitler—he has completed the circle.

Brown, a London-based satirist, includes in this bounty of historic get-togethers such seemingly disparate pairings as Nancy Reagan and Andy Warhol, Frank Lloyd Wright and Marilyn Monroe, H.G. Wells and Josef Stalin, and Alfred Hitchcock and Raymond Chandler. He enlivens these brief accounts (each precisely 1,001 words long) with smirky asides and breezy footnotes.

In one such note, Brown quotes the Australian comedian Barry Humphries concerning his reaction to meeting playwright Arthur Miller: “When [he] shook my hand,” Humphries recalled, “I could only think that this was the hand that had once cupped the breasts of Marilyn Monroe.”

For the most part, it’s the incongruity of these one-on-ones that interests Brown—and the reader. Why does Groucho Marx persist in discussing King Lear when T.S. Eliot clearly prefers talking about the Marx Brothers movies? Is it conceivable that the 92-year-old philosopher Bertrand Russell is putting the moves on his 22-year-old neighbor, the budding actress Sarah Miles? (Short answer: Oh, yeah.)

There are many personalities chronicled here who won’t be familiar to an American audience, but that doesn’t matter. Brown makes them all come alive.

Until the mid-19th century, the only way to obtain a divorce in England was through a private act of Parliament. Given the difficulty of such a process, it made divorce effectively impossible for anyone but the rich and powerful.

Then, in 1858, came the revolution: Divorce Court. The unhappy rushed to take advantage of the new law, and domestic secrets were exposed to all. Perhaps the most sensational resulting scandal involved Henry and Isabel Robinson, the subject of Kate Summerscale’s riveting Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady.

It started when Henry Robinson, a prosperous manufacturer, read his wife’s secret diary and found what he believed was evidence of her infidelity with a respected doctor who ran a flourishing health spa. Henry filed for divorce, naming the doctor as co-respondent. With the diary—emotional, erotic, but not specific—as evidence, the newly appointed divorce judges had to decide whether the marriage should end and who should pay the cost.

Summerscale, whose earlier book The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, focused on the same period, has found a story that wonderfully encapsulates much of the social ferment of the time. Isabel was a talented but frustrated woman whose friends were among the progressive intelligentsia. Her marriage a disaster, she lost her religious faith and found comfort in phrenology. Her putative lover—who denied everything and told everyone she was crazy—was a pioneer in health care.

Summerscale uses the diary, private letters, newspaper stories and public documents to seamlessly and dispassionately tell Isabel’s still-poignant story.