Tania Head was in the south tower of the World Trade Center when a hijacked jet sliced through it, leaving her severely injured and barely able to escape before the tower came crashing down. In those same perilous moments, her fiancé died in the blaze of the north tower.

Or so her story went.

The subtitle of The Woman Who Wasn’t There is “The True Story of an Incredible Deception,” but “incredible” doesn’t begin to capture the depth of Head’s lies in the wake of the horrific terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Head, whose seeming strength and resilience made her a cause célèbre and co-chair of the powerful World Trade Center Survivors’ Network, was not in the tower on that awful day. She was not even in the country.

How Head managed to hoodwink so many for so long is the focus of this fascinating book. She started her deception shortly after September 11, when she joined an online survivors’ forum. Her mind-boggling story of loss and hope comforted others suffering from guilt and post-traumatic stress. No one thought to question the veracity of her account, which included an encounter with a badly burned man in the 78th-floor sky lobby who begged her to return his wedding ring to his wife. Her story began to unravel only after a New York Times reporter profiling her for an anniversary story tried to verify her claims.

Head’s motives are perhaps unknowable, but the reader is left yearning for more answers than the authors are able to give. Certainly Head had her share of traumatic experiences: As a teen, she was in a serious car accident that nearly severed her arm. Her parents had an ugly divorce, and her father and brother were involved in a high-profile embezzlement scandal. But what causes someone to exploit such a tragic event? Head never applied for victim compensation, and her work with the Network was voluntary. In the end, all she gained was a small measure of fame and intimate friendships with survivors. Ultimately, The Woman Who Wasn’t There forces us to examine our need for connection and purpose by any means necessary.

With his probing curiosity, his dazzling research, his elegant prose and his deep commitment to bio­diversity, Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist (The Ants) and novelist (The Anthill) Edward O. Wilson has spent his life searching for the evolutionary paths by which humans developed and passed along the social behaviors that best promote the survival of our species. His eloquent, magisterial and compelling new book offers a kind of summing-up of his magnificent career.

In The Social Conquest of Earth, Wilson asks three simple questions: “Where do we come from?”; “What are we?”; and “Where are we going?” Answering these questions, however, is not so simple, and he brings together disciplines ranging from molecular genetics to archaeology to social psychology in his quest to address these persistent queries.

Drawing upon detailed mathematical models and meticulous biological research, including his own work with the social insects—ants, wasps, termites—Wilson concludes that multilevel group selection, rather than inclusive fitness and kin selection, offers a fuller and more accurate explanation of the origins and development of human social behavior. He demonstrates persuasively how the conflict between individual selection (the competition for survival among members of the same group) and group selection (which shapes instincts that tend to make individuals altruistic toward one another) has led to our very human struggle between good and evil. The worst in our nature coexists with the best; to scrub it out, even if such were possible, would make us less than human.

While not everyone will agree with Wilson’s provocative and challenging conclusions, everyone who engages with his ideas will discover sparkling gems of wisdom uncovered by the man who is our Darwin and our Thoreau.