When Monique McClain entered seventh grade in Middletown, Connecticut, she encountered taunts, slurs and insults and eventually physical aggression from her classmates. In the eighth grade in upstate New York, Jacob Lasher endured physical and verbal attacks for over a year because he is gay. In a highly publicized case, Phoebe Prince, a 15-year-old student at South Hadley High School in Massachusetts, committed suicide after enduring online and in-person taunts and physical attacks at the hands of several of her fellow students, including Flannery Mullins, who later faced criminal charges in Prince’s death.

In her absorbing book, Sticks and Stones, Slate’s senior editor Emily Bazelon captivatingly narrates the stories of McClain, Lasher and Mullins in an attempt to reveal the various ways that bullying affects the victims, the bullies, the families and the communities involved in such cases. She points out that bullies taunt and attack others because they feel that their behavior will elevate their social status, either by distancing themselves from a former friend they now see as a loser or by impressing members of an in-crowd. “How can families and schools dismantle that kind of informal reward system?” she asks. More importantly, “How can you convince kids that they can do well by doing good?”

Bullying comes in all shapes and sizes, but it must satisfy three criteria, as Bazelon explains: “It has to be verbal or physical aggression that is repeated over time and that involves a power differential—one or more children lording their status over another.” She also offers profiles of five types of bullies: the bully in training; the kid who acts like a bully, not out malice but because he’s clueless; the kid who is both a bully and a victim; popular bullies whose subtle taunts create insecurities in victims; and the Facebook bully.

In the era of social media, when taunts and bullying can become more insidious and damaging, Bazelon thoughtfully urges a fresh consideration of the nature and definition of bullying. We must not overreact, and we must be careful to “separate bullying from teenage conflict that is not actually bullying—from drama.” In a courageous conclusion—courageous because it is idealistic and contrary to popular opinion—Bazelon advocates overcoming bullying by instilling character and empathy in our children, teaching them to see that people’s feelings are more important than status and that kindness should be a value that overrides all others.

Most of us would like to believe that we’re free-thinking, fair-minded folks who treat everyone equally. In this age of political correctness and diversity, that’s built into the code of everyday life. There’s proof. Americans elected an African-American president—twice.

Yet, according to Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald, authors of Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, such gestures don’t atone for the various “mindbugs” we possess: “ingrained habits” that dictate how we perceive and react to, well, everything around us.

That I can summarize the book so easily is a credit to the authors, longtime psychology professors at Harvard University (Banaji) and the University of Washington (Greenwald), who complement their data with straightforward explanations and examples, whether it’s real-life stories or famous “Seinfeld” episodes. The result is a riveting book steeped in research that feels personal, sometimes uncomfortably so.

Blindspot’s first moment of clarity comes when you take the authors’ much-discussed Implicit Association Tests (IATs), especially the one on race. You may find that you’re not as enlightened as you believe. (A 2009 meta-analysis of 184 studies showed that “the race IAT predicted racially discriminatory behavior.”) By allowing us to participate in the science—as I did—and not just digest data, Banaji and Greenwald capture our attention.

And what we learn is fascinating. Examples: Stereotypes may help us navigate the world, but they can force the affected to live up (or down) to that description—which can be good and bad. Discrimination doesn’t have to involve overt acts of hatred, but can be as simple as “maintaining the status quo.” (The authors describe a doctor at a university hospital whose effort increased when he learned that his youthful-looking patient was a professor.) Automatic preferences steer us away from uncomfortable situations, which is why undertakers may have a hard time finding dates.

In this accessible and sobering book, Banaji and Greenwald dig into our soul’s deepest crevices. And that’s great. Because it turns out that before we can all get along with each other, we need to work on ourselves.

As he did in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond continues to make us think with his mesmerizing and absorbing new book. In The World Until Yesterday, he pushes us to reconsider the contours of human society and the forces that have shaped human culture.

Drawing on both his personal experiences of traditional societies, especially among New Guinea Highlanders, and in-depth research into cultures as diverse as Amazonian Indians and the !Kung of southern Africa, Diamond convincingly argues that while many modern states enjoy a wide range of technological, political and military advantages, they often fail to offer an improved approach to such issues as raising children or treating the elderly.

Hardly naïve, Diamond acknowledges that the modern world would never embrace many practices, such as infanticide and widow-strangling, embedded in traditional cultures but horrifying to modern ones. Yet traditional societies also value societal well-being over individual well-being, so that care for the elderly is an integral part of their social fabric—an arrangement that “goes against all those interwoven American values of independence, individualism, self-reliance, and privacy.”

Ranging over topics that include child-rearing, conflict resolution, the nature of risk, religion and physical fitness, Diamond eloquently concludes with a litany of the advantages of the traditional world. “Loneliness,” he observes, “is not a problem in traditional societies,” for people usually live close to where they were born and remain “surrounded by relatives and childhood companions.” In modern societies, by contrast, individuals often move far away from their places of birth to find themselves surrounded by strangers. We can also take lessons from traditional cultures about our health. By choosing healthier foods, eating slowly and talking with friends and family during a meal—all characteristics Diamond attributes to traditional societies—we can reform our diets and perhaps curb the incidence of diseases such as stroke and diabetes.

Powerful and captivating, Diamond’s lucid insights challenge our ideas about human nature and culture, and will likely provoke heated conversations about the future of our society.

Everyone can think of a grim anecdote about Detroit—the highest murder rate in the country, 70,000 abandoned buildings—that they saw in a magazine article or in a news report. The city is an easy punch line, a convenient example to use when citing how America’s good fortune is running out.

There’s a larger truth. A city does not reach this state without a story behind its decline. And what about the thousands who live and work in Detroit, who must grow tired of being viewed as targets of pity or weary subjects for magazine features?

Rolling Stone contributing editor Mark Binelli’s Detroit City Is the Place to Be is part history, part explanation and part profile of a city he knows intimately—he grew up in the Detroit area. Sounds complex? It is, and it should be. The city doesn’t need any more labels or quick summaries. It needs someone to put a face on Detroit, to show that it’s not rolling over and playing dead. Binelli proves he’s up to the task in this refreshing, intriguing work.

What’s most apparent in Binelli’s thorough reporting is that Detroit is in constant battle mode. With so much unused land in the city, urban farming has become popular, but there are also those who want to make this neighborhood unifier into a corporate endeavor. Neighborhoods have become havens for creative types, but the changes brought by this influx “were miniscule in comparison with the problems facing the rest of the city,” Binelli reports. The American auto industry has created some noteworthy cars in recent years, but the unions are in the middle of a slow, endless death.

Binelli actually lived in Detroit while writing the book, and he talks to dozens of residents. It feels like he’s invested in Detroit’s future, not just reveling in the relevancy. He wants to understand what happened and what will happen. By looking beyond the troubling headlines and promises of politicians, Binelli discovers what determines a city’s fate: people who care. Detroit has more than you might expect.

Plutocrats is an immensely useful and entertaining book, not only because it lets the striving 99 percent of the world’s population see how the glittering 1 percent live but, more significantly, because it provides insight into the mindsets and methods of the super-rich—insights that sympathizers will regard as instructional manuals and opponents will seize upon as Achilles’ heels. A former reporter for the Financial Times, the Economist and the Washington Post, the author moves with ease among the financial titans she anatomizes, chatting with the likes of investor George Soros and Google chief Eric Schmidt and moderating panels at international economic conferences where the wealthy ponder ways of remaining so.

Freeland does not concern herself here with mere millionaires. Her microscope is trained on those whose outsized wealth gives them global impact. She seeks to determine the factors that enabled them to become wealthy and then considers what the social effects may be of the widening gap between the self-satisfied rich and the resentful middle class and poor.

The two biggest factors in gestating today’s megafortunes, Freeland concludes, have been advances in technology and the breaking down of national trade barriers. Add to these basics such economic opportunities as the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent privatization of its state-owned resources, China’s rapid embrace of capitalism and the U. S. government’s shielding of Wall Street from the consequences of its risky speculations and you have an entrepreneur’s concept of heaven.

Freeland is a bit too ready to buy into the “self-made” rationale from which some plutocrats derive smug comfort. “[T]he bulk of their wealth,” she says, “is generally the fruit of hustle, intelligence, and a lot of luck.” Overlooked in this sunny equation is the essential contribution of workers whose pay and benefits are kept low by outsourcing, union busting and lax or non-existent labor laws. One may get by but no one gets rich on his own, much less super-rich.

Using the economic rise and fall of 14th-century Venice as a cautionary tale, Freeland lays out a warning to plutocrats. Once Venice’s entrepreneurial class had made its vast fortunes, she says, it tried to safeguard them by closing off the very social mobility that enabled these fortunes to be created in the first place. Today’s plutocrats are inclined to do the same, she says, through manipulating laws and regulations and disregarding “the interests of society as a whole.” That path, she acknowledges, is fraught with peril.

In the introduction to Hidden America, Jeanne Marie Laskas observes that “we become so familiar with the narrative [of celebrity culture] we forget that there are any others happening at all.” That’s how Kim Kardashian gets branded a success while the truck driver who brings valuable parts to factories is viewed as unimportant.

A veteran journalist, Laskas gets her hands dirty in this collection of profiles, many of which are based on her work for GQ. Among her stops: an Alaskan oil rig, a gun shop in Arizona and an NFL stadium.

Great stories define these occupations. A trip to a California landfill leads to an engineer-turned-PR guy who sees trash as an opportunity to improve the world, by using landfill gas to produce electricity. Working on a cattle ranch is a rustic throwback complete with cowboys, but its existence hinges on technology. For immigrant farmers, many of whom are in the United States illegally, the promise of a good paycheck comes with the daunting prospect of not being able to trust anyone.

No job is examined the same way, a tribute to Laskas’ talents as a writer. Her attention to detail is vivid: One man is “packed solid as a ham”; the Cincinnati Bengals’ cheerleaders are “glimmery and shimmery kitty-cat babes.” She is also adept at giving explanatory passages a conversational feel, essential in a book introducing readers to jobs and mindsets.

Laskas’ enviable stylistic flow hides her most useful tool: restraint. The chapters in Hidden America aren’t star-spangled odes to American pluck or pleas for working-class understanding. Laskas simply gives voice—as well as dignity and poetry—to America’s blue-collar ranks.

Beware the apocalyptic book title. It’s a great marketing device, but the forcefulness and flash with which a title states a book’s theme virtually ensures that the author’s more measured conclusions will be overlooked. Hanna Rosin, who previewed the thesis for The End of Men in a 2010 cover story for the Atlantic, doesn’t use the word “end” to mean “termination” or even “destination.” She’s essentially arguing that men, particularly in the lower and middle classes, are losing ground economically to their female counterparts.

To illustrate this point, Rosin peers into the day-to-day lives and evolving motivations of several groups, including college girls and post-grads who embrace their sexuality as a career tool, upper-class couples who have made their marriages work to their mutual advantage (as opposed to lower-class ones who haven’t), men left idle or underemployed after a textile mill leaves town and women who are inundating the once primarily male profession of pharmacy.

Rosin also investigates the little publicized fact that women are so outpacing men in college enrollment and completion that some schools have quietly instituted “affirmative action” programs to recruit more men by lowering or re-structuring admission standards.

As Rosin demonstrates, women are getting ahead on the economic front in no small part because they work for less money and fewer benefits. In addition, many of them are too occupied in their off hours by children and unemployed or underemployed mates to demand more from their employers.

Don’t look for any Norma Rae unionizers or 9 to 5 score-settlers here. The men Rosin shadows are not out of work because there’s no work to be done but because companies can make more money and pay less taxes by shifting the work elsewhere. It’s not a pretty picture to see women and men forced to compete with each other for economic success and happiness.

Some of My Best Friends Are Black looks at integration and the ways it has failed from a fresh perspective. While campaigning for Barack Obama in 2008, Tanner Colby realized he didn’t know any black people. Asking around, he found that his friends didn’t either. There were very few circumstances when blacks and whites, as Colby would phrase it, hang out and play Scrabble together. He set out to learn why.

Four related stories come together here: a Birmingham school system’s gradual integration; a Kansas City neighborhood that fought housing discrimination; the separate and unequal strata occupied by blacks and whites in advertising; and the intergration of a Louisiana Catholic parish whose parishioners were separated only by a parking lot.

There’s no “a-ha” moment in the book, promising an easy solution and more Scrabble nights if we all follow directions. As Colby writes, “White resistance and black reticence are hopelessly entwined with one another, endlessly variable from situation to situation.” It’s not the recipe for racial harmony, but Some of My Best Friends Are Black moves the discussion forward and out into new territory.

In the modern board game of Life, players come to a fork in the journey very early on: get a job or go to college. If they choose college, they might find a higher-paying job in the long run, but they’ll have to take out loans and pile up debt before ever collecting a paycheck. Players might start a family along life’s road, but whichever fork they choose, unlike real life, always leads to retirement and never to death.

The Mansion of Happiness—the prototype for Life—was the most popular board game in 19th-century Britain, and while it was more moralistic than its later American counterpart, it raised many of the same questions about this journey called life. With her characteristically vivid storytelling, New Yorker writer Jill Lepore uses this British game to embark on a stunning meditation on three questions that have dominated serious reflection about human nature and culture for centuries: How does life begin? What does it mean? What happens when we die?

Lepore proceeds by exploring the stages of life from before birth, infancy and childhood to growing up, growing old, dying and life after death. For example, she examines 17th-century physician William Harvey’s discovery that human life begins with an egg (as opposed to the long-held belief that humans germinated from seeds), and illustrates the ways that such an idea came to have significant political consequences for women by the latter half of the 20th century. She focuses on the Karen Ann Quinlan case to show how the definitions of life and death—once the province of religion—were suddenly decided not in a hospital or a church but in a courtroom.

Through these stories, Lepore demonstrates how the contemplation of life and death moved from the library to the laboratory, so that scientific narratives of progress now promise a different sort of eternity—right up to the vague idea that one day, when the Earth dies, humans will simply move to outer space. In The Mansion of Happiness, Lepore’s refreshing and often humorous insights breathe fresh air into these everlasting matters.

Conceding that the term “amateur” means different things to different people, in his book Bunch of Amateurs Jack Hitt nonetheless singles out particular examples of that breed—those characterized by curiosity, open-mindedness and self-confidence—and shows how they have functioned in such disparate fields of study as ornithology, astronomy, genetics, robotics, archaeology and history. “Amateurs are more likely to see what is actually there,” he asserts, “because there’s no money, no power, no prestige (at least not immediately) attached to anything else. Amateurs mainly just want to know.”

To set the stage for his amateur vs. professional faceoff, Hitt devotes a chapter to America’s most exemplary novice, Benjamin Franklin, and his prissy, think-inside-the-box nemesis, John Adams. (Never one to shy away from reductionism, Hitt calls Adams “the Yosemite Sam of the founding fathers.”) Both men were in Paris in 1778 to drum up French support for America in the war against Britain. Franklin, who tended to wing it when it came to diplomatic relations, was a living affront to all the traditional formulations Adams held dear. But he was also an infinitely more effective emissary.

Hitt demonstrates these competing approaches in a series of profiles. His method is to “hang out” with especially provocative amateurs, describe their personalities and assess their processes for discovering truth or utility. There’s Meredith Patterson, for example, who cobbles together a home laboratory and homemade ingredients to study DNA; John Dobson, a “ninety-two-year-old hippie” whose obsession is teaching other amateur astronomers how to grind large telescope lenses in order to better view the universe; and the ever-enthusiastic David Barron, who contends—and not without reason—that certain stone structures in southeastern Connecticut were built 1,500 years ago by Irish monks.

Fascinating though Hitt’s profiles are, they merely serve as entry points to his more extensive discussions of the subjects they’re obsessed with. He goes into great detail about the search for a living specimen of the ivory-billed woodpecker and how the professional ornithologists were just as prone to embrace flimsy evidence as amateurs often are. The same holds true in his discussion of the discovery of the remains of the “Kennewick man” in 1996 and the subsequent effort to establish that he was Caucasian, an exercise in wish-fulfillment to which even credentialed professionals were not immune.

Hitt doesn’t really develop a cohesive thesis here on the nature and value of amateurism, nor does he argue persuasively that it is a distinctly American phenomenon, as he suggests at the outset. But he does illustrate with striking specificity that the road to knowing is cluttered with hazards, the chief of which are our own desires and preconceptions.

As Americans struggle to survive and prosper in today’s shifting and far-flung economy, they find themselves tugged farther and farther away from the supportive embrace of family and community. Under these conditions, functions that used to be performed personally or “in house,” so to speak—such as finding a mate, bearing and raising children, holding a marriage together and taking care of the elderly—have been “outsourced” to for-profit businesses.

This is the landscape Arlie Russell Hochschild explores in a study that takes her from the office of a “love coach” in Southern California to a ritzy gated community near Minneapolis and from the baby mills of India that specialize in “wombs for rent” to sterile nursing homes in Massachusetts. She illustrates the pervasiveness of outsourcing by following the life cycle from courtship to birth to death and personalizes her account by comparing these modern customs with those she witnessed as a child while visiting her grandparents’ farm in Maine.

To a degree, this is a chronicle of people with too much money to spend. How else to explain the flourishing of such pricey but nonessential trades as Internet dating services, wedding planners, surrogate mothers, kiddie chauffeurs, potty trainers, birthday party producers, “nameologists” (who help couples find the “right names” for their babies), parenting evaluation services and “wantologists” (who aid the confused in distinguishing between what they think they want and what they really want)? But Hochschild gives the people who use these services—and those who offer them—their full say, allowing them to explain their actions in their own words. Whether one is convinced by their reasoning is another matter.

It is only near the end of the book that Hochschild makes it clear that she views profligate outsourcing as an unfortunate triumph of marketing over common sense and social needs. “It’s become common,” she says, “to hear that the market can do no wrong and the government—at least its civilian parts—can do no right, and to hear little mention of community at all. Curiously, many who press for a greater expansion of the free market, gutting of regulations, cuts in social services, are the same people who call for stronger family values. What’s invisible to them is how much market values distort family values.” In attempting to buy happiness perfectly packaged and off the shelf, Hochschild argues, “What escapes us is the process of getting there—and the appreciation we attach to the small details of it.”

In America, the car has long been associated with freedom: the open road, the ability to come and go as you please. Getting a driver’s license is one of the hallmarks of teenage life, a chance to legally drink from the frothy cup of adult pleasures.

Travel writer Taras Grescoe has a less starry-eyed view. In Straphanger, he paints cars as a force of destruction. The lifestyle created by cars—freeways, parking lots and suburbs—has eaten up land and stripped our continent of its character, turning towns and cities into glorified driveways. Cars destroy the environment and lives (each year, worldwide, they kill 1.2 million people), while cutting us off from human interaction by “pav[ing] over so much of what was authentic and vital in our cities.”

Life independent of cars exists, and in Straphanger Grescoe travels the world to prove it. He rides subways in New York, Tokyo and Paris. He hops on Bogotá’s famed bus rapid transit system TransMilenio, a key part of the city’s revitalization, and survives a testy crowd on a Philadelphia bus. These colorful anecdotes amuse us and, more importantly, show us that a city that invests in mass transit also invests in itself. Paris’ urban integrity, the one that inspires dreamers worldwide, would have been destroyed had it not been for its métro. Now that bicycles are the main mode of transportation in Copenhagen, street life thrives. Bike lanes, Grescoe notes, provide a way to grasp the city’s layout that’s absent in New York or London. Plus, you don’t have to go the gym.

The statistical and historical nuggets Grescoe unearths lend credence to his grievances against cars. After World War II, public policy favoring the car-friendly suburbs made buying homes there a no-brainer, while America’s freeway program frequently targeted urban ethnic enclaves for development, destroying long-established communities and erecting highways in their place. And Phoenix, a city built around freeways and suburbs, is in free-fall after the real estate market crash.

These aren’t the musings of a rail snob or some desk-bound pundit. With Straphanger, Grescoe has fashioned a cogent, spirited call-to-arms that is also a practical, insightful handbook for change. By not blindly worshipping one of the icons of individuality, we may save generations from serious trouble.

Indian land makes up about 2.3 percent of the land in the United States, and the Indian population in the US is slightly over two million. And yet, as novelist David Treuer wryly observes in his sobering yet quietly redemptive book, Rez Life, in spite of how involved Indians have been in America's business, most people will go a lifetime without ever knowing an Indian or spending time on an Indian reservation.

There are roughly 310 Indian reservations in the United States, but not all of the 564 federally recognized tribes have reservations. All Indian reservations have signs that welcome travelers, offering acknowledgment that the lands the drivers are about to enter is different from the lands through which they have been traveling. Such signs exist in more than 30 states, and you can see them in areas as diverse as the rocks of the Badlands, the suburbs of Green Bay and the sprays of Niagara Falls. Twelve reservations are larger than the state of Rhode Island, and nine are large than Delaware.

As Treuer points out, most people think of life on the reservation as harsh, violent, drug-infested, alcohol-fueled, poor and short. This story of reservation life is often accompanied by a version of history that lays the blame on Anglo-Americans and their despicable treatment of Native Americans.

Treuer's elegant chronicle of the lives and stories of individuals on his own reservation, Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota, chips away at the stony structures that embed these views of the reservation in the American consciousness. We meet, for example, Red Lake Nation conservation officer Charley Grolla, who is deeply devoted to protecting the waters and the land on the reservation from outsiders who would encroach upon and destroy it. And we meet Sean Fahrlander, an excellent ricer who can fillet a walleye faster than anyone Treuer knows. Fahrlander continues to fish on the land he has called home all his life, in spite of the state government's attempts now and then to challenge the treaty that the Ojibwe have with the state of Minnesota.

Treuer convincingly and affectionately captures reservation life in order to demonstrate that the reservations are more than scars, tears and blood. Through his stories, he affirms that there is beauty, pride and love in Indian life and on Indian reservations.