Candy
by Samira Kawash (Faber & Faber, $27)
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Perv
by Jesse Bering (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26)
Many of the fetishes explored in this new book on human sexuality seem “ripe for lampooning,” said Michael Washburn in The Boston Globe. But even when psychologist Jesse Bering is discussing people with an erotic interest in wasps, he “does an admirable job” of showing us why such niche interests are not so different from garden-variety turn-ons. Even pedophilia is a sexual orientation rooted in early development, he argues, and treating it as such would help pedophiles keep their urges in check.
Love and Math
by Edward Frenkel (Basic, $28)
Love and Math rates as “an admirable attempt to lay bare the beauty of numbers for all to see,” said John Matson in Scientific American. Seeking to redeem a field that many outsiders consider arcane, mathematics professor Edward Frenkel shares stories about how, as a young man of Jewish heritage in the openly discriminatory Soviet Union, he had to study high-level math on the sly. Still, Frenkel has to begin explaining such math eventually, and “some readers may balk” when he does.
The Map and the Territory
by Alan Greenspan (Penguin, $36)
Rather than learning from his mistakes, Alan Greenspan “seems determined to repeat them,” said Steven Pearlstein in The Washington Post. The former Fed chairman begins his first book since 2008’s financial crisis by admitting that economists should have seen it coming. But in listing the probable causes, he offers no hint that he might have played a role, then blames old bogeymen, like federal entitlement spending and overregulation. If there’s any logic to his argument, it’s “hard to discern.”