Also of interest ... in the national pulse

The Opinion Makers by David W. Moore; Click by Bill Tancer; The Numerati by Stephen Baker; State by State edited by Matt Weiland and

The Opinion Makers

by David W. Moore (Beacon, $24)

The Week

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Click

by Bill Tancer (Hyperion, $26)

One place that the people can’t hide their true nature is online, said John Mangels in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. In Click, marketing expert Bill Tancer writes in a “breezy, gee-whiz tone” about what our collective Web-surfing habits reveal, and the picture isn’t pretty. Sure, visits to porn sites are declining relative to all other online traffic, but Tancer’s absorbing study makes clear that the Internet is “a vast enabler of insecurities, perversions, and run-amok consumerism.”

The Numerati

by Stephen Baker (Houghton Mifflin, $26)

BusinessWeek’s Stephen Baker “could easily have gone for spooky” in this group portrait of the new class of math geeks who are analyzing our every Web click, cell phone call, or credit card purchase, said Barbara Kiviat in Time. Instead, he often emphasizes their positive contributions, giving readers “deeply reported” accounts on the algorithms used by dating websites, the digital footprints that trip up would-be terrorists, and future medical technologies that will spot our illnesses even before we do.

State by State

edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey (Ecco, $30)

Part of the appeal of this “highly readable” collection of essays is that it makes America seem too diverse to capture with a single description, said Larry Cox in The Arizona Republic. Seen one state at a time through the eyes of such writers as Dave Eggers, Lydia Millet, Anthony Bourdain, and William T. Vollman, America suddenly appears—“for all its bland interstate highways and big-box retailers”—to be endlessly varied.