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Founding Faith

by Steven Waldman (Random House, $26)

Steven Waldman’s valuable new book might overturn some misconceptions about how America’s Founders viewed faith, said Michael Dirda in The Washington Post. Though Waldman’s colloquial prose style can be distracting, he “takes pains” to underscore the First Amendment’s ambiguities and reminds us that clashes among Puritans, Baptists, Catholics, and Quakers were much on the minds of the Founders when they separated church and state.

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Daydream Believers

by Fred Kaplan (Wiley, $26)

Any dissection of the Bush administration’s foreign policy blunders is bound to feel “terribly familiar” in its details, said Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. What sets Fred Kaplan’s book apart is that the Slate.com columnist grounds his argument in a fresh idea. Team Bush, he says, mistakenly assumed that U.S. power had expanded after the collapse of the Soviet Union when, in fact, the end of the Cold War only weakened America’s alliances.

Windy City

by Scott Simon (Random House, $25)

Scott Simon’s new novel rates as a must-read for “city-politics fiends,” said Don Oldenburg in USA Today. When a Chicago mayor is found dead in his office, an appealing Indian-born stand-in works valiantly to quiet the “delectable political chaos” that ensues. Though Simon’s descriptions of his native city can become “too much of a good thing,” the NPR host consistently finds some clever new turn to draw you back in.

Superclass

by David Rothkopf (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26)

David Rothkopf’s portrait of today’s global power elite could have been a hit if the former U.S. undersecretary of commerce had listed the 6,000 people that he says he has identified as the world’s most influential wheeler-dealers, said Laura Miller in Salon.com. While it’s mildly interesting to instead learn how this tightknit group thinks, a reader begins to suspect that the chief purpose of Superclass is attracting superclass clients to Rothkopf’s consulting business.

Worlds at War

by Anthony Pagden (Random House, $35)

This “troubling” book from UCLA professor Anthony Pagden hardly deserves to be called history, said Adam Kirsch in The New York Sun. To Pagden, the Western world has for 25 centuries been “fighting for justice against an unjust and unreasonable East.” Instead of re-examining the myths that encrust the major collisions between the two cultures, “he seems to want to revive the power of those myths.”