The science, economics and policy aspects of global warming has become one of the most exciting and challenging tasks facing the natural and social sciences in the last decade of the twentieth century. Till even the Eighties, only a handful of people outside the geoscientific world bothered to even to cast a momentary glance on the potential or implications of global warming. The fuels of economic growth - oil, coal and gas - were natural riches and the cause of energy shocks. Climate change was not yet a concept, writes Subir Ghosh

The author starts off with Panamanian independence, and concludes with the rejection of the Filos-Hines treaty that would have granted the United States more extensive military bases. Thomas Pearcy seeks to explain the advent of military rule in Panama that ended with the arrest of Manuel Noriega in 1989 following the invasion of Panama by United States. Pearcy provides a conventional political history, but also delves into allied issues that provide the context for political developments. This includes a sophisticated demographic analysis as well as an in-depth examination of Panama's economy, points out Gene Evans

During a speech in the Senate, Adam Sunraider, a racist New England senator, is shot down by an assassin. He asks for A.Z. Hickman, a black minister, to attend his bedside. Out of this visit emerges the story of these two men, seemingly different on the surface. This is the story of the black south and the ministry of Reverend Hickman and his son, Bliss, the prodigy preacher. After many years, A.Z. Hickman tells Bliss (Adam Sunraider) the story of how he came to be born and how this event forever changed Hickman's outlook on life, says Cynthia Arbuthnot

A cynical friend coined the phrase "the voluptuous embrace of impotence" to accurately describe much of the writing on Burma by academics in the humanities. Too often authors write tamely on microtopics as obscure as they are irrelevant. While this style protects against, god forbid, being too "political" it also ensures an author a well-deserved anonymity.A welcome new exception to this style is Gustaaf Houtman's "Mental Culture in Burmese Crisis Politics: Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy," published by the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. The monograph is long, dense, invaluable and free, asserts Douglas Steele

A leading German critic from the generation of Europeans scarred by the First World War, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) had a writing career marked by deep philosophical insights and tumultuous emotional crises. But until recently, most of his work was unavailable in English; the handful of essays that could be read in English, like "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," were undisputed classics, but the full spectrum of Benjamin's thought remained untapped. That has changed with Harvard University's publication of the multivolume Selected Writings, says Amazon.com