Anyone who writes a biography of Abraham Lincoln bears a heavy burden of justification, for more words have been written in the English language about America's sixteenth president than any other individual except Jesus Christ. What more could possibly be said on the subject of Abraham Lincoln's life?

Allen Cuelzo, a distinguished historian who has published several books in American intellectual and religious history, believes he offers a new perspective in his book 'Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer Presiden't. Cuelzo claims to do "something with Lincoln which virtually no modern biographer has managed to do, which is to read Lincoln seriously as a man of ideas (p 19)." At the same time, Cuelzo provides the reader with a general overview of Lincoln's life and career. The result is a curious hybrid, part basic primer on Lincoln's life story, part intellectual history of Lincoln's politics and ideological worldview.

Does it work? For the most part, yes. Cuelzo writes a decent narrative of Lincoln's life and presidency, treading over the well-trampled ground of Lincoln's boyhood, career as an Illinois attorney, budding antebellum politician and Civil War president. His treatment of Lincoln's personality and psychological makeup is nothing new, and his reading of Lincoln's contributions to the Union victory still less so. Redeemer President also lacks the verve and narrative dash of more popular biographies by David Donald and Stephen Oates. That said, it is still a solid, serviceable read, particularly for anyone not intimately familiar with the details of Lincoln's life, or the larger social and political context of his times.

Cuelzo weaves this biographical narrative with a more sophisticated intellectual history of Lincoln the "man of ideas". He sets much of Lincoln's worldview in direct contrast to Thomas Jefferson and his agrarian political philosophy. Cuelzo shows that Lincoln, the frontier railsplitter of American legend, in fact hated the small farm life Jefferson idealised, opting instead for a political and economic perspective which emphasised free market entrepeneurship, the free flow of commerce and goods, and government-subsidised economic development. While none of this is particularly original, Cuelzo offers a subtle and persuasive examination of the various ways in which Lincoln's free enterprise ideology affected his life and career.

But Cuelzo's chief contribution lies in his examination of Lincoln's religious ideas. For decades Lincoln's faith --or lack thereof-- has been the subject of controversy. Lincoln's friend and law partner William Herndon claimed that Lincoln was an "infidel", a freethinker who openly questioned the existence of God and scorned organised religion. Other friends of Lincoln, as well as clergy and politicians who wished to enshrine Lincoln as an American prophet, angrily denounced Herndon, arguing that Lincoln was a reverent and profound Christian man.

Cuelzo more-or-less split the difference between these two camps. On the one hand he rejected the suggestion that Lincoln was an atheist, arguing that "throughout [Lincoln's] life he increasingly wrapped his political ideas around religious themes (p 5)." Cuelzo convincingly demonstrates that Lincoln thought long and deeply about the nature of God, a process heavily influenced by his Calvinist background and the awful moral consequences of the Civil War. On the other hand, Cuelzo also rejects an overly simplistic interpretation of Lincoln's faith, pointing out that he was hardly an orthodox Christian believer, and that he did indeed dabble at times in metaphysical speculations which smacked of religious scepticism.

In the end, Cuelzo argues, Americans eager to make of Lincoln a deity --a "redeemer president"-- distorted and vastly oversimplified Lincoln's complex theological world. This complex analysis of Lincoln's religious thought is by far the most worthwhile feature of Cuelzo's book, and is likely what garnered Redeemer President the coveted Abraham Lincoln Prize from Gettysburg College this year.

In the end, Lincoln buffs and scholarly specialists may find Redeemer President frustrating. It is an odd mixture of the old and the new, the familiar and the original. The narrative of Lincoln's life is familiar to the point of redundancy, and readers will find that they need to mine Cuelzo's insights like so many bright nuggets from the rather bland soil of his general biographical narrative. But his analysis of Lincoln's religious life is compelling enough that it is well worth the effort.

Have you ever found yourself drifting in an oasis of sand? Or crying so hard, but with no one listening to you. Do you get up in a sweat and find yourself in a boat all alone? If you are the happy-go-lucky sort, but very ambitious, then perhaps your hours of sleep will have images of you trying to climb a ladder or scaling a mountain. Have you ever tried to interpret this activity, you perforce indulge in, perhaps every night or every other night?

Dreams are the bulwark of a human being's existence. But the dreams that Nicholas Heyneman explores are the manifestations of the unconscious mind when in sleep. Described as a "unique tool for enriching your relationships and your life," the book purports to "help you explore new avenues in your quest for love... shows you how to use dream interpretation to improve relationships with partners, family, friends, and colleagues".

Authored by a clinical psychologist and university professor who specialises in sleep, dreams, and relationship therapy, the book can help to some extent in understanding the other, fuzzy and unexplained world of symbols and images. But, it will need oodles of patience. For, there are step-by-step exercises, rather games one can play with a partner and try to arrive at some understanding of the dreams and perhaps even "enhance your love life and improve all of your valued relationships",

In seeking to demystify the hidden language and symbols of dreams, it leads one up a pathway where it can help one "interpret dreams…understand emotions, ... and find fulfillment". A reading of the book can aid one to "gain special insight into romantic bonds as well as relationships with family members, colleagues and friends. Learn to set aside differences and build strong, supportive ties".

Bright and colourful with interesting illustrations, the book makes excellent company on a lonely afternoon with a bowl full of munchies. It will have special interest for young couples in love, those wishing they could fall in love as also for those going through a troubled phase with kith and kin. Heyneman, at the very outset, makes it clear that "to make sense of our dreams, we should not take too literally the images that flit in front of our eyes". Here dreaming or "mental chatter" is associated with feeling, with "dream emotions." It is only after these emotions are understood in the right context that one can get on with the next stage of dream interpretation.

Divided into nine sections, the book begins with "Dreams and Gender," the "Language of the Unconsciousness" and an exercise on how to listen to your inner voice and goes on to the emotions of sleep and the dream path of love. It describes the interpretation of dreams as more an art than a science. "Dreams can help us come to terms with our waking emotions: they can guide us in dealing with disabling guilt, or teach us how to infuse life into a relationship when it is most needed. Dreams work in terms of either positive or negative imagery: the only way to distinguish one from the other is to pay attention to the emotions they bring forth," the author explains.

The various case studies are thought-provoking and raise hope that perhaps one can actually work on the exercises and strive to do away with the troubled patches in life. The concluding section, 'The Relationship Oracle', provides an alphabetical directory of some of the key relationship symbols of one's dreams. There are more than thirty symbols or images that one can interpret to understand with clarity and eloquence the unique language of one's unconsciousness.

The last thing the world needs is another book on Ernest Hemingway. But Debra Moddelmog's new study is one of the best indeed, perhaps the finest consideration of an individual author one has read in some years. One of the reasons is that it directly addresses the concerns of those who might think that the world would be a better place if Hemingway's fiction where banished to ... wherever White Male Authors go when they die. Hemingway of course is the malest of the Male -- the man who defined to his generation of American men, and then to subsequent others, what it means to be a man. What does it mean? Put simply, to define oneself over against women, who must be silenced or otherwise made subject to the various scripts of male authority. Moddelmog is not the first to notice, though, that in his obsession with what we would today refer to as gender Hemingway's fiction can in fact be profitably and even provocatively reread by feminists, who have been discovering for some time now that Hemingway women are in fact surprisingly resilient and even subversive figures in some of our culture's primary texts of male identity.

But what texts, exactly? Rather than the usual suspects -- 'A Farewell to Arms', 'Hills Like White Elephants' -- Moddelmog writes that she asks her students if they know such works as 'The Garden of Eden' or 'The Sea Change' and 'The Mother of a Queen'. Of course they don't. In part, 'Reading Desire' is an extended argument for a new Hemingway canon, based on a critical agenda that directly challenges the familiar heterosexual readings of the old canon or else that rebukes these readings as blind to more wayward and exciting currents of desire. The book is especially sharp about how our images of desire, in turn, at once contribute to and are addressed by the whole realm of the social, which is where our desire (whatever its particular origins) must have its life and being.

What would a new canon reveal? Two things, primarily. First, a Hemingway whose narratives are considerably more troubled by homosexuality than we have hitherto realised. (Modelmog is most emphatic that she is not proposing that Hemingway himself was homosexual "repressed, latent, or otherwise".) Secondly, an idea of desire derived from representations where gender is more fluid and sexuality not necessarily structured according to socially dominant constraints concerning what is normal and what deviant. How we read Hemingway has a significant place in these constraints. This is why he is such a famous author, and therefore why Moddelmog wants us to read him differently than we have. She is particularly shrewd about how the very biographical figure of "Ernest Hemingway" --never mind his fiction-- has been culturally produced, down to (say) a 1954 Look magazine report on one of his safaris, which omits how Hemingway often dressed native, hunted with a spear, and had sex with African women.

The only question about this book is who it's meant for. At one point, Modelmog characterises her argument as advancing "a Hemingway who both rebuffed and desired the gaze of other men, whose desire never found a resting place on either side of the homo-hetero binary". With the possible exception of the last phrase, there is nothing here that restricts the access of the educated general reader -- and so it goes through this superb book, whose theoretical sophistication is almost always lucidly, and, more rarely, even felicitously, phrased. At the end of a chapter on 'The Garden of Eden' (itself worth the price of admission) Moddelmog refers to it as an example of work "which reaches mainly specialised readers of a scholarly community and not the general public". True enough, generally.

But she has produced a rare book which can be read by anybody today who reads Hemingway. Even someone who yawns at the very mention of his name will find in the pages of 'Reading Desire' --which might be, rarest of all, a scholarly book which is so good because it's so short -- a Hemingway far more inventive and exciting than his culture currently takes him to be. A reader will also discover that reading Hemingway in the first place also means reading the culture, for better or worse. Moddelmog knows which is which, better than any critic of Hemingway one has ever read.

Steve Jones is a biologist and an admirer of Charles Darwin who decided to pay homage to the master by rewriting the "Origin of the species" in the light of modern biological knowledge. "On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection" was published over 140 years ago (in 1859, to be exact) and nothing has ever been the same in biology. Some wag has said that in modern biology "evolution is God and molecular biology is its prophet". But like all gods and prophets, these two have their fervent admirers and vicious opponents. Though it is frequently presented as a clash between religion and science, many religious people have no difficulty in reconciling evolution with their religious beliefs, and many scientists are intensely religious.

But the idea of evolution has been particularly difficult for those who stick to a literal reading of the Bible. It may be similarly threatening to literalist Jews and Muslims but the main opposition to it has come from certain groups of Christians, especially in the more literalist denominations in the United States. As a result of these controversies a cottage industry of evolution supporters and debunkers has sprung up and Jones' book is the latest addition to this canon.

The idea is so simple it seems strange that no one had done this before. Biological knowledge has grown immensely since Darwin wrote his masterpiece and many common objections to his ideas can now be confidently refuted with the help of new information. Another benefit of undertaking this task is that readers who are unfamiliar with the original can now appreciate its basic premise in a book which maintains the framework of the original, but presents up-to-date information in a contemporary style. The book begins with a historical sketch of the progress of opinion on the origin of the species. By giving some historical background Darwin's greatness is brought into focus.

When Darwin was writing, the immensity of time that has passed since the earth was formed was only just beginning to be understood. The mechanism of inheritance was completely unknown as all our knowledge of genes and DNA lay in the future. The fossil record was beginning to come to light, but very little of it had been deciphered or even vaguely dated. Yet Darwin was able, not only to hit on the basic mechanism of natural selection, but also to give such a wealth of evidence that it did not take long for millions of literate people to be convinced of his basic thesis. It also did not take long for others to attack his theory or (perhaps worse) to derive from it social and political theories of master races and so on that do not stand up to scientific scrutiny. Jones gives us this story in the historical sketch and introduction and then it's on to the book itself.

Evidence that the species are not static and they evolve over time and do so under the pressure of selection (whether natural or, as in the case of pets and livestock, human) is presented from all angles. The variation of domesticated animals, the variation we see in nature, the fossil records etc. are all presented in a readable and easy to understand manner. The book requires no special background in biology or science and, like the original; it makes its case by sheer weight of evidence. By the time the reader wades through 350 pages of fascinating facts, presented with wit and verve and argued with sober, systematic and deliberate care, he or she will find it hard to resist the authors conclusions. This does not mean that all controversies are settled. Far from it.

The mechanics and details of evolution are still a matter of intense debate and Jones discusses many of the common arguments that swirl around the topic. He (like Darwin) passes no judgment on the origin of life or consciousness. He takes the mainstream position of regarding evolution as being driven by blind chance and circumstance rather than any grand design. but the reader is free to speculate on other possibilities. Whether the universe was bound to evolve as it did, whether there is some creative force beyond the usual forces of physics and so on are not questions that are resolved or even directly tacked in this book. To a scientist armed with Occam's very sharp razor, it seems unnecessary to postulate other entities where chance and selection will suffice. Like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennet, Jones sees a universe made by natural selection and evolution but not everyone will agree. Still, everyone would do well to read this book, because whether the mainstream view is adequate or not, any theory that goes beyond blind evolution must at least deal with these facts and not ignore them.

Those interested in a more polemical view can read Richard Dawkins' 'The Blind Watchmaker'. And those looking for a wider view will enjoy Daniel Dennett's 'Darwin's Dangerous Idea'. But to learn about the theory of evolution, as it is understood in mainstream biology, this book is an excellent and comprehensive guide.