Now in his seventies, Robert Fogel has produced a book that focuses as much on the future as on the past. Instead of meticulously building economic models, scouring archives and carefully computing numbers that summarise the performance of the historical economy, Fogel tackles a topic that is seemingly beyond the reach of economic theory and quantification-the interaction of technology, economics, politics, culture and religion, says Robert Whaples

Left for Dead is the story of a man who survived the unsurvivable and who is now working on changing his own life for the better. It is the story of a marriage made rocky by a man's depression and obsession with mountain climbing. With the help of his friends and family, Beck Weathers is still practising medicine and living a pretty normal life. Throughout the book, the viewpoints of family members, friends, and acquaintances are interspersed, giving the reader the bigger picture of this story, writes Cynthia Arbuthnot

The Kim Phuc-John Plummer incident is only of the many in Victoria Sherrow's compilation that examines the impact of war on young people throughout the world and at different times in history beginning with the Thirty Years' War 1618-1648. Though this war was taken as the starting point because Sherrow believes it was the first time that the number of civilian casualties far exceeded the number of military casualties and this was the first war of long duration to have a significant effect on children and families, the bulk of the book is taken up by the Second World War and post-War wars, says Subir Ghosh

Lise Manniche gives us an excellent look at this fascinating yet unfamiliar aspect of Ancient Egyptian society. A lot of careful and hard work has gone into producing this beautiful book, which is recommended for those interested in fragrances, beauty care and, of course, Ancient Egypt, asserts Francesca Jourdan

One can only conclude that Noam Chomsky is right when he says that the best picture of society and history that we have is in literature, not in the scholarly books which aim to explain psychology, sociology and history. This book is merciless and fairly accurate in its portrayal of Stalinism and its fellow travellers, but for deeper insights into human psychology and the history of the twentieth century, some works of fiction are infinitely superior, avers Omar Ali