Can a book of elegies rise above maudlin morbidity? Author Stewart O'Nan says yes — and he recommends a great one by Christie Hodgen. It's a book that will break your heart, and warm your soul.

In Power Concedes Nothing, civil rights attorney Connie Rice describes brokering peace between the Los Angeles Police Department and minority populations.

Shalom Auslander's Hope: A Tragedy takes on genocide, identity politics and Anne Frank (now elderly and squatting in a farmhouse in upstate New York) with grim humor and daring irreverence.

The Glock is rapped about in hip-hop songs and carried by heroes in action films. It was once touted as the gun of the future, but also derided as a terrorist's best friend. Host Michel Martin and Paul Barrett, author of Glock, discuss how an obscure Austrian manufacturer of door hinges and knives ended up making America's top-selling handgun.

In Intel Wars, historian Matthew Aid details how bureaucratic policies and a glut of raw data have weakened the intelligence community in its war against would-be terrorists.

There's a new award for brutal book reviews in Britain: the Hatchet Job of the Year Award. A Julian Barnes book is dismissed as "just so... average." A biography of Martin Amis is called "spectacularly bad writing about spectacularly good writing."