"The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion," by Jonathan Haidt. (Vintage, $16.) Why doesn't the other side listen to reason? Haidt, a social psychologist, charts the "mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our group's interests, in competition with other groups," and explains why liberals and conservatives have such different intuitions about right and wrong. In "Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent" (Bloomsbury, $18), the Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. situates our current political dysfunction in the full sweep of American history. "Americans disagree about who we are," he writes, "because we can't agree about who we've been."
"The Chemistry of Tears," by Peter Carey. (Vintage International, $15.) In Carey's touching novel, set in a London museum of "clocks and watches, automata and other wind-up engines," a grieving curator immerses herself in 19th-century journals about the construction of a mechanical bird.
"The Kissing List: Stories," by Stephanie Reents. (Hogarth, $14.) There's a satisfying edge to Reents' nimble first collection — connected stories about women navigating early adulthood in a world cluttered with narcissistic men and discarded friendships.
"Immortal Bird: A Family Memoir," by Doron Weber. (Simon & Schuster, $16.) With urgency and tenderness, Weber chronicles the efforts to save his eldest child, who was born with a congenital heart defect, and their struggles against the received wisdom and arrogance of the American medical establishment.
"Forgotten Country," by Catherine Chung. (Riverhead, $16.) Janie and Hannah, the Midwestern sisters in Chung's first novel, have been reared on stories of relatives gone missing amid political turmoil in their native Korea. So when Hannah drops from sight, Janie's search becomes a genealogical connect-the-dots as she links her sister's disengagement with generations of family trauma.
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