Atlantic County Library System

Jacob Soll’s ambitious history takes us from Cicero to Milton Friedman, but is hobbled by questionable assertions.

“The Philosophy of Modern Song” offers commentaries on a range of music, written in the singer’s unmistakable lyrical style.

Drawing on newly released letters from the poet to Emily Hale, with whom he maintained a decades-long, mostly epistolary affair, “The Hyacinth Girl,” by Lyndall Gordon, reconsiders his life and work.

In “Unstoppable Us,” he presents the provocative ideas that drove his 2015 best seller, “Sapiens,” without dumbing them down.