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Reviews the book "To Renew America," by Newt Gingrich.

Reviews the book "The Twenty-Year Century: Essays on Economics and Public Policy," by Felix Rohatyn.

Reviews the book "Wealth and Poverty," by George Gilder.

This article discusses several books about the democratic process in the U.S., including "Take This Job and Ship It: How Corporate Greed and Brain-Dead Politics Are Selling Out America," by Byron L. Dorgan, "State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America," by Patrick J. Buchanan, and "Does American Democracy Still Work?," by Alan Wolfe.

The article reviews the book "Double Down: Game Change 2012" by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann.

Reviews the book "The Evolution of Cooperation," by Robert Axelrod.

Reviews the book "The Antitrust Paradox," by Robert H. Bork.

A review of the book "Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief," by Lawrence Wright is presented.

The article reviews the book "The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World," by Alan Greenspan.

The article reviews the book "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," by Christopher Hitchens.

Reviews the book "Washingtoon," by Mark Alan Stamaty.

Reviews the book, "On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense," by David Brooks.

It can't be easy to create a financial thriller. There's no blood, there are (usually) no bodies. How do you create excitement when most of the action consists of middle-aged white men in conservative suits talking on the phone, and the closest thing to a car chase is a stately procession of big black Town Cars? How often can you show people peering at spreadsheets and recoiling in alarm? What do you do when the scandal itself might as well be labeled ''Too Complicated to Understand''? The HBO film ''Too Big to Fail,'' based on the book of the same name by the reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times, about the financial crisis of 2008, uses every cinematic trick in the book, but ultimately succeeds because we know that the danger was real. One way to create an atmosphere of crisis is simply to have your characters assert that it's a crisis. In ''Too Big to Fail,'' directed by Curtis Hanson (''L.A. Confidential''), people are always saying things like, ''If we don't do this now, we won't have an economy on Monday.'' There's also a lot of staring soulfully through windows or into mirrors. The hero of Mr. Sorkin's version of events, Treasury secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., played by William Hurt, indicates the terrible stress he's under by talking ever-more softly. The Federal Reserve chairman Ben S. Bernanke, played by Paul Giamatti, does the same. As things get worse, the conversation at their weekly breakfast meetings degenerates into a low rumble. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]