When Becky Aikman's husband dies and leaves her a widow in her 40s, she joins a grief support group to help her through her loss. But as the youngest participant in what seems like a wallowing contest, Becky concludes that what she needs is to shed her gloom and cheer up. When she voices this goal and is met with skepticism, then asked to leave the group, Aikman (writer and editor for BusinessWeek and Newsday) sets out to start her own widows' support group devoid of tissue boxes, folding chairs and mental health checklists. After putting word out, she and five other recent widows, ranging in age from 39 to 57, agree to meet once a month on a Saturday night to do something "fun," sharing in cocktail parties, cooking and fitness classes, visits to spas and museums, lingerie shopping and, ultimately, a trip to Morocco.

Saturday Night Widows is an unflinchingly honest, spirited memoir that details the revelations and escapades of these women, collectively and individually, over the course of one year. As each widow begins to put the pieces of her life back together, personal stories that bring tears and laughter, healing and hope emerge in the safe solidarity of the group. In the end, Aikman and her friends triumph over loss by supporting each other as they each chart a new course, determined to live abundant, healthy, happy lives despite the pain of grief. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Anybody who's read Cyndi Lee's Yoga Body, Buddha Mind or sampled her essays in Yoga Journal or Shambhala Sun knows she is a humane and instructive writer. The acclaimed yoga instructor's memoir, May I Be Happy, has an earthy sensibility that sets it apart from her earlier work.

Lee--the founder of New York City's OM Yoga Center--writes about her early love of dance, her burgeoning passion and mastery of yoga, her encounters with Buddhism and the convergence of those teachings with her inclusive but disciplined world view. She also deals open-heartedly with her often painful struggles with body image, addressing both her own emotional and psychological wounds and offering useful insights into society's soul-killing pigeonholing of female beauty within narrow (read: skinny) confines. Lee also wonderfully incorporates stories of her friendships with famous women like Cyndi Lauper (Lee was a choreographer for her early videos) and Jamie Lee Curtis. The engaging dialogue between Lee and Curtis on the subject of aging, beauty and the changing body is a particularly fascinating distillation of the book's main points.

Though May I Be Happy's message embraces female empowerment, its underlying wisdom about the body as a vehicle for self-improvement and instrument for spiritual growth should appeal to readers of either gender. --Donald Powell, freelance writer

When first the housing market and then the bond market imploded in the late 2000s, the repercussions damaged not only Wall Street but the entire United States economy--as well as economies abroad. In After the Music Stopped, Princeton economics professor and Wall Street Journal columnist Alan S. Blinder explores the causes of the financial crises, along with the steps the federal government took to address the meltdown and the further work needed to prevent financial history from repeating itself with another catastrophic depression.

After the Music Stopped displays Blinder's thorough knowledge of his subject as well as of his audience. Readers with scant background in economics will have little trouble understanding Blinder's explanations of the causes of the financial crises or how the steps that have already been taken and the further steps he recommends apply to the situation. Blinder never hesitates to lay blame where it is due on both sides of the political divide, but neither is he stingy with praise--and he focuses on the complicated issues involved that are clearer in hindsight. After the Music Stopped is not only a comprehensible overview of the financial crisis but an enjoyable one as well. --Dani Alexis Ryskamp, blogger at The Book Cricket

True Refuge excels thanks to Tara Brach's mixture of touching autobiographical sketches and accounts of her clinical psychology experiences. Her pragmatic approach to insight meditation and Buddhism should be thought-provoking and spirit-calming no matter where one rests on the spiritual journey.

Individuals acquainted with the Buddhist dharma teachings may recognize the term "taking refuge." Brach's reverent yet flexible view of the ancient wisdom, approached through psychological insight, makes for an innovative work of sustenance and lasting use. She is not afraid to throw in teachings and aphorisms from other traditions, and this gives True Refuge a welcome air of the ecumenical. While Brach's obvious knowledge of Buddhist teachings and her capacity to present this knowledge in a pithy and psychologically penetrating way is unusual, her main new contribution is the R.A.I.N. system: Recognize what is happening; Allow life to be just as it is; Investigate inner experience with kindness; and practice Not-identification. She illustrates these four main points with plenty of examples, arriving at an approach to life that is both wonderfully free of extraneous baggage and brave in its insistence at looking at life without preconceived notions.

In a world dominated by compulsive appetites and dogmatic adherence to particular modes of thought, Brach's refreshing Buddhist-inspired approach is a wise and compassionate revelation that should appeal to those in need of soul replenishment. --Donald Powell, freelance writer

In 2012, John Brockman of Edge.org asked more than 200 scientists, social scientists, thinkers and novelists, "What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?" Their responses are collected in This Explains Everything, starting with Susan Blackmore's belief that natural selection offers the most elegant explanation of how the world works, exemplified by the oft misunderstood tautology "Things that survive survive." According to Steven Pinker, natural selection and social Darwinism explains how the familial gene pool shapes human conflict. For Keith Devlin, it's the creation of human language and grammar that serves to encode and communicate complex ideas.

Others find simplicity as the key to the world's inner workings: "Simplicity leads to depth," says Nobel laureate physicist Frank Wilczek. "The shortest programs all contain nothing gratuitous. Every bit will play a role." Others cite one elegant explanation as the stepping stone for better explanations, with one door, according to Alan Alda, nudging open another 100 doors. David Pizarro admires Jared Diamond's explanation of how human societies work, but Diamond himself points to Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley's theory of the biological generation of electricity as the ultimate authority on worldly matters. Not so journalist Nicholas G. Carr, who offers up the Peter Principle's "everybody is a dolt" rationale as the deepest insight into human character (and the easiest explanation for why mediocrity predominates).

This thoroughly thought-provoking, cross-disciplinary approach to how the world works will have readers pondering the meanings of their own existence and that of the world around them. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

Among the most striking features of Andrew O'Hagan's The Atlantic Ocean is the breadth of its subject matter. From incisive essays on writers such as James Baldwin, E.M. Forster and William Styron to accounts of the decline of British farming, an appreciation of the Beatles and a reminiscence of Marilyn Monroe, these 21 sterling pieces marry the concerns of an impressive intellect to an insatiable curiosity, creating a body of work that justifiably invites comparison to the nonfiction of George Orwell or, among O'Hagan's contemporaries, writers like Christopher Hitchens or Geoff Dyer.

In a collection so consistently strong it's difficult to choose highlights, two of the best and lengthiest works of journalism appear side by side. In "After Hurricane Katrina," O'Hagan accompanies two North Carolina men--one young and white, the other black and middle-aged--on what turns out to be a mostly futile trip to a New Orleans that "had become the thing that geological memory knew it to be--a voluminous swamp, a lake of reeds and tangled boughs, except that television sets and teddy bears and living people had got in the way." Then "Brothers" twins the deaths of two remarkably dissimilar soldiers--Guardsman Anthony Wakefield, a British infantryman, and Lieutenant Colonel John Spahr, a celebrated United States fighter pilot--both killed in Iraq on May 2, 2005, exactly two years after President Bush declared the end of major combat operations there.

Most of the pieces in The Atlantic Ocean first appeared in British publications, and thus it's likely Andrew O'Hagan isn't widely known to American readers. Perhaps these fine examples of his abundant talent will change that. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

First novelist Kay Honeyman creates a strong heroine, Jade Moon, for this coming-of-age tale set in Jinjiu village in 1923 Guangzhou, China.

Jade Moon's mother died giving birth to her nearly 17 years ago, and life is not easy for a girl in an all-male household in China. But Jade Moon often speaks without thinking, and takes on every battle. In Chinese astrology, girls born in the year of the Fire Horse are "especially dangerous" and bring tragedy to their families. Everyone in Jinjiu blames Jade Moon for any misfortune that befalls them. A stranger comes to town with a connection to her father's brother, whom Jade Moon never knew existed. The stranger's name is Sterling Promise, and he comes bearing a ticket that will get Jade Moon, her father and Sterling Promise himself passage to America.

Honeyman fills the narrative with period details sure to fascinate readers: the creation of "paper sons," fictitious family members invented by Chinese immigrants after the San Francisco earthquake to gain passage for others wishing to come to the U.S.; the fireworks trade in Hong Kong, made possible through child labor; and the second-class status of girls and women. Jade Moon's only hope in China is to marry a man who can provide for her. In America, she hopes she'll get a chance to be whom she's meant to be. But as fellow passenger Mrs. Ying tells Jade Moon, "It is not easy to be a woman anywhere." An engrossing historical novel with a captivating heroine. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

After identical twins Edgar and Allan Poe (great-great-great-great grand nephews of the Edgar Allan Poe) are expelled under suspicion of cheating on a standardized test, their Aunt Judith agrees to homeschool them, with comical results.

The twins' principal does not understand that Edgar and Allan, "whose knowledge was always identical, however far apart they were," would never cheat on a test. The fact that they got the same three answers wrong in precisely the same way served as proof. Why couldn't Mr. Mann see that? Instead, he calls them in to expel them, and allows an odd fellow called Mr. Archer time alone with the boys, who clips a lock of each boy's hair and exits as the twins' guardians arrive. What could he be up to? The plot thickens when their black cat, Roderick Usher, goes missing.

Gordon McAlpine (Joy in Mudville), making his children's book debut, intersperses chapters in which Edgar Allan Poe (despite admonishment from boss William Shakespeare) attempts to leave helpful clues for his namesake twins, a few of which go awry. Edgar and Allan, being clever boys who "believed that oddities and seeming coincidences were actually the world's way of communicating secret messages," nonetheless pick up on them. Sam Zuppardi's drawings of the clues, cameo portraits and posters augment the story as well as readers' interests. Some of the literary allusions will be more amusing to adults than to young readers, but children will certainly get the references to Oz, and cheer on the twins as they decode the clues to track down their beloved cat. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Debut author Eric Kahn Gale creates a powerful treatise on one of today's hottest topics: bullying.

Eric Haskins used to be a normal kid, with a normal group of friends and a normal life. But something changed between fifth and sixth grade. Now, his former friends are calling him "Grunt" and bullying him. This is not stereotypical, steal-your-lunch-money bullying. This is the real thing. First, a few boys refuse to acknowledge Eric's existence. Next, they jostle him as he's peeing, ruining his clothes. Through these small acts of exclusion, his tormentors transform him into an object loathed by his entire class. He is no longer Eric; he is the Grunt. Desperate to change his lot, Eric tracks down a book he has heard of, an instruction manual that purports to give its readers the power to arrange the social hierarchy.

Despite some first-time writer missteps (Eric's voice is too grown-up for a sixth grader; one plot point, involving a page ripped from The Book, is an artificial device to create suspense), The Bully Book ultimately succeeds as a story that grants legitimacy to the extreme fear, anger and despair that victims of bullying feel. The existence of a bullying instruction manual, and the methodical, deliberate manner in which Eric's tormentors employ it, may ring false. But ultimately, these points of incredulity allow the reader to access a deeper truth: to the bullied, the sense of organized attack is real. --Allie Jane Bruce, children's librarian, Bank Street College of Education