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Journalist Jonathan Alter regards the 2012 presidential contest as the most consequential election of recent times. In his new book, Alter argues that President Obama's re-election prevented the country from veering sharply to the right, and he dissects the campaign and the events that led up to it.

John Thavis covered the Vatican from Rome for nearly 30 years while working for the Catholic News Service. In his new book, The Vatican Diaries, he describes a place much less organized and hierarchical than the public imagines.

Born from a deadly underground train crash, Manhattan's historic transit hub is credited with inventing the ramp and bringing electricity to both train tracks and terminal. Author Sam Roberts marks its centennial in Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America.

Heart of a Samurai tells the true story of 14-year-old Manjiro, a boy who was shipwrecked, rescued by whalers and taken to America. It was the late 1800s, when Japan was cut off from the outside world — until Manjiro returned and influenced the shogun to open the country to diplomacy.

In The Price of Inequality, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz argues that widely unequal societies don't function effectively or have stable economies. Even the rich will pay a steep price if economic inequalities continue to worsen, he says.

These five books will give you literary jet lag — a yearning to linger in the world of the author's imagination, and a reluctance to return to your own. The research is so deep it becomes invisible, and these writers are trusted guides, gently nudging and leading you through each tale.

Philip Galanes talks about what it takes to get your modern-etiquette question answered in the Sunday New York Times — and takes a few questions from NPR listeners.

"If we want to make media better then we've got to start consuming better media," says open-source-Internet activist Clay Johnson. His new book, The Information Diet, makes the case for more "conscious consumption" of news and information.

What does the Internet look like? Journalist Andrew Blum decided to find out. His new book, Tubes, is a journey into the Internet's physical infrastructure — where our data is stored and transmitted.

The famed neurologist talks to Fresh Air about how grief, trauma, brain injury, medications and neurological disorders can trigger hallucinations — and about his personal experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs in the 1960s.