Brian Bethune

Brian Bethune writes about ideas, books and the book trade, and religion, but what really interests him is why people believe what they believe.

An iconic artist’s trick for overcoming his colour-blindness tells another kind of story

To learn what it is to be human, one writer lived like a beast, worm-eating and all

Nancy Isenberg examines the long history of class in America

Another compulsively readable book from science writer Mary Roach

Ben Lerner explores The Hatred of Poetry with the best, and worst, the genre has to offer

A snapshot of the current consensus on the very first cave drawings

The quest to understand the human genome, the instructions that rule our form, our function and, more than we would wish, our fate

The National Ballet makes sense of a startlingly adult children’s fable

Siddhartha Mukherjee’s genetics book rises to the top of the pool. See what else made our list of the top-selling reads from the last week

Author Sebastian Junger asks what if PTSD is located not in the trauma of combat, but in the transition back to modern life?