My Funny Valentine...

...Is your figure less than Greek
Is your mouth a little weak
When you open it to speak
Are you smart?

I hope so, because there's not a mush-headed love story to be had amid this week's quirky comic tales, novels of insidious suspense, and cautionary accounts. So unless you want to settle for another last-minute Valentine's Day Vermont Teddy Bear, I think you'll find some intriguing — and equally endearing — new releases amid the latest batch of books, both fiction and non, expressive of all feeling both hither and yon. Okay, now we're verging on mush-headed territory... 

NONFICTION:

In The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby, dismayed by the average U.S. citizen's political and social apathy and the overall "crisis of memory and knowledge involving everything about the way we learn and think," incisively and often caustically sizes up the state of post-World War II anti-rationalism as it exists from pop culture to a certain "junk thought"-laden pseudo-intellectual pervasiveness. At the same time, the author, through historical research, breaks down such popular beliefs fueling a consensus of sorts that the 1950s were a cultural wasteland and the 1960s were solely a breeding ground for liberals.

What it all comes down to is an anti-attitudinal adjustment away from logic and evidence that manifests itself as a wide-scale discontent fostered by mass media, pseudo-science, religious fundamentalism, mediocre public education, a lack of fair-minded public intellectuals, and a lazy and unquestioning public. Furthermore, with reading on the decline and scientific and historical illiteracy on the ascent, it comprises an anti-rationalism seeking overdue action.

Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West by Benazir Bhutto

The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby

Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam after Iraq by Michael Scheuer

FICTION:

The Soul Thief by Charles Baxter

The Ghost War by Alex Berenson

The Palace of Illusions: A Novel by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Dakota by Martha Grimes

The Killing Ground by Jack Higgins

Prey by Lurlene McDaniel

Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories by Steven Millhauser

A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz