Why Niebuhr Now? by John Patrick Diggins (Chicago, £14)
Why who now? The American Reinhold Niebuhr was the socially engaged Christian theologian of a "God in exile", who agitated for America to join the second world war and was then a devout cold warrior until his death in 1971. He is still namechecked by both Barack Obama and John McCain. This slim, posthumously published study by the historian Diggins carefully sets out Niebuhr's ideas, tracing the influence on him of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, and argues that most people appealing to his legacy nowadays get him wrong.
Niebuhr was a major (and popularly known) 20th-century cultural figure who cited "original sin" as justification for his tragic view of politics. On Diggins's view, this remains useful in order to complicate what he calls Americans' "fetish of freedom", as well as to understand the nature and limits of human power. "The genius of Reinhold Niebuhr," Diggins writes touchingly, "is that we can laugh with Woody Allen and wait with Samuel Beckett and still reflect on the theologian's teachings." On the other hand, you might share a Niebuhr critic's impatience with his "cosmic hypochondria".
Tweeting the Universe, by Marcus Chown & Govert Schilling (Faber, £12.99)
This must have sounded like a clever idea in the pub: get a couple of science writers to explain current astronomy and cosmology (but not cosmic hypochondria) in a series of sentences of exactly 140 characters, eg "Conclusion: flattened spiral of Milky Way is embedded in vast, spherical 'halo' of dark stuff, perhaps 10 x as massive as visible galaxy." Each of the book's 140 questions (do you see what they did there?) – for example "What are quasars?", "What is dark energy?" – is answered by a series of six or 20 pseudo-tweets, generating an ugly, monotonous succession of short staccato paragraphs leached of any variation in tone. (Chown's own amusing, friendly style is here flattened out of existence.)
It is, then, a "book" that is substantial yet all but unreadable, lacking a real book's ebb and flow of argument and rhythm. (Definite article is depressingly optional.) No doubt one is not expected to read it as a book but to dip in, perhaps when otherwise engaged, to learn some fascinating space facts. There are lots of nice space facts, but what's that sound? It's the sound of literature committing suicide.
A Brief History of Biographies: From Plutarch to Celebs, by Andrew Brown (Hesperus, £8.99)
Kicking off with a biography of God, this rapid and clever book surveys biographies through the ages: biographies of saints, sinners, emperors, and artists; experimental or fake biographies by Woolf and Nabokov; film biopics. Biogs, the author writes, are "juridical", "penitential", "monstrous" or even "minimal", as well as in some way impossible. ("Perhaps there are moments in a life which are simply illegible?")
Brown, author too of the excellent recent A Brief History of Encyclopedias, is evidently an expert in composing cultural tours d'horizon of a highly civilised brevity that pack in more ideas and sharp analysis than many books twice the length. One follows him willingly here into obscure areas of Chinese or French literature to find a joke or plangent example, and he offers a playful set of microbiographies of his own, including a rather wonderful "Life of Heidegger". Near the end, Brown reads a biography of Lady Gaga, and muses on the notion of sources in flux: tomorrow's biographies will mine archives of electronic effluvia from a culture of total self-surveillance. It almost made me want to delete all my email.
