A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning

  • Ray Jackendoff
Oxford University Press 288 pp. £16.99 (2012)

Linguist Ray Jackendoff wends his way through thorny questions around language and thought, hedge-clippers in hand. Covering words and meaning, consciousness and perception, reference, rationality and intuition, he reveals the split between how we experience the world and how perception and language are organized. His conclusion is that rational thought rests on intuition — and that meaning and thought are almost completely unconscious. The book is a multi-perspective journey into the hinterlands of the 'problem of knowledge'.

The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards

  • William J. Broad
Simon & Schuster 336 pp. £16.63 (2012)

Whether it is hatha, ashtanga or kundalini, yoga is swathed in hype. This ancient discipline is a vast and growing industry in the West, and ripe for investigation. Science writer William Broad, a two-time Pulitzer prizewinner and experienced yoga practitioner, has spent five years researching the teaching and practice. The result is illuminating and often unnerving. Yoga has proven physical and psychological benefits, yet Broad shows how even ordinary poses, poorly taught to the unfit, can lead to strokes, serious hip-joint damage and worse.

Steam-Powered Knowledge: William Chambers and the Business of Publishing, 1820–1860

  • Aileen Fyfe
University of Chicago Press 336 pp. $50 (2012)

As e-books rise, it is salutary to recall another technological revolution in bringing words to mind: the steam-powered printing press. Historian Aileen Fyfe focuses on Edinburgh publishing firm W. & R. Chambers to reveal how the cheap print that flooded both sides of the Atlantic in the 1800s transformed the dissemination of knowledge. This chronicle of great endeavour is studded with small pleasures, from the horror over 'sordid' railway literature to engineer Charles Babbage's awe of printing speeds at The Times.

Across Atlantic Ice: The Origin of America's Clovis Culture

Dennis J. Stanford and Bruce A. Bradley. University of California Press 336 pp. $34.95 (2012)

North America's first peoples were long thought to be Asians who migrated over the Bering land bridge some 12,000 years ago, bringing with them the tools of the Clovis culture. Now archaeologists Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley have radically recast the story. Drawing on climatic, genetic and archaeological evidence, they argue that the roots of Clovis culture rest in the Solutrean people of Spain and France, who sent some of their number across the Atlantic in boats 18,000 years ago.

The Puzzler's Dilemma: From the Lighthouse of Alexandria to Monty Hall, a Fresh Look at Classic Conundrums of Logic, Mathematics, and Life

  • Derrick Niederman
Duckworth 216 pp. £14.99 (2012)

Mathematician Derrick Niederman takes classic logic puzzles and weaves them into a fiendish brain-teaser of a narrative. He covers 'kangaroo' puzzles that contain their own answers, lateral-thinking posers, and even riddles that abide by Sherlock Holmes's great technique — eliminating the impossible so that “whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”.