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Gurion's scholarly erudition is so staggering, so monumentally over-the-top, that the accusation of its implausibility is embedded in the book itself. A footnote excerpts a letter from Philip Roth (his fictional counterpart, anyway), who misreads fan mail from Gurion as an adult's "terrifically cruel and on point" mimicry of "recent so-called Jewish wunderkind authors." Roth urges him to stop "writing from the unconvincing POV of a boy-genius whose name suggests a messianic fate" and instead to adopt the more realistic perspective of a man remembering his childhood "as a time when he, like so many of us, suspected that he was the messiah."

Even at five years old, we are told, the boy asked scriptural questions so complex that his mentor, a rabbinical scholar, was moved to transcribe their conversations. No doubt the allegorical touchstone is different for Jewish readers, but for this fundamentalist-raised gentile the obvious echo is of Jesus' three-day debate, at age twelve, that left Jerusalem's temple elders astonished. (Luke 2:46-47) At times, like the fictional Roth, I struggled with Gurion's voice -- with the high diction, and the essaylets and other postmodern flourishes -- but Levin has an uncanny facility for blending sympathy and satire, for making us care about his charming but dubious hero and for infusing life into this alternate, slightly fantastical reality that's very much like our own. "The Instructions" recalls both the real Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America," in which aviation hero and Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindberg defeats FDR on an isolationist platform and winds up in the White House, and Kurt Vonnegut's "Slapstick," in which members of the Church of Jesus Christ, Kidnapped are required to "spend every waking hour" trying to find their savior, who was "kidnapped by the Forces of Evil" at the second coming. And, like Roth's and Vonnegut's, Levin's flights of fancy are placed in service of a deadly serious project. Not only is he, as he recently told The Chicago Tribune, having "a conversation with Jewish literature," he's illustrating, in a wholly original way, exactly what sort of catastrophe results when fervent religious conviction meets brute force.

Gurion may be a scholar, but he's also a thug, at least according to his record. He's been kicked out of three schools, for starters. The first, the ultra-orthodox Schechter, booted him for throwing a stapler at a rabbi who said "the all-time snakiest thing anyone had ever said to me": that Gurion could not be the messiah, because "‘The messiah will be a Jew.'" "I was half lost-tribe," Gurion explains. "You couldn't see it in my skin unless you were trying, but my mother's parents were from Ethiopia and a few Ashkenazis still thought that meant I wasn't an Israelite." Northside Hebrew Day expelled him for distributing a pamphlet to teach fellow students how to make a pennygun -- a sort of sling shot -- from a balloon, a penny, and the sawed-off top of a soda bottle. The instructions, inspired by an attack Gurion witnessed on a synagogue, required recipients to pass them along, in secret, to other Israelites (Gurion rejects the word "Jews"), so that they would never again "cower amidst the masses of the Roman and Canaanite children." Next Gurion was assigned to the lock-down program at Martin Luther King Middle School, where he lasted four days before he was accused, wrongly, of beating a boy with a cinder block.

Now enrolled at Aptakisic Junior High, Gurion has been placed under all-day surveillance with the school's other most dangerous kids, in "The Cage." Cut off from his fellow Israelite scholars, Gurion is drawn to kids who are, as he puts it, damaged. Meeting Eliyahu of Brooklyn, a Hasidic new arrival at AptakisicI – who is both damaged and an Israelite -- causes Gurion to reflect that "Everyone I liked who wasn't damaged was a scholar. Rather, everyone I liked who wasn't a scholar was damaged. Or maybe the first way. The stress kept shifting." His scriptures are primarily for "all the Israelites," but also for "anyone who's on the side of damage." In his heart of hearts, Gurion knows he can't lead both the chosen and the damaged, but as a member of both groups he refuses to choose.

The pressure that refusal comes under is made more explicit by the fact that those who shape Gurion's messianic project most are not in fact Israelites. He learns how to write scripture from the novelist, motel owner, and ex-lawyer Flowers, who forbids Gurion "to portray him as a wise old black man who gave life-lessons to an Israelite boy."'I think you best not harp on about being the messiah,'" Flowers tells him. "'[L]eak it in slowly while you're hooking everyone, and then Blast!'"

When Gurion falls in love with a troubled but talented red-haired girl, he's convinced she's Jewish even after his mother pronounces her name -- Eliza June Watermark -- "the single most goyishe" she's ever heard. "Hashem would never fall me in love with someone who wasn't an Israelite," he explains. When June reveals the next day that she's a Unitarian, Gurion is distraught and rageful, but decides, partly on the strength of their matching birthmarks that are "an abbreviation of Adonai's best written name," to convert her; since Adonai neither yells "No" nor paralyzes him during the impromptu ceremony, Gurion pronounces June an Israelite.

And then there's Gurion's best friend, Benji. Although he isn't an Israelite either, Gurion includes him in the dissemination of the contraband pennygun-making documents. But Benji is instructed to destroy the pamphlet rather than join in its viral spread. "‘Mine says if I don't burn it we're enemies,'" Benji says, when he encounters the original. "'Theirs say, strangers, please spread this to other strangers.'" "You want me to apologize?" Gurion says. "Cause you're not an Israelite? Because I am?"

Gurion's dilemma -- the impossibility of protecting the downtrodden while leading God's chosen people -- is tied up in the words of the Israelite prophets, in specifically Jewish tropes of identity. And it is the specificity of his tangled doctrinal illogic that makes him so sympathetic and compelling. But in our fanaticism-addled world, the implications of his story's tragic arc resonate much further. To carve out any group for salvation is to condemn everyone outside it to damnation of one kind or another.

Inevitably, given this debut novel's range, energy, and sprawl, pre-publication quotes compare Adam Levin to David Foster Wallace. And in its footnotes and asides, its thoroughgoing but wholly approachable intellectualism, and its relentless self-awareness, "The Instructions" really does recall "Infinite Jest." Other forebears -- Roth, Salinger, Cervantes, and "The Book of Jonah" ("the most deadpan comedy ever written") -- are explicitly evoked by Gurion himself.

But the ability to engender true sympathy in a reader for the schemes of a narcissist is a very particular and rare sort of talent. There is, of course, Humbert Humbert, whose criminal seduction of Lolita Nabokov somehow enlists his reader in rooting for. And the antihero of Iris Murdoch's "The Sea, the Sea" fascinates as much as he repels when he takes his first love hostage. As I mull over "The Instructions," though, my mind keeps returning – again I reveal my goyishe frame of reference -- to John Milton's Satan, the most compelling figure of "Paradise Lost." And I think of the words of an aging country squire (quoted by Philip Pullman in an introduction to the poem), who wrote, transfixed by the fallen archangel's saga, "I know not what the outcome may be, but this Lucifer is a damned fine fellow, and I hope he may win!"

Nor did he make a simple circumnavigation. Slocum sailed from Boston to Gibraltar then south, hugging the African coast, turning back across the Atlantic through Cape Verde to Pernambuco along the South American coast. He passed though the Straits of Magellan and across the vast Pacific Ocean to Australia. From there, Slocum sailed the Indian Ocean, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, crossed the Atlantic a third time, and arrived in Newport, R.I., on June 27, 1898. Alone in a 37-foot sloop, he had sailed 46,000 miles almost entirely by dead reckoning.

The account he delivered of the voyage, "Sailing Alone Around the World" (1900), is one of the masterpieces of nautical writing. It features a direct and lyrical style that is inviting from the very first words. Arthur Ransome, whose "Swallows and Amazons" sailing series are among the best children's literature, said, "Boys who do not like this book ought to be drowned at once." I nod in agreement. "Sailing Alone" is one of those books that, if placed in your hands young, will provide a lifetime's perfect enjoyment -- rereading only deepening the contentment found therein -- "Kim" is another. As is "Treasure Island," "The 39 Steps" and "Pride and Prejudice," too. "Sailing Alone" is all the rarer in this company for being nonfiction.

And the quarter it comes from is an unexpected one. Slocum (1844-1909) had scarcely any formal education when he escaped the drudgery of making leather boots for the sea. Yet, he was a devoted reader and as a writer had a confidence and unworriedly reflective style that, I suspect, came from his decades as a sea captain, which was the nearest thing to being god most men might ever know. His description of his father strikes me as near-perfect: "My father was the sort of man who, if wrecked on a desolate island, would find his way home, if he had a jack-knife and could find a tree. He was a good judge of a boat, but the old clay farm which some calamity made his was an anchor to him. He was not afraid of a capful of wind, and he never took a back seat at a camp-meeting or a good, old-fashioned revival."

It is also, as I discovered in Geoffrey Wolff's "The Hard Way Around: The Passages of Joshua Slocum," a fair description of Slocum himself. In May 1871, the 27-year-old captain -- already qualified as a master mariner for more than two years -- departed with his wife and a crew in the 100-foot bark Washington to fish Chinook salmon in Alaska's Cook Inlet. Able to work day and night due to the midnight sun, the party also had a fine view of their boat being wrecked when a gale snapped its anchor lines. Slocum kept the crew fishing and set to building a boat that could carry him to Kodiak Island, 200 miles distant. When a U.S. government ship offered them rescue, Slocum accepted only for his wife, as the salmon catch would have had to be abandoned. He made his journey, hired Russian sealers, and returned to take the crew and salmon to San Francisco. Wolff, who calls the whole adventure a "tamer" version of "Shackleton's heroic rescue in 1915-16 of his crew from Antarctic ice," notes that "adding the loss of the Washington to his other expenses, the vessel's owner sold the fish and pocketed a profit."

A fine feat, and typical of a man who later built a 35-foot canoe and sailed his family 5,000 miles back from Brazil after their boat was wrecked on the coast. Wolff manages a rare feat himself: writing a whole book about a minor classic that doesn't bury it, or exaggerate its importance. "The Hard Way Around" is a brisk evocation of Slocum's world. Wolff characterizes all the phases of Slocum's career from a wide-reading in the nautical history of the era: catching the nature of life before the mast, of the rapid advancement allowed to able seamen, of life afloat for a family, of the constant threat of death in almost every aspect of merchant shipping, and of the tremendous changes wrought by steam.

What doesn't come clearly through "Sailing Alone" is that Slocum had been thrown ashore in middle age by the end of the age of sail. Like his subject, Wolff is prone to breezing past the duller days. He also finds endlessly interesting subjects. I had always assumed that the seaman's life in the age of the clippers and the Grain Race was a narrow one intellectually, yet Woolf notes "young sailors -- those with open eyes and ears -- learned to cook and eat foreign food, to wear and appreciate foreign clothes, to play foreign games, to understand the singularity of the world's people." And, of course, he's right. A sailor who avoided the dangers of drink and brothels had a life far richer than the farmers or fishermen of Slocum's native Nova Scotia. It was a life that could produce a singular literary figure like Joshua Slocum.

"Sailing Alone" is one of the best books ever written about the call of the running tide. On its last page Slocum boasted, "No king, no country, no treasury at all, was taxed for the voyage of the Spray, and she accomplished all that she undertook to do." Geoffrey Wolff has done the same. His every page drives us back to a book he rightly characterizes in his first line as "a tour de force of descriptive and narrative power." Read "Sailing Alone." Then read "The Hard Way Around." You'll want to reread "Sailing Alone." I can think of no greater praise for Geoffrey Wolff.

According to journalist Ted C. Fishman's new book "Shock of Gray," those changes are already being felt in parts of the world. By reporting from cities that are ahead of the overall aging curve, Fishman deftly forecasts the larger problems that will soon consume the globe. Professionals and skilled laborers will be pushed out of their jobs before they can afford to retire, forcing many into service industries that pay a small fraction of their former salaries. Rural communities will struggle with acute aging as young people leave for the cities. That in turn will create opportunities for immigrants, thus accelerating globalization. Builders will need to accommodate more people with greater mobility issues, which will drive up costs for infrastructure. At the same time, scientists will continue to tweak the human life span to the point, perhaps one day, of near immortality.

We recently spoke with Fishman over the phone from his home in Chicago about how America treats its seniors, the "Silicon Valley of aging" and whether immortality is really possible.

You have a section title in your book called "Why We Don't Like Old People." Do you really think we don't?

I think it is true. In general, we don't like them because for people who are not in late life yet, late life remains a mystery. And it's a mystery fraught with danger. Lots of things start happening to people at age 60 and the people who are on the young side of that divide see those as frightening and threatening. But there's also another divide: We think very differently about people in our own lives who are above that age than we do about the general population above that age.

There's a notion that certain cultures do better by their elderly than we Americans do. You looked at this as a worldwide phenomenon. What did you conclude?

One of the really dumbfounding truths of the book is that very often the places that insist that they are the most loyal and faithful to their families are the places that do the most violence to them. As soon there are geographic distances, the things that once bound the family break up very rapidly. Almost all these very traditional places have driven down birthrates to among the lowest in the world. I think there's a relationship between the mythologies -- and expectations of people to be bound to their families -- and the desperation to escape those bonds.

What do we mean when we use the word "old"?

That depends on who we are and the age we are. When I spoke to people late in their career, they were talking about people who were retired as old. Then the early retirees would talk about the less-active retirees as old. There's ageism at every age. And it works in reverse, too. I was at a senior center where they were telling me about a dance where the 70-year-olds were dancing and a 90-year-old was on the balcony looking down. The senior center director said, "Why don't you go join in." And he goes, "Oh, those aren't my people."

As baby boomers start to approach the age of 65 in large numbers, do you foresee a civil rights movement for older adults, given that generation's history of activism?

There might be a civil rights movement, but people won't recognize it as a civil rights movement. They'll see it as an economic turf war. When you get the resources of a society, you get the respect. You can see this in Europe right now, where the population is somewhat older than it is here. The debt crisis has really caused a huge and quick reckoning with the crisis in pension funding and hundreds of thousands of people are coming into the street. They made promises to themselves and now they find that they can't keep those promises. In some ways, they're battling their past selves.

But they feel like they are fighting a younger generation.

Yeah, I think that's right. But in the long run the battle will not be for who gets what share of the public financing. It will be a more traditional civil rights issue, which is: Evaluate me on my abilities and my skills, not on my weaknesses. The older population is a hugely diverse one. If the image of an older person is going to be exclusively that of an enabled, sharp, cognitively with-it, older person who can work into their 70s and 80s, then we're ignoring a huge part of the population that will need our help.

You call Sarasota, Fla., the Silicon Valley of aging. How so?

Sarasota is the oldest large metropolitan area in the United States. I wanted to see how a community works that has an age demographic profile today that the rest of the country will have in a few years to come. There are all kinds of businesses devoted to giving people in late life the very best, most active, challenging, pleasurable social life they could possibly have. And it's not done for the older people, they are doing it for themselves too. They start endeavors to give their life new meaning. And all of these things are great tonics for longevity. But at the same time, a lot of the best things that happen to people in Sarasota happen to people who have means.

You argue that when wealthy nations started to age, that actually sped up globalization.

Right. Aging economies -- Japan and Europe and the United States -- are shopping the world for youth. The traditional workplace is changing to drive older people out -- the cost of healthcare and pensions weighs very heavily on global companies -- and places such as China have a population that it could send to the cities unburdened by age and the cost of age. Globalization really is a function of demographic change. When you go into beat-up, industrial towns you can feel it. You can see that older workers who used to be on the factory are now doing minimum-wage work at big-box stores on the edge of town. And then China has factories that contain tens of thousands of workers, without a single soul that's over 25 years old. And you think, the only important thing about these workers is their youth.

Well, that brings us to the primary tension of the book. On the one hand, we humans have become very effective at prolonging life. On the other hand, these prolonged lives are placing pressures on our resources that will become critical. So the question is, which should win, our prolonged lives or the resources?

I think the hands-down winner there is longer life. Especially longer, healthier life. So if you add up all the misgivings we have about a society that has far more older people and the challenges of age and ageism, they don't even compare to the gift of living longer and living healthier. This is what humankind has been devoted to since we could first mix a few herbs together. And we're there. So our challenge is to apply this kind of brilliance to the result that we've created, which is being an older society.

Our life span averages have leaped in the past century, as you point out, and I wonder if you think there's a point where we'll hit a ceiling. Now that you've read the science, is there really a possibility for immortality?

I only read the science as a layman and I can only tell you who I trust, which is based on emotional signals as much as empirical ones. I do think maybe eventually we'll be able to reengineer the human body so that it's some mix of mechanization and biological miracle and we live forever. But in the lifetime of anybody who's reading the book, I think there are big limits to the expansion of the human life span. Our genetic makeup is such that the genes that help us grow when we're young tend to turn against us as we get old.

You show there might be some incremental ways to extend our own lives.

My absolute favorite finding in the whole book is the life-prolonging effects of Spanish ham and other nitrated meats. I can't swear it's true, but I want to believe it.

That's your emotion getting in the way.

Right. Italians and Spaniards live a long life because they eat salami. I want to believe that. That would be a dream finding and there's some evidence. I'm sure some day I'll come upon contradictions, but I'm going with it for now. Actually, the truth is the things we do as individuals are important but they really pale in comparison to the social efforts we make on longevity, which are improving public health initiatives and literacy. Both of these things are such powerful prolongers of life. I think the other factor, which we haven't done a super job with, is sociability. A lot of the world's longest-living people live in places where society is very, very social and people can stay active and in social networks deep into old age.

That's more important than antioxidants?

I don't know, I'm not a scientist. But looking over all the places where longevity is more common, sociability is a telling characteristic. Antioxidants might be very promising, but this is the cycle of all promises of anti-aging -- hype and debunking, hype, debunking. But we do know what the sure things are. Public health, sociability and literacy.

You created a list of how aging works in general, when the body breaks down, and you begin at the age of 30. Why so young?

Thirty is when some things in the body start changing. You can see this with professional athletes. There is a winnowing out at key ages.

How old are you?

I'm 52.

Where does that put you in this continuum of young to old?

I'm still young enough to deny a lot of things about old age. When I do look in the mirror I am shocked that I don't look 15 years younger. But working on the book did make me pay attention to the ticks and tocks quite intensely. Now when I walk down the street I really do see a different unfolding of the people around me -- about their ages. Actually, working on the book has confused me a little bit about how old I am. Once you start seeing it, you start having affinities with people at every age.

We have this ideal of aging gracefully. Your mother is in the book and she is a delightful representation of this ideal. What can you learn from your mother?

Well, my mom is on the lucky side of the dependency divide. She took care of my father, but he was ill and dependent for 16 years after a long and brilliant and vital career. She was his primary caregiver. She stayed upbeat, found purpose in his care and then when he died, she embraced life as fully as she could. When she was out with her friends in Chicago, she would say, "Look at us, aren't we terrific? We're in our 80s and we're still going." That's a very wonderful woman to have as your mother.

How is she doing now?

She's doing great. She's nearly 84 and she's getting on a plane to Italy tomorrow.

When I use the word "mystery" I'm referring to two kinds of mystery: one micro, one macro. The micro level is what guns do to human bodies. Most people have thankfully been spared that type of knowledge. Soldiers, police and criminals are the only social groups with a high likelihood of committing or enduring gun violence. For the rest of us it's an abstraction represented dryly in news reports ("So-and-so was shot three times in the chest by an unknown assailant") or stylized via popular culture. YouTube has made images [Warning: graphic link] of actual, unvarnished gun violence more accessible, but what you see on that site is still but the tip of the representational iceberg. WikiLeaks notwithstanding, the vast majority of gun injuries and deaths -- on the battlefield, on the street or in the home -- aren't visually represented anywhere except in government files (sometimes not even there). Everyone understands the gist of what it means to shoot someone or get shot, but Americans are spared the particulars -- and that's how we seem to like it.

On the macro level, guns have been framed in such a way that we tend to think of them only as devices that one individual might use against another. They are that. But they're also more than that. Guns are, in no particular order, inventions, mass-produced products, tools of global politics and symbols of national pride. It is possible to go from cradle to grave in America without ever understanding any of that. And that's why C.J. Chivers' book "The Gun" is so valuable. Ostensibly a history of automatic weapons -- and a very good one -- it's also an engrossing yet plainspoken exploration of what guns are and what they do. It truly does approach the subject from the inside-out, explaining, with equal lucidity, how an automatic rifle discharges one bullet and loads another; the psychological effect that weapons have on the individuals that carry them and the nations that create and distribute them, and the economic and political impact that a well-designed weapon can have upon the world at large.

More than anything else, though, "The Gun" describes what bullets do to flesh. The author's own descriptions tend to be exact yet detached, readable but never exploitative, using language not markedly different from that which Chivers employs to visualize the layout of a rifle assembly line or the clockwork details of a Gatling gun ammo feed. Other accounts of violence in "The Gun," however, are drawn from historical records, mostly firsthand reports by military officers testing new weapons against live targets. These descriptions are charged with emotion: rage, terror, astonishment. Taken together, Chivers' dry descriptions and his astutely chosen historical passages clear away whatever residual fog might be hovering around the American reader's imagination, and show the machine gun, and the gun generally, for what it is, in all its multifaceted complexity.

Chivers is a former Marine infantry officer who later became a New York Times correspondent, and was part of a team that won a 2009 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan. I'd imagine that this blend of insider and outsider sensibilities is part of the reason why "The Gun" manages to be consistently fascinating without devolving into adolescent gun fetishism, moralistic finger-wagging or tedious info-dumping. Thoroughly researched and sensibly organized, the book is a hybrid of war reportage, sociological analysis, kinetic technical writing, and historical quotations that treat the machine gun not just as a milestone in homicide technology, but an evolutionary (or de-evolutionary) signpost, a weapon as significant as the club, the sword, the bow-and-arrow and gunpowder itself. Simply put, the machine gun placed a nearly divine death-dealing power in the hands of lone soldiers, giving one rifleman the killing power of a platoon -- and bestowing the same dark gift on terrorists, guerrilla fighters, bank robbers and maniacs that think "The Terminator" is a how-to film.

"The arm in question," wrote Richard Gatling, the Gatling gun inventor, in a letter to President Abraham Lincoln in February 1864, "is an invention of no ordinary character."

"As Gatling posted his letter," Chivers writes, "war had reached its bloodiest form yet. The Industrial Revolution and the American zest for capitalism were proving to be incubators for weapons development, and the soldiers of the time faced firearms and artillery that were becoming more powerful and more precise. Ordered into battle at close ranges, in solid-colored uniforms and in dense formations, they were easy marks at short distances, and suffered miserably from bullet and shrapnel injuries, as well as from diseases stalking both armies' filthy camps … Accounts of the carnage were accumulating. More than 50,000 casualties at Gettysburg, nearly 35,000 at Chickamauga, another 30,000 at Chancellorsville." With po-faced idealism that seems absurd in retrospect, Gatling "offered to help end the bloodletting through more efficient slaughter. He hoped that President Lincoln would see that his weapon -- 'very simple in its construction, strong and durable and can be used effectively by men of ordinary intelligence' -- was "providential, to be used as a means in crushing the rebellion."

Unfortunately for Gatling, his new gun didn't get much play during the U.S. Civil War. By the time the Union army placed its first orders, the conflict was already winding down. But the gun took its turn in the spotlight soon enough. And like the monster in "Frankenstein" -- a tale of hubris that Chivers' book sometimes evokes -- the machine gun slowly but surely turned on its creator, an ironic turn of events that Chivers chronicles in vivid detail and gallows humor. "This is not an account solely of a weapon's ubiquity on the battlefield," Chivers writes of the AK-47, putatively the brightest star in this book's homicidal firmament. "Nor is it a treatment of the AK-47 only for the sake of examining the AK-47 … These weapons occupy a place in history beyond the questions of when, where and how they have been manufactured and used … The journey through this history is populated by geniuses and fools, ruthless villains and naïve idealists, self-promoting salesmen and incorrigible profiteers, a pantheon of killers of all stripes and, now and then, people who wanted the killing to stop."

When Chivers' history enters the era of the multi-barreled, hand-cranked Gatling and its more advanced imitators, including the Gardner -- roughly 1865 through the early 1900s -- the machine gun is a lethal indulgence. It was so pricey that only industrialized countries could afford to buy large numbers of them. It was also prone to malfunction, thanks mainly to the hellish heat generated by the continual ignition of all that gunpowder, which could warp and even melt parts of the gun. And on top of that, early versions of the machine gun weighed hundreds of pounds, which meant generals had to decide if the battlefield advantages a machine gun conferred were worth the hassle of lugging it through war zones. Despite these drawbacks, however, the earliest version of the machine gun had great success as a colonial "pacification" tool, beloved by European powers looking to crack down on "savage" uprisings in occupied African nations. Before its invention, a few dozen white riflemen with pith helmets would have regarded a thousand Zulu on a nearby ridge as a cue to start writing up their wills. After the machine gun, that same sight led to a math problem: If we have X number of guns firing Y number of bullets per minute, how long before we break for lunch?

Strategists didn't start to see the potential offensive applications of the machine gun until the turn of the century, after witnessing a few wars fought between industrial powers (such as Russia and Japan) that were somewhat more evenly matched. But as the machine gun evolved and became lighter and more reliable (thanks to more sophisticated shell casings and the displacement of iron by lighter, tougher steel) it became less an imperial indulgence than a standard item in the modern army's tool kit. The big guns were miniature cannons, the equivalent of having a whole platoon of tireless robots firing simultaneously in the same direction. The smaller machine gun, or submachine gun, was a glorified sidearm, deadlier than a pistol but more useful at medium distances (the distances at which most early 20th century wars were fought) than a single-action rifle.

And it's here that the weapon's history took a curious (and for Western powers, unfortunate) turn: Now that pretty much anyone with killing on the brain could obtain, maintain, carry and use a machine gun, wholesale slaughter became democratized. And the wonderful, horrible thing about democracy is, everybody gets a vote. As Chivers documents in nearly every section of this book, the machine gun -- a noun encompassing weapons as diverse as the Gatling, the Gardner, the Thompson and the AK-47 -- could transform an ordinary man into Zeus hurling thunderbolts. This was true whether the triggerman was a U.S. Marine, a German storm trooper, a Depression-era Chicago gangster, an Algerian insurgent, a Cuban rebel, a Viet Cong warrior or a Miami coke dealer. The age of the one-man army -- or, at the very least, the one-man platoon -- had arrived, and it wasn't going away.

But this power fantasy had a flip side. The machine gun -- like the grenade, the flamethrower, the fighter plane and the laser-guided bomb and other instruments of mass death -- made individual soldiers even more pawnlike than they'd been in the pre-machine gun age. This is the rhetorical through-line of Chivers' book -- the notion that when the machine gun came along, the same thing happened in war that was happening throughout civilization during the machine age. Individual willpower and resourcefulness increasingly took a back seat to state muscle and industrial might.

The most dramatic illustration of this principle can be found in lengthy section on the development of the AK-47 -- at once the fuzziest and most compelling part of "The Gun," thanks to inventor Mikhail Kalashnikov's varied and contradictory life stories and the former Soviet Union's mania for secrecy. Although Kalashnikov was the assault rifle's primary creator, it was literally designed by committee -- a committee of millions of Communist workers struggling to build a mighty economy and an even mightier war machine. It wasn't the best rifle ever made, far from it. But it was light, reliable and cheap to produce, a murderous miracle that could only have been devised in the land of Stalin, with his purges, expropriations, five-year plans, ostentatious lionizing of the nameless worker, and mandatory worship of all things lethal and shiny. The AK-47, Chivers writes, expressed the personality and preoccupations of the post-World War II USSR in much the same way that the Gatling epitomized the war-frazzled determination of United States after the Civil War, and the MP-18 captured the rapacious life force of Germany circa 1915, when that nation's army perfected the idea of "shock troops who, before the war's end, would master the tactics of pinpoint attacks and breaches of front lines." And the U.S.-manufactured, jam-prone M-16 rifle -- which was rushed into production partly because the country was embarrassed by the ubiquity of the AK-47 and desperately wanted to create a "Free World" equivalent -- expressed the arrogance, obtuseness and misplaced faith in technological wizardry that doomed the overall war effort.

Chivers draws links between machines and their cultures very convincingly. The breadth and depth of his strategy is as compelling as it is educational. His book treats guns not just as tactical devices, technological marvels and instruments of death and terror, but as psychological snapshots of the nations that produced them -- and monuments to a bloodthirsty, ingenious race that has spent centuries years fighting over land, money and God, and won't stop any time soon. His approach goes so far beyond the "Guns are scary/guns are awesome" approach that after you've finished the book, it's hard to reenter the pandering that passes for discourse without feeling disgust. Like a judicious and coolheaded marksman, "The Gun" hits its target again and again.

But witchcraft in Africa is no comical curiosity, as Canadian journalist Karen Palmer eloquently demonstrates in her new book, "Spellbound: Inside West Africa's Witch Camps." Palmer who first learned about the camps from a human rights report, decided to visit one while on a six-month fellowship in Ghana in 2007. The makeshift settlements are populated by accused witches, mostly women, exiled from their home villages.

Essentially, these women are internal refugees, fleeing not ethnic or religious persecution but allegations of supernatural crimes, their guilt substantiated by dreams and the ritual sacrifice of guinea hens. The camps aren't small, either. At Gambaga, the town Palmer moved to when she decided to dedicate a couple of years to the subject, there are more than 3,000 accused witches living in unenviable conditions. The residents aren't prisoners, exactly, but they can't go home. Unless they can convince their former neighbors that they've given up cannibalizing other people's souls in the spirit world or flying through the night in the form of a fireballs (a common practice of Ghanaian witches), they're likely to be beaten or stoned to death if they return.

"Spellbound" takes the form of a personal narrative because much of Palmer's story is about how difficult it was to find out what's going on in Ghana. It's considered improper to speak frankly about witchcraft, so her questions prompted a lot of evasive and indirect answers. The educated Ghanaians she met told her they didn't believe in black magic, but later turned out to have hired sorcerers (just in case) or bought juju charms or attributed a relative's illness to evil spells. Even the simplest of communications could be challenging: The poor rural people she interviewed spoke a host of local dialects, so she had to rely on a shifting cast of translators, each of whom becomes a character in his own right.

Above all, Palmer encountered a profound cultural gulf when it came to establishing the facts according to the exacting standards of a Western journalist. "Spellbound" opens with a blood-curdling story of one woman's witchcraft trial, and only later reveals that Palmer spent countless hours talking to dozens of people in order to reconstruct that simple narrative. She reproduces a partial transcript of one of those conversations as it meanders, unmoored, through a fog of undefined incidents, actors, locations and times. Who accused her? "They." Who are "they"? "The family." Her sources describe two different accusations as if they occurred at once. Relationships are ambiguous. A woman with five daughters might sometimes be described as childless ("Oh, we don't count daughters," her translator told her, "cheerfully"). Another woman might refer to the children of her husband's co-wives as her own. And everywhere, the taboo about discussing magic must be negotiated. "Instead of speaking clearly about witches and victims," she writes, "people would speak guardedly, and cryptically, of cattle, sheep, riverbeds, snakes or insects."

Then there was the "creepy feeling" of Gambaga and many of the other places Palmer visited and expertly invokes: the "sheets of heat lightning" on oppressively rainless nights, illuminating, in eerie silence, the "twisting leaves" and "underbellies of swooping bats" with a "lilac" light. Or the oracular shrine she visits in the remote region of Tongo — a landscape of precariously balanced stacked rock formations — where the skulls of donkeys have been jammed into every crevice, "arranged so their empty eye sockets stared out at passersby." (Palmer didn't actually enter the shrine, since anyone who does so must strip to the waist, and she didn't want to embarrass her translator, a Christian. He, however, did go in.)

Profoundly disorienting as all of this must have been, and despite a considerable amount of willingness on her own part, Palmer never became a believer herself. What she saw when she looked at Ghana's witch camps was the result of a destabilized tribal society on the lookout for scapegoats. "In an African setting," one of her guides tells her, "any mishap — anything that happens — should have a cause." Illness, natural disasters, accidents — all of these are likely to be blamed on a village's most vulnerable members: Women past childbearing age without sufficiently influential male relatives. Other targets include women with abrasive and uppity personalities, or "tall poppies"; one accused witch Palmer interviewed had parlayed her good business sense into a modest fortune that aroused the jealousy of other small-time merchants. When she became a moneylender and made herself disagreeable by trying to collect from her debtors, her fate was sealed.

The witch hunts that racked Europe from the 15th to the 17th centuries followed the same pattern: Accusations arising from local quarrels and rivalries led to panics that opportunistic religious leaders then capitalized upon. (Contrary to popular belief, the church didn't instigate witch hunts so much as take advantage of them.) The regional chief at Gambaga has the reputation of being able to control witches; that's why the women sought sanctuary in his territory, where they would not be regarded as a threat. In exchange for his protection, he gets to rent out their labor and charges their families for room, board and purification rituals. Other witch doctors make a good living by detecting witches and selling counterspells. Naturally, it's in the best interests of these men that witchcraft accusations continue.

Even Palmer seems ambivalent. Although the women from one camp she visits subsist entirely on grain swept up from the dust of the marketplace after the sellers have packed up and left, others get humanitarian aid and may even do better in the camp than they would at home. So abject is the position of women in traditional Ghanaian society — where they are treated like chattel — that one of the few successfully repatriated witches Palmer reports on looked much thinner, older and sicker after being reunited with her family. Unfortunately, a bright scheme to make the camps economically independent foundered when the goods they manufactured couldn't be sold. Turns out no one wants to buy products made by witches.

Reading "Spellbound" doesn't make the reports of African witch scares sound any less bizarre — a man's soul trapped in a cockroach or a pair of adulterous lovers becoming permanently locked together in intercourse will never be the stuff of mundane morning newspaper fare. But Palmer does construct an understandable context for all this supernatural weirdness, as well as a chastening vision of its all too human costs.

Now Simon LeVay, a former Harvard neuroscientist, has written, "Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Orientation," a comprehensive, engaging and occasionally quite funny look at the current state of the research on the topic. LeVay is one of the leading authorities in the field: Back in 1991, he discovered that INAH3, a structure in the hypothalamus of the brain that helps to regulate sexual behavior, tended to be smaller in gay men than in straight men. It was a watershed moment in our understanding of sexual orientation (the study was published at the height of the AIDS epidemic, when the disease was widely regarded in religious circles as divine punishment for the sin of being gay) and the first scientific finding to support the idea that gayness might be more than just a lifestyle.

Salon spoke with LeVay over the phone from his home in West Hollywood about sexuality and the developing brain, gay sheep, and how science can help prevent anti-gay bullying.

Why do you think this debate is so important?

The fact is, a lot of anti-gay attitudes have been tied to the notion that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice. The biology tends to run against that, plus it's just absurd, because if it were a choice, people would remember making it -- and they don't. When people are talking about a lifestyle choice, well, of course it is a choice in the sense that people choose to make what they want out of these feelings of sexual attraction that they have. There are plenty of gay people who've gotten heterosexually married and had kids. Even Oscar Wilde did that. There are also plenty of straight people who engage in gay sex under certain circumstances.

But I don't think anyone chooses to experience the underlying attractions. At that level, I think the biology really argues against the point of view that the Christian right has presented, of homosexuality as being nothing more than straight people saying to themselves, "Oh, I think I'll try that gay thing this weekend." That's the sort of level that they sometimes want to reduce us to.

You devote a section of the book to sexual orientation in other species. Why is that important to our understanding of it on a human level?

The most famous example are these so-called gay sheep. There was a group of sheep breeders in Idaho who couldn't breed some of their prize rams. They put them together with the females and they just wouldn't perform. So they took the rams to an animal psychologist who studied them for about a year and said, "Look, you've got gay sheep here." It seems that about 5 percent of rams have that preference.

Chuck Roselli and his colleagues at Oregon Health Sciences University looked at their brains and found something very similar to what I found in my study. The structure in this part of the hypothalamus, which actually has a different name in sheep, is also smaller in these male-oriented homosexual sheep than in the female-oriented sheep. That was a confirmation of my work in the sense that it got away from the whole disease angle. I had to collect brain samples from gay and straight men, and at that time most of the gay men had died of AIDS. So some people thought it was a disease that was affecting this part of the brain, rather than sexual orientation. The fact that these sheep were completely healthy gets very much away from that kind of interpretation.

Does naturally occurring homosexuality happen elsewhere in the animal world, in the wild?

Much more common are animals that are to some degree bisexual. They will, on some occasions, mate with same sex partners and, on other occasions, other-sex partners. For example, in bonobos, our oversexed primate relatives, you see all kinds of sexual behavior depending on social circumstances. Animals use sex for purposes beyond reproduction: for forming alliances, swapping sex for material things like food and so forth. And you see same-sex pairing in many bird species.

In breeding colonies of seagull species where there's an excess of females, you'll have female/female mating. It's not really the case that you've got individual animals that have a predisposition to be homosexual or heterosexual. It's a tricky thing to actually find what we call "homosexuality" in the wild, because you really have to follow animals for long periods of time. They're all having sex with each other, but you've got to figure out which of them actually prefer doing that.

Yeah, and you can't exactly ask them

(Laughs) Exactly. Humans seem to be sort of unusual in that many of us are strongly predisposed to be sexually attracted to either males or females.

Why is that?

Well, we don't know, but I think the answer will emerge from the study of brain development.

You point out that even though the research is more and more support of the idea that gays and lesbians are born gays and lesbians, that they should be accepted even if it were a choice. Which I think is a really good distinction to make, because the drawback to the biological argument is that it can start to sound apologetic in a way.

Yes, it can sound apologetic, and one can also say, "Oh, what about bisexuals? Maybe they're not entitled to protection because they do have a choice." Or maybe sexual orientation is more fluid in women than in men, so, do we give more rights to men? It starts to get a little ridiculous if you really parse it out in detail.

One of the groups that I'm very popular with is PFLAG, because they have traditionally borne the "blame" for their kids being gay. So they see my biological line as getting them off the hook, in a sense. I usually say to them, well, in the 10 years or so until we all realize how cool it is to be gay, you'll be changing your tune, saying "Oh, I made my kid gay by reading him a chapter from 'Great Gays in History' every night or something like that." I really think that there are plenty of reasons why gay people should be welcomed in the world. Parents should be blessed to have gay kids.

Given that gay people don't reproduce in nearly the same numbers as straight people, how do gay genes survive?

The usual idea is that a gene predisposing some individuals to homosexuality might promote the reproductive success of others, and the two effects might balance out. It might be that a gene predisposing a man to be gay might make a woman even more attracted to men than she otherwise would be, so that she would engage in more heterosexual sex and thus become pregnant more often. There are a couple of studies reporting that women who have gay male relatives (and who may therefore carry the same "gay gene") do indeed have more children than women without any gay male relatives. The answer will remain speculative, however, until the actual genes have been identified and their mode of action worked out.

The idea that birth order affects sexual orientation in males on a biological level, and that gay men are more likely to have older brothers, is a relatively new one within this field. How do we know that it's not just a social effect?

At first I tended to think it was social, because there have been all these studies on the influence of birth order on mental traits. But that really does not seem to be the case at this point, based primarily on a study [by Tony Bogaert] looking at boys who were adopted out of their birth family. It seems to be the actual birth order of the biological family that matters, not the actual experience of growing up with or without an older brother.

The mother generates some sort of antibodies against the initial male fetus, which interact with the developing brain of later pregnancies with male fetuses, in such a way as to make that fetus more likely to be gay later on. Researchers think that this "older brother" effect accounts for up to about a quarter of the total causation of homosexuality. They are in the process of actually pinning down the biological mechanism involved, so maybe in a year or two we'll have some more direct evidence.

The concept of gender nonconformity comes up in the book a lot: that many people who are gay tend to have traits that are typically associated with the opposite sex. How is this explained in biology?

You have to be really careful, because this is definitely an area of stereotyping, calling a gay man queeny, or lesbians butch. But it does seem that there's a kernel of truth to the idea that being gay or lesbian is not an isolated trait, but part of a package of gendered traits that go together. And what I think is behind that is that during fetal life, the brain is differentiating in a more masculine direction or a more feminine direction under the influence of sex hormones circulating in the fetus's body, mostly testosterone. So it produces people who are not just different from the mainstream in terms of who they want to have sex with, but also in many other aspects. You see that, for example, in that gays and lesbians tend to be overrepresented in certain occupations. And again, you're very much near a stereotype. If people think I'm trying to say that every gay man should be a male nurse or something, and every lesbian should be a professional golfer, then no, that's completely ridiculous.

Issues of bullying and the struggles of growing up gay are kind of center stage right now, with the recent rash of suicides and things like Dan Savage's It Gets Better project. How do you think the work in this field is going to play a role in avoiding these sorts of tragedies?

First of all, yes, it's just horrible what has happened to these kids. When you see these boys and realize what a normal cross section of teenagers they are, it's pretty horrifying. But the way people think about gay people right now, in comparison with a generation ago, the differences are spectacular. Happy, out, gay kids are living like normal teenagers in a way that was not possible a short while ago.

But these kids who are gender-nonconformist at 7, 8, 9 years old, do provoke a tremendous amount of bullying. One thing that this research says is that you have to go to earlier ages and think about what the experience is like for children. The biology points us in a direction of recognizing these children as "born gay" with an entitlement to respect for that difference, just in exactly the same way that a racial group should be entitled to that kind of respect and protection.

But is that problematic in its own way, since we don't really know before puberty whether or not someone is gay or straight, and especially since people with these nonconformist gender traits often ultimately turn out straight? Is there a danger in singling them out for something they won't even realize until much later?

I think gender-nonconformist children should be protected and respected for what they are, not what they may become in the future. Most experts believe that the important thing is to support the child as he or she is. So my advice -- and I'm in no way an expert in this field -- would be for parents to accept their child's gender-nonconformity, and to point out that a grown man or woman can be anything from a ballet-dancer to a marine, and can be in relationships with men or women or both, but not to celebrate "our gay son" or whatever. Parents also do well to point out how mean people sometimes can be, and how the child can take steps to minimize the hurt.

There's a common fear that if a gay gene could be isolated, then it could be eliminated. Is that something that's feasible?

It's not feasible right now, because no gay gene has been identified. We know that genes play a role, but we don't know which genes they are. Now, if it should be found that there is a gene or a small number of genes, each of which has a major effect on sexual orientation, then yes, you could certainly imagine that at some point in the future it might be possible to, say, if you had a bunch of embryos, choose one that was predisposed to have the sexual orientation that you wanted it to have. For most people, I suspect, that would be straight.

This is not true just for sexual orientation, but for our entire makeup as human beings. A lot of this is going to eventually come down to a genetic menu that people might be able to pick and choose from, thanks to the Human Genome Project. It's a major ethical dilemma that we are going to have to face in the next decade.