On the Death and Life of Languages, by Claude Hagège, translated by Jody Gladding (Yale, £14)
There are roughly 5,000 languages in the world today; half of them might have gone by the end of the century. That would be a great loss, argues this beautifully written book by an emiment French linguist, because each language has a "share of genius", "a precious trace of human talent", telling us something valuable about the human mind. Hagège delights in describing, for example, a native American language known as central Pomo, which has "a completely original conception of objects", and "five different verbs . . . to designate the act of sitting down".
Languages, as this properly meandering survey (civilly broken up with explanatory subheadings) shows, live by borrowing, and die for various reasons, sociopolitical and even economic. But field linguists can attempt to preserve endangered languages, and moribund ones can be revived, as with Cornish, Welsh and Hebrew, whose 19th-century champion Ben-Yehuda had the lovely motto: "Everything needs its lunatic." So Hagège makes his expert case for linguistic biodiversity, and against the swamping of everything by English. "I wager," he concludes gently, "that the wisest Anglophones would not . . . wish for a world with only one language." Il n'a pas tort.
Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life, by Douglas T Kenrick (Basic Books, £18.99)
Why shouldn't a university undergraduate wallpaper his room with "Playboy centerfolds"? Well, apart from the obvious, it will change his "adaptation level", and he won't consider other women so attractive (including his own girlfriend, in the unlikely event that he has one). On the other hand, women's "commitment level" to their partners goes down if they are shown pictures not of handsome men but of powerful men. Such is one result in this entertaining compilation of psychology experiments performed by the author and colleagues, spiced with some vivid scenes from Kenrick's New York childhood and roguish reminiscences from his oats-sowing years.
There is room to disagree on the notion of "subselves" (otherwise known as "modularity": how do all these people get into one person's head?), or the possibly disingenuously named idea of "deep rationality", which attempts to explain apparently selfless behaviour by appealing to, essentially, selfish genes. But Kenrick, unlike many popularising authors, displays a fine scientific modesty and generosity to the reader in pointing out where different explanations are possible. I particularly liked his suggestion to think of the mind not as a "blank slate" but as a "coloring book". I think mine's full of purple dinosaurs.
Pop Music, Pop Culture, by Chris Rojek (Polity, £16.99)
This book's conclusion is like a pop song that ends with an unexpected major chord. Having stomped through a thickety survey of theoretical cultural-studies approaches to pop music, one arrives here: "Pop can make a sunny day out of bleak midwinter and establish empathy between strangers." Nice.
Refreshingly, Rojek insists throughout that technology (wax cylinder, magnetic tape, electric guitar, drum machine, laptop) is central to the "sensuous labour" of pop music. He is good on paramusical minutiae – record contracts, PR, style subcultures – but shaky on music itself (calling a chord progression a "march tempo"). Radiohead's In Rainbows is offered as an example of new internet business models, but there is no hint of what it sounds like. Perhaps that would smack of "musicology", to which the author condescends in this otherwise useful overview. Meanwhile, I hereby launch my public campaign for the criminalisation of Chicago citation style. How much longer must we read absurd references such as "(Aristotle 2005)"?