The Men Who Stare at Goats, by Jon Ronson (Picador, £7.99)
Imagine the advantage in being able to think the enemy to death. So much cheaper and less messy. In the 1970s, US soldiers were trained to do just that. Psychological warfare wasn't an invention of the 20th century but, from the basic belief that the motivation behind George Bush's "war on terror" is a deep-seated paranoia, Ronson examines how crazy, harebrained schemes from the 1970s have come to be employed to quite horrific effect. And so, from a fairly genial search for a man who, it is believed, once stared a goat to death, Ronson's investigation of the use of the paranormal in US military strategy moves to Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo Bay, where the psychological and subliminal terror inflicted on prisoners is nothing short of nauseating. Ronson is a very funny writer but he knows when to be serious, and his book is a chilling account of torture being carried out with the willing cooperation of an elected government.
Big Bang, by Simon Singh (Harper Perennial, £8.99)
According to the Nobel laureate Isidor Rabi, physicists are all Peter Pans: "They never grow up and they keep their curiosity." For Simon Singh, this delayed development has resulted in "one of the greatest achievements of the human intellect and spirit" - the Big Bang model of the origin of the universe. Singh takes us on a mind-expanding journey through cosmology, from ancient myth to the Einsteinian revolution and beyond. One of the theory's founders, Georges Lemaître, described the development of the universe as "a display of fireworks that has just ended". On our "well-cooled cinder", all we can do is imagine "the vanished brilliance of the origins of the worlds". In 1992, the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite let us see that vanished brilliance and confirmed the theory, since renamed by Calvin and Hobbes "The Horrendous Space Kablooie". Singh's weighty but readable tome is a fitting tribute to cosmologists and their curiosity.
Ball of Fire, by Stefan Kanfer (Faber, £9.99)
This is the tense, successful life story of Lucille Ball, who learned the grim arts of comedy as a Hollywood starlet passing across a set to drop a single gag before exit, and who then transferred her skills, and her awkward partnership with her husband, the Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz, to television. The show that she helped to craft - I Love Lucy - became the basis of all situation comedies, with its live audience filming and interaction between the life of its stars and the plots (Lucille's pregnancy was scriptwritten as Lucy's). Kanfer did original research into early television's mix of improvisation and experience adapted from other pop entertainments, so his book is an essential addition to the so far short shelf on the history of programmes and their making; there are whole libraries on TV franchises and technicalities, but almost zilch on the Arnazes' production company, Desilu.
Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III, by Flora Fraser (John Murray, £9.99)
Of George III and his wife Queen Charlotte's 13 children, six were girls. And their royal father greeted the arrival of each with unfettered joy, it being well known that he "liked little girls best". Despite his happiness and interest, the care for each girl was quickly despatched to a redoubtable wet nurse, one Mrs Muttleberry, and the sisters remained in the background for the rest of their lives. Flora Fraser here attempts to put the girls back in the spotlight, and so recounts in exhaustive detail every courtship, affair, broken heart, marriage, difficult pregnancy, illness, headache and nervous complaint. That they suffered many personal tragedies is beyond doubt, but there can be no getting away from the fact that the princesses, averagely talented, averagely attractive, were throughout their lives so achingly bored that to document their lives with such fastidiousness leaves little room for excitement.
Gunpowder, by Jack Kelly (Atlantic, £8.99)
The chemistry of big bangs was invented in 10th-century China by alchemists searching, ironically, for the elixir of eternal life. Among the fiendish weapons they created was the "Bandit-Burning Vision-Confusing Magic Fire-Ball", whose very name scared the pants off their enemies. In Europe gunpowder was called the "devil's distillate", as it contained brimstone (sulphur). Ben Jonson cursed the inventor "who from the Divel's-Arse did Guns beget". But Kelly argues guns and gunpowder put "a new form of lethal power into the hands of commoners" (such as Guy Fawkes) and thus fuelled the rise of democracy. Samuel Colt certainly thought his multi-shot handgun was a boon to civil society. A gentleman "armed with my invention can keep a dozen ruffians at bay", he boasted. Without a trace of irony, his firm named its most lethal killing machine the Peacemaker. Kelly's theory is intriguing, but his otherwise excellent history doesn't quite produce the evidence.
Charlemagne's Tablecloth, by Nichola Fletcher (Phoenix, £8.99)
A history of feasts, set out in a short-chapter, tapas format so that you can nibble your way through four millennia of courses. I resisted at first (not Persian pilaff and medieval blancmange again) and then enjoyed it so much it became my book-with-lunch. The cook-author's all-venison banquet, with its dessert of hartshorn jelly and reindeer milk ice-cream, sounds wonderful, and as for those hot custards served at the 1465 enthronement of the Archbishop of York - anybody have a recipe? The best entries are less about food itself than its psychological power. In comparison with the vomit-provoking stress of a Native American potlatch, your average dinner party is a supper of brotherly love. Fletcher celebrates the plenty that a morsel represents to those who have nothing - Shackleton's expedition pigged it at Christmas on a couple of square inches of plum duff each.