Words that Work, by Frank Luntz (Hyperion, £9.99)
The US pollster famous for his linguistic advice to the Republican party here outlines what does not deserve to be called his philosophy of language, in a book that he hoped to call Killer Words until, for some reason, that title focus-grouped badly. Luntz recounts some of his finest moments - replacing "estate tax" with "death tax" - but is oddly coy about his other successes in the realm of unspeak, particularly his memo advising the administration to keep talking about "climate change" instead of "global warming", because the former sounds less frightening. Of that no mention is made, but we do get a chapter about words that work in personal life, containing the advice that you should lie about a family illness or job interview in order to be allowed to board a plane when you're late. As this shows, Luntz is glibly amoral, worrying only about whether language has the right effect, not whether it's true. As a whole, the book retreads the author's greatest hits, while implicitly blaming the Republicans' 2006 electoral meltdown on the fact that they haven't hired him recently. As a book about political language, it's self-contradictory, sloppily researched and egregious; even as an extended job application, it's a bit whiny.
Survival of the Sickest, by Dr Sharon Moalem with Jonathan Prince (HarperCollins, £16.99)
Oh good, another "maverick" - this time, "A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease". Luckily, it's a tart, funny and fascinating confection about emerging evolutionary understanding of illness. Why, for example, is a disease such as haemochromatosis (which causes the the body to absorb too much iron) still in our gene pool? Perhaps because, as it also boosts the immune system, it helped Europeans to survive the plague. Meanwhile, diabetes might originally have been an adaptation to severe cold, one of the clues to which idea is the existence of a remarkable frog that freezes solid during the winter, becoming, as the authors put it pertly, a "frogsicle". There are also illuminating discussions of why giving birth in water is probably a good idea; the field of "epigenetics", or how bits of your genome can be turned on and off by environmental factors; and the alarming phenomenon of "host manipulation", in which parasites somehow manage to change the behaviour of doomed host spiders or ants to the parasites' advantage. "Think about it - you're riding in an ant and you need to get into a sheep; what to do?" What indeed?
Democracy: The Long Revolution, eds David Powell & Tom Hickey (Continuum, £14.99)
Democracy - what is it good for? Have we got it, or at least some of it? If so, how did we get it? This punchy collection of essays addresses the questions from various historical angles, in order to correct what the editors' introduction presents as a lacuna in modern discourse: "While Blair and Brown invoke the history of 'Britishness', and the importance of the subject in the curriculum, both tend to minimise their references to the past and to the role that the socialist movement has played in the pursuit of democracy." In response we have Tony Benn, histories of labourism, women's emancipation, the Putney debates and the Chartists, and a magnificent, melancholy account by Colin Richmond of how Anglo-Saxon free men gradually became unfree as "the middle ages were hijacked into modernity".