12 New Books We Recommend This Week

DOOMED ROMANCE: Broken Hearts, Lost Souls, and Sexual Tumult in Nineteenth-Century America,by Christine Leigh Heyrman. (Knopf, $28.95.) This account of a love triangle that roiled the country’s burgeoning evangelical movement in the late 1820s is scholarship at its most entertaining and insightful, as Heyrman, mining smoldering letters by aspiring missionaries, chronicles the ambition, hypocrisy and sexism at the heart of a crusade. The book “may seem at first like a charming confection,” Caroline Fraser writes in her review. “It is that. But in Heyrman’s telling, it becomes far more, as she remorselessly dissects the fragile male selfhood at the heart of evangelical Protestantism and its ‘vexed relationship with ideals of manhood.’”

THIS IS HOW THEY TELL ME THE WORLD ENDS: The Cyberweapons Arms Race,by Nicole Perlroth. (Bloomsbury, $30.) Perlroth writes in the propulsive prose of a spy thriller to offer an intricately detailed, deeply reported — and frightening — account of the gray market for digital weapons and the worldwide cyberweapons arms race. “Deterring cyberattacks turns out to be much, much harder than deterring conventional ones,” Jonathan Tepperman writes in his review. “Despite all its offensive power, the United States, as one of the most wired nations on earth, is also more vulnerable to such attacks than many of its less-connected enemies.”

ZORRIE, by Laird Hunt. (Bloomsbury, $26.) This novel about a modest life in the rural Midwest serves as a luminous history of 20th-century America. Hunt renders the titular character’s resilience in hard times — and her fragile, often fleeting bonds with others — with ardent precision, detail by lean detail. “Hunt is not shy about his elegant ambitions with this small novel,” Alyson Hagy writes in her review. “What Hunt ultimately gives us is a pure and shining book, an America where community becomes a ‘symphony of souls,’ a sustenance greater than romance or material wealth for those wise enough to join in.”

FUNDAMENTALS: Ten Keys to Reality,by Frank Wilczek. (Penguin Press, $26.) Wilczek, a Nobel-winning physicist, writes with breathtaking economy and clarity about the forces that shape our physical world. His pleasure in his subject is palpable, whether writing about dark matter or the possibility that we might “terraform” a new planet. The book, Nell Freudenberger writes in her review, is filled with “the kind of question adults think they can answer until their children ask. How long until the Earth is swallowed by the sun? How does GPS work? How many thoughts can a person have in a lifetime? (Based on an average speech rate of two words per second, Wilczek estimates approximately a billion.) Although Wilczek’s voice here is endearingly humble, it’s clear that his mind was never like that of most kids piping up from the back seat.”

BUGSY SIEGEL: The Dark Side of the American Dream,by Michael Shnayerson. (Yale University, $26.) Making good use of memoirs and F.B.I. files, Shnayerson tells the story of a glamorous murderer who was once known as the “supreme gangster … the top man,” a mobster with matinee-idol looks, expensive haberdashery and an affable, honeyed manner. Shnayerson’s keen eye for detail “enlivens the traditional rise-and-fall narrative,” Jenna Weissman Joselit writes in her review; the book, she adds, is “written in a rat-a-tat style where money jingles and the American dream is in reach of ‘anyone with guts, good taste and a gun.’”

DEARLY: New Poems,by Margaret Atwood. (Ecco, $27.99.) Atwood, celebrated for her fiction, is also a prolific poet; the work in her 16th collection is concerned with ecology and with time — most interestingly, with how the present moment, “our too-brief history,” will look in the future. “Here we see Atwood at the height of her poetic powers: her imagery made tangible with sound,” Emilia Phillips writes, reviewing the book alongside two other volumes of poetry. “The more Atwood wields specifics, the more of the world she skewers with her fantastically sharp imagination.”