A Long Way Gone begins this way:

I assume that Pauline Chen’s experience is quite typical of doctors. She began medical school dreaming of being a hero and of saving lives but had little idea of just how big a role death would play in her chosen profession. It did not take long for her to learn that death would be a regular occurrence and one for which she was largely unprepared. She found that her vocation, which is premised on caring for those who are ill, also systematically depersonalizes dying. Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality, another book I found on the New York Times list of bestsellers, represents her attempt to come to terms with this brutal truth of the medical profession.

Born on a Blue Day is the memoir of Daniel Tammet, a British autistic savant. The subject of a documentary entitled The Boy With The Incredible Brain (also broadcast under the title Brainman) Tammet has gained some notoriety and worldwide attention for his incredible feats of memory and mathematics.

“The Long Tail” is one of those buzz-phrases I have heard time and time again in the past couple of years. In my ongoing pursuits to catch up with books that have been sitting on the New York Times list of bestsellers and to better under the culture we live in, I decided to read the book that seems to do the best and most thorough job of explaining this phenomenon. Written by Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, The Long Tail seeks to show “why the future of business is selling less of more.” While Anderson did not coin the phrase, he is the man primarily responsible for popularizing it (and, I suppose, for turning it into a proper noun rather than simply a descriptive phrase).

I don’t envy the man who writes a book on prayer, for I can’t think of too many topics that have been written about more extensively than this. There are many spiritual classics dealing with the topic and surely an author must wonder if anything he writes can contribute to the discussion. New to the fray is Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference by Philip Yancey. A guaranteed bestseller, this book, by virtue of the topic and the author, is sure to sell tens or hundreds of thousands of copies. And so it was with some interest that I read this book, interested in learning what so many people would learn from Yancey.

There is a great deal of controversy surrounding global warming. Some insist that it is a terrifying and imminent concern that portends worldwide disaster. Others scoff at the notion, accusing those who spread such dire predictions of using global warming as part of a larger, sinister agenda. Al Gore considers global warming to be an inconvenient truth and a pending planetary emergency. In his political career he was an advocate of measures to deal with this and other environmental crises, and in his post-political career he has accelerated these warnings. An Inconvenient Truth, an immediate New York Times bestseller, and the film that was released at around the same time, are his attempt to take this message to the masses.

The first I remember of Anderson Cooper was as host of the short-lived reality program The Mole. Prior to The Mole he had apparently been a successful reporter for the Channel One and ABC networks, both as correspondent and news anchor. I knew nothing of this and thought he made a more than adequate host for what was surely one of the better shows to appears at the dawn of the reality craze. After 9/11 though, Cooper decided he had had enough of reality television and returned to the news, this time as a co-anchor of CNN’s Good Morning America. He has since begun anchoring his own program, Anderson Cooper 360. But what Cooper is best known for is for appearing in the world’s most troubled spots. He routinely reports from the scenes of disaster and devastation, both natural and man-made. Dispatches From The Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters and Survival is his memoir of his life and of the most difficult situations he has covered as a reporter. An immediate New York Times Bestseller, the response to this book proves that Anderson Cooper has become a much-loved and highly-respected journalist.

The decision that I would read Mayflower, a book that has made its way nearly to the top of the New York Times list of bestsellers, took only as long as was necessary for me to understand that it dealt with the Puritan pilgrims who arrived on the shores of American in 1620. Though the story of the arrival and early struggles of this group of immigrants is now the stuff of legend, I know surprisingly little about these people. Because this story has entered the realm of legend, it is difficult to know where reality ends and mere fantasy begins. Nathaniel Philbrick, who was awarded the National Book Award for his previous title, In the Heart of the Sea, believes that the oft-told tale of the first Thanksgiving, celebrated between the Pilgrims and the Indians, does not do justice to the history of Plymouth Colony.

Bart Ehrman is a highly-regarded New Testament scholar and chairs the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has both an M.Div. and Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary where he studied under Bruce Metzger. Much of Ehrman’s career has been dedicated to proving a rather unorthodox thesis: that history has been incorrect in suggesting that it was heretics such as Marcion who were responsible for tampering with the texts of the Bible. Rather, he suggests and attempts to prove, it was those who professed faith in Christ who sought to change the Scripture to force it to adapt to their beliefs. In the past decade he was written extensively, though the bulk of his work has been directed at the academy, as shown by such intimidating titles as The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament.

I elected to read Freakonomics as part of my ongoing effort to engage with books that have become fixtures on the New York Times list of bestsellers. This title has spent many weeks on that list and has sold millions of copies. This is a bit surprising for a book dealing with the decidedly unsexy discipline of economics. Still, the subtitle, “A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything” hints at a level of fun, interest and accessibility that might not be found in an economics textbook.