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The latest releases

"A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier," by Ishmael Beah. (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $12.) Beah was only 13 when, during a civil war in Sierra Leone, he was recruited into the army as a boy soldier. Given a rifle and plied with drugs, Beah embarked on a two-year killing spree. He was sent to a rehabilitation center by UNICEF fieldworkers and eventually wound up in the United States, where he graduated from Oberlin College. His autobiography offers "a vision of hell," William Boyd wrote in The New York Times Book Review, that "makes you wonder how anyone comes through such unrelenting ghastliness and horror with his humanity and sanity intact."

"Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster," by Dana Thomas. (Penguin, $15.) This witty social history describes how the production of luxury items has shifted "from small family businesses of beautifully handcrafted goods to global corporations selling to the middle market." Cheaper materials and outsourced labor mean that craftsmanship has waned as consumer demand has exploded.

The Collected Stories, by Leonard Michaels. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15.) "Larky, fitfully brilliant" as well as "profane," Leonard Michaels' stories "stand alongside those of his best Jewish contemporaries -- Grace Paley and Philip Roth," Mona Simpson wrote in The New York Times Book Review. This book includes stories from two earlier volumes, as well as the astonishing Nachman stories, about a California mathematician, written late in Michaels' life (he died at 70 in 2003) and collected here for the first time.

"Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World," by David Brion Davis. (Oxford University, $18.95.) Davis, an emeritus professor of history at Yale, has forced a rethinking of many fundamental issues of slavery. In this book, he follows the story of slavery through the Atlantic world, asking the big questions. "Inhuman Bondage" is "a tour de force of synthetic scholarship," New York Times reviewer, Ira Berlin, said. Davis "expertly summarizes the debates, bringing clarity to the contending arguments."

"Before," by Irini Spanidou. (Vintage, $13.95.) New York City in the 1970s, when SoHo was still a dangerous neighborhood, is the setting of Spanidou's third novel. She focuses on an aspiring writer married to a painter, a beautiful, well-to-do woman whose life spirals out of control.

"Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious," by Gerd Gigerenzer. (Penguin, $15.) In "Blink," Malcolm Gladwell drew on work by Gigerenzer, a German social psychologist, about the nature of intuitive thinking. Here Gigerenzer presents his own claims that what he calls gut feelings "are based on rules of thumb that enable us to act fast and with astounding accuracy."

"Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind," by Margalit Fox. (Simon & Schuster, $15.) Fox, a reporter for The New York Times and a trained linguist, accompanied a team of researchers to a remote Bedouin village in Israel where an indigenous sign language has developed. The book offers "an exhaustive, energetic and frequently elegant tour through the world of sign language and sign linguistics," Leah Hager Cohen wrote in The New York Times, and gives special attention to the question of how language is made in the mind.

"Tokyo Year Zero," by David Peace. (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, $14.95.) In the corrupt, chaotic nightmare of postwar Tokyo, Peace's protagonist, a detective troubled by his own secrets, is on the trail of a monstrous serial killer. Laos is the setting for Colin Cotterill's mystery series featuring Dr. Siri Paiboun, a septuagenarian coroner in Vientiane; the fourth book, "Anarchy and Old Dogs" (Soho, $12), takes place in 1977, and Siri and his friends discuss the discouraging state of their nation under the rule of the Pathet Lao with mordant wit. In another historical mystery, "Tug Of War" (Delta, $13), Barbara Cleverly sends her Scotland Yard detective, Joe Sandilands, to Reims, France, to determine the identity of a shell-shocked World War I veteran.

"F5: Devastation, Survival, and the Most Violent Tornado Outbreak of the Twentieth Century," by Mark Levine. (Miramax/Hyperion, $14.95.) This story of the devastating storm that struck Limestone County, Ala., on April 3, 1974, is "a work of reportage so artfully structured and emotionally moving that it looks pretty good next to 'In Cold Blood,' " Troy Patterson said in The New York Times Book Review.