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The latest releases

"What Was Asked of Us: An Oral History of the Iraq War by the Soldiers Who Fought It," by Trish Wood (Back Bay/Little, Brown). Wood, a Canadian investigative reporter, interviewed 29 American veterans of the Iraq war. The men and women came from different personal and ideological backgrounds, but their descriptions of their experience all display a sense of duty and courage in the face of war's violence.

"Ooga-booga," by Frederick Seidel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The poems in Seidel's 14th book, dealing with such subjects as sexual prowess and the Bush administration, are "as beguiling and magisterial as anything the septuagenarian jet-setter has written," Joel Brouwer, the reviewer for The New York Times, said.

"What Paul Meant," by Garry Wills (Penguin). Wills turns the standard reading of early Christianity on its head by arguing that Paul, more than the four canonical Gospels, should be recognized as the most reliable guide to Jesus' teachings. He suggests that the Roman hierarchy in the Middle Ages denied the egalitarianism of Jesus' and Paul's intentions.

"Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York," by Adam Gopnik (Vintage). Gopnik, a staff writer for The New Yorker, left Paris with his wife and children in late 2000 for the upper-middle-class Manhattan of play dates and private schools. He describes that world in these essays: "In the end, ordinary life, sheltered from the abysmal winds of History, is what we all hope to preserve as long as the universe will allow."

"Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture," by Michael Kammen (Vintage). This well-researched study of "the nature, diversity and persistence of major disputes generated by art" since the 1830s raises questions about the expectations of art in a democratic society. Kammen, a professor of American history and culture at Cornell University, looks at public controversies over war memorials (from the Washington Monument to Maya Lin's commemoration of the Vietnam War) and public decency (from Thomas Eakins to Robert Mapplethorpe).

"Brave Enemies," by Robert Morgan (Shannon Ravenel/Algonquin). During the last year of the American Revolution, this novel's 16-year-old heroine murders the stepfather who raped her and takes to the western North Carolina road dressed as a boy. She falls in with a traveling preacher who discovers her true sex, marries her and is promptly forced into the British cavalry. They meet again at the site of an important clash in January 1781.

"Madhouse: A Tragic Tale of Megalomania and Modern Medicine," by Andrew Scull (Yale University). Henry Cotton, the director of Trenton State Hospital from 1907 to 1930, had a bizarre theory of insanity: that it was caused by bacterial infection. Soon he was removing not only his patients' teeth and tonsils but also their stomachs and colons. Although the death rate passed 30 percent, Cotton was protected by a powerful mentor who suppressed the evidence against him.

"Dangerous Nation," by Robert Kagan (Vintage). Americans were never the innocents they imagined themselves, particularly in matters of foreign policy, according to Kagan, a trans-Atlantic fellow of the German Marshall Fund. In the first of two volumes on the United States as an international power, Kagan argues that from the first days of the Republic, America was a player on the world scene, and that domestic and foreign concerns were always intertwined.