FINAL EXAM: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality, by Pauline W. Chen. (Vintage, $13.95.) To doctors, who are in the business of saving lives, death represents failure. “I learned from many of my teachers and colleagues to suspend or suppress any shared human feelings for my dying patients,” Chen, a liver surgeon, writes. “These lessons in denial and depersonalization began as early as my first encounter with death in the gross anatomy dissection lab.” In these thoughtful, moving essays on the relationship between medical practice and the emotional events surrounding death, Chen draws on her 15 years of clinical experience to inform a discussion of the failings of medical education (and possible remedies) and to share stories about dying patients and their families.

GAME OF KINGS: A Year Among the Geeks, Oddballs, and Geniuses Who Make Up America’s Top High School Chess Team, by Michael Weinreb. (Gotham, $15.) Weinreb spent a year (2004-5) following the eight boys on the varsity chess team of Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn as they competed for a national championship. He describes the ferocious nerd-macho chess culture of his Eastern European/Hispanic/African-American subjects in what our reviewer, James Kaplan, called a “thrilling, vigorously reported, deeply empathic book” that “vibrates with the energy of the outer boroughs.”

THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM, by Matt Beynon Rees. (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin, $13.95.) The former Jerusalem bureau chief for Time magazine, Rees has set a mystery in the middle of a war zone. When a colleague is unjustly accused of collaborating in an Israeli assassination of a Palestinian leader, a history teacher at a United Nations school on the West Bank conducts his own search for the killer. “An astonishing first novel,” Marilyn Stasio wrote in the Book Review.

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Pauline W. Chen

THE SHAKESPEARE WARS: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups, by Ron Rosenbaum. (Random House, $18.) This “besotted, passionate new book,” as our reviewer, Walter Kirn, put it, probes the relationship between the early editions of Shakespeare’s plays and the later ones. Line by line, sometimes word by word, Rosenbaum, with the aid of a roster of scholars and directors, weighs the question of whether Shakespeare got it right the first time, and whether later cuts, additions and changes represent typesetters’ errors and actors’ flawed memories, or Shakespeare’s second thoughts. Colin McGinn, a distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, admits in the preface to SHAKESPEARE’S PHILOSOPHY: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays (Harper Perennial, $13.95) that he is no literary scholar. But his straightforward examination of “the philosophical ideas embedded” in six of the major plays — among them the possibility of knowledge, the nature of the self and the nature of evil — is provocative. McGinn makes a case for the influence of Montaigne, a skeptic whose work was being translated into English at the time the plays were written.

CHINA SHAKES THE WORLD: A Titan’s Rise and Troubled Future — and the Challenge for America, by James Kynge. (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin, $14.95.) Kynge, the former China bureau chief of The Financial Times, offers a nuanced, well-reported description of China’s rapid economic rise. He also points to China’s vulnerabilities, like pollution and corruption. Reed Hundt, a business consultant, sees China as “fertile ground for entrepreneurship” and its global success as rooted in “vigorous domestic competition.” Protectionism is not the answer to Chinese economic power, Hundt argues in IN CHINA’S SHADOW: The Crisis of American Entrepreneurship (Yale University, $15). Rather, he believes that Congress should make legal changes — including providing low-cost, high-quality education — to encourage Americans to innovate.

I KILLED: True Stories of the Road From America’s Top Comics, compiled by Ritch Shydner and Mark Schiff. (Three Rivers, $13.95.) For stand-up comedians, getting big laughs is known as killing; dying is getting none. These reminiscences evoke both experiences. While there are famous bylines here, the focus is on comics you haven’t heard of. John Leguizamo is not one of its contributors, but an account of his career can be found in PIMPS, HOS, PLAYA HATAS, AND ALL THE REST OF MY HOLLYWOOD FRIENDS: My Life (Ecco/Harper, $13.95). Fans of his one-man shows will recognize many of Leguizamo’s stories about a mischievous Latino kid growing up in Queens who “had other things on my mind. ... Like girls. And dodging my old man’s fists.”

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PATHFINDERS: A Global History of Exploration, by Felipe Fernández-Armesto. (Norton, $17.95.) This sweeping history of exploration, by a professor at Tufts, begins with the peopling of the world through migration and discovery and ends in the present, examining the way cultures have diverged and converged. Writing in the Book Review, Candice Millard praised “Pathfinders” as “a rich study of humankind’s restless spirit” and found it “brilliant and readable.”

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