AMERICAN scholar Ronald Takaki joins the debate about the devastating end to the Pacific War in 1945 in Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Bomb (Little Brown $200).
In a spare 150-page analysis, Takaki casts a critical eye over the arguments that the bomb was dropped to hasten the end of the war and the view that it started the beginning of the Cold War before drawing his own conclusions via the personal letters, diaries and confidential military reports of key personnel at the time.
In Cults In Our Midst, Margaret Thaler Singer together with Janja Lalich (Jossey-Bass $250) examines the power of two types of groups in the United States; those which expose recruits to psychological and social persuasion to gain long-term control over them; and those commercially-sold large group awareness training programmes that use similar persuasion processes but don't want followers to stay rigidly attached - just to take more of their courses.
The book estimates that in the past 20 years, 20 million people in the US have joined cults and that there are 3,000 to 5,000 groups actively seeking members today.
Singer, a clinical psychologist who has counselled and interviewed thousands of members and former members of cults, looks at how these groups work, how they manage to keep hold over people and what can be done to help someone to break free.
Joining the Mafia, Triads and Yakusa in the giant league of crime are the Yardies, Jamaica's criminal gangs who have established themselves through exercising the requisite menace in the United States as top crack cocaine drug dealers. In Ruthless (Warner $136), Geoff Small examines the rise to power of the Yardies - or posses as they are also known - and their influence on the international criminal circuit. Pictures included.