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Eco-primer

Stephen H. Schneider, winner of one of those $500,000 genius grants, has written a witty, informative and impassioned account of perils he sees in global warming and what to do about them.

But if a curious high-school halfback is tempted by the title "Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth's Climate" (National Geographic, $28), he may find himself blocked by a line of climatological reasoning and terms such as "ecology" and "anthropogenic," rarely heard on the football field.

Using plainer language, Schneider raises a broader problem than climate change.

"Can democracy survive complexity?" he asks. It seems clear to him that scientific judgments, reached as a consensus of career-long study, should overwhelm national rivalries and partisan politics when governments have great decisions to make.

Lincoln's tale

It's inevitable that a new book about the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 would seek out analogies between that remarkable event and the election of Barack Obama in 2008.

Fortunately for readers, author Bruce Chadwick doesn't overly dwell on this all-too-obvious theme in "Lincoln for President: An Unlikely Candidate, An Audacious Strategy, and The Victory No One Saw Coming" (Sourcebooks Inc., $24.99)

Chadwick, who lectures in American history at Rutgers University and author of nine previous history books, strives to show Lincoln was not simply the accidental, aw-shucks candidate depicted in many other writings.

The real Lincoln, the author suggests, helped engineer his victory over three stronger candidates from the outset, and has been largely overlooked.

Canadian prize

Linden MacIntyre, an investigative journalist who wrote a novel about sexual abuse by Catholic priests, has won one of Canada's most prestigious literary awards. MacIntyre won the Scotiabank Giller Prize for his book "The Bishop's Man."

The novel tells the story of a Roman Catholic priest tasked with stamping out sex-abuse scandals before they go public. The book is set in Antigonish, Nova Scotia.

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