Digitized by Peter J Bentley (Oxford, £16.99)
Computers are now so ubiquitous as to be disposable (eg a greetings card that plays music), but they still suck. Luckily, as Bentley's richly interesting survey of computer science shows, there are experts trying to improve life for the millions who use "software that is bloated and cluttered with so much complexity that it is too slow to be usable, and too complex to use without extensive training". (Tactfully, the author makes sure the word "Microsoft" appears nowhere near this description.) With cheerful geekiness and biographical vim, Bentley sketches the history of computing from Turing's second-world-war codebreaking, the invention of "software engineering" and the relational database, to the birth of the internet and the modern cutting edge of computer-assisted art, medical imaging, and evolution-inspired machine learning. It's salutary to be reminded how much modern tech was actually brainstormed in the 1950s and 60s: mice, windows, and even 3D virtual reality headsets. When I was small I thought everyone would be wearing them by now; instead we're all poking myopically at featureless black slabs. That's the future for you.
The Book of Mormon: A Biography by Paul C Gutjahr (Princeton, £16.95)
In 1823, a farmer named Joseph was allegedly visited by an angel informing him about a buried stack of gold plates. On the plates were allegedly engraved a new Christian testament about how one Biblical tribe voyaged to America. Joseph transcribed the plates from the hitherto-unknown language in which they were allegedly written, and so was born The Book of Mormon and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, protected in its early days by a "formidable militia". Now 4m copies of the Book are printed every year.
We learn here of the creative if not entirely successful efforts of Mormon archaeologists to find evidence for the alleged events of the book, and the history of the book's printings and translations. (For an Urdu version, some heroic designers spent four years hand-drawing a 20,000-character computer font.) Gutjahr, an English professor, sides with the "incredible" (sic) scholarship of Mormon-friendly writers against the nasty "sceptics". Even so, this is a fascinating history of an important document of American culture. It will be even more germane if Mitt Romney becomes president.
Taming Tigers by Jim Lawless (Virgin, £11.99)
"This book is the antidote to self-help," the jockey Richard Dunwoody exclaims in a foreword – but not in the same way that I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue is the antidote to panel games. Lawless basically exhorts us to, um, feel the fear and do it anyway. His own inspirational journey, from bored lawyer to globe-trotting inspirational speaker, begins with a pleasingly counterintuitive anecdote ("Slough did me a life-changing favour": that has to be a first), though by the time he was talking about showing cards to tigers outside the prison that was him, it all seemed rather confusing.
Cat-fanciers might be disappointed that tigers are the bad guys here, but Lawless is open about his own lack of originality ("truths that you already know"), and it doesn't hurt to be reminded that it's important to "do the basics brilliantly". You have to respect, too, a "just do it!" motivational speaker who actually just does it: he's the first Brit to free-dive (without oxygen) to a depth of more than 100 metres. That's one way to be absolutely sure of avoiding big cats, as well as loopy religious texts and bloated software.
