A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

Allen Barra scratches his head over Chuck Palahniuk’s latest. (“Reading Pygmy is like trying to do a crossword puzzle while riding a horse underwater.”) . . . Mark Oppenheimer reviews George Scialabba’s What Are Intellectuals Good For?, “as succinct and companionable a tour through major American thinkers of the past century as you’re likely to get anywhere. . . . Scialabba makes me want to use my library card.” . . . In the new Believer, Steve Hely reviews 11 “imaginary” beach reads. . . . Nicole Lanctot says that Mark Rudd’s account of his time as a political radical “concludes that much of the Weathermen’s activities had the opposite effect of what was intended.”