A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

Peter Kramer believes that Richard Powers’ latest novel is the victim of bad timing: Recent scientific findings might render its central plot point irrelevant. Kramer sympathizes: “My only novel concerns a thoughtful anarchist who communicates with those he loves through blowing up buildings. It appeared to mostly good notices in August 2001; after Sept. 11, the book was all but undiscussable.” . . . Reviewing a massive new anthology edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, Laura Miller says, “You could do a lot worse with the next 220 days of your life than to begin each one by reading an entry from the freshly published A New Literary History of America — the way generations past used to study a Bible verse daily.” . . . Michael Sandel is a professor at Harvard who offers an enormously popular course on moral philosophy. He’s now written a book based on the course, and Edward Skidelsky finds that “Sandel’s insistence on the inescapably ethical character of political debate is enormously refreshing — a riposte to the arid and evasive legalism of so much recent liberal thinking.” . . . In People Like Us, reporter Joris Luyendijk argues that it is “impossible for TV in particular or indeed for any journalist to explain what [is] happening in the Middle East.” The Dutch edition of the book sold 250,000 copies. Now it’s available in English. . . . Edmund White recommends a collection of Michael Greenberg’s “sharp, sensitive, even painful” 1,200-word essays for the Times Literary Supplement. . . . James Wood considers A.S. Byatt’s latest.