A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

Garry Kasparov reviews a book about chess and artificial intelligence, a springboard for his thoughts about the state of the game and technology. Fascinating. . . . Matt Ridley reviews a “witty and incisive” book about the “quest to end aging.” . . . Alice Kaplan writes a wonderfully brainy-but-breezy essay about “volumes assessing literary reputations during the years of the Nazi occupation of France.” . . . Richard Posner writes a long, characteristically intelligent piece about the history of miscegenation laws in the U.S. (“People take pride in being descended from Mayflower passengers, or from Revolutionary War veterans, though after a very few generations the traits that distinguished an honored ancestor, even if genetic, disappears in the genetic reshuffling that occurs in every new generation.”) . . . The Economist judges that Peter Carey’s latest novel, a fictional retelling of Tocqueville’s travels in America, “has all the quirky qualities that we have come to expect from Peter Carey: a winding narrative, a mass of vivid historical detail, and some very lively writing.” . . . The Guardian calls Jon McGregor’s new novel, Even the Dogs, “a [powerful] fragmentary group portrait” of addicts and vagrants who move in and out of an empty flat over several years. . . . Jeff VanderMeer calls a new novel about Depression-era bank robbers “a rip-roaring yarn that manages to be both phantasmagorical and historically accurate. In its labyrinthine, luminous narrative, reminiscent of Michael Chabon’s best fiction, readers will find powerful parallels to the present-day.”