As a species of literature, art gallery exhibition catalogs usually fall into one of three categories, none of them good. There’s the perfunctory. There’s the expensively vacuous, the kind that Marc Spiegler, a director of Art Basel, has described as simply another rite in commercial art’s “elaborate validation ritual.” And then there’s the nonexistent, which is too often the case.

Adbusters' Kalle Lasn came up with the idea of Occupy Wall Street, and, crucially, its name in 2011. But the year before, political columnist Timothy Noah—once of Slate, now at the New Republic—explained the nature of the income inequality problem that Occupy would later decry. "The United States of Inequality," Noah's widely circulated, award-winning series of Slate articles on income inequality in America, outlined exactly what separated the 99% from the 1%, and who was to blame, months before OWS got going.

Now Noah has turned that series, published in ten parts in September 2010, into a

Limited to the rock scene, the book might have derailed in a fit of nostalgia. But Love Goes to Buildings on Fire lures readers interested in one genre and keeps them hooked to learn about the others.

In The Swerve, Greenblatt traces the history of an ancient manuscript written in poetic meter that argues for the materialist doctrines of the Hellenistic Greek philosopher Epicurus. The poem, known as De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) was written in the first century BCE by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius. Unfortunately, we know next to nothing about Lucretius; his personal story has been lost to history. His manuscript was almost lost as well, in the great obliteration of ancient knowledge that came with the fall of Rome.

“You may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas.”

Davy Crockett supposedly uttered these words in 1835, when the people of Tennessee declined to re-elect the frontiersman to another term in Congress. Crockett didn’t last long in Texas; Santa Ana’s army dispatched him at the Alamo the following year. But his words certainly did. Almost two centuries later, the phrase is proudly emblazoned on T-shirts and coffee mugs for sale across the Lone Star State.

New York Times columnist Gail Collins must find this phrase—and Texans’ delight in it—pretty rich, as she believes that Texas is hell, at least

At the end of Beasts of No Nation, Uzodinma Iweala’s 2005 novel, a rescued child soldier in Africa finds himself in the care of a “white woman from America who is coming here to be helping people like me.” Instead, she seems to be helping herself: “She is always saying to me, tell me what you are feeling. Tell me what you are thinking.” As the young boy, Agu, recounts some of the horror he’s experienced, he realizes “she is not even knowing what war is….When I am saying all of this, she is just looking at me and I am seeing water in her eye….[She] is never saying anything when I am saying this,