New in paperback: "Snark" by David Denby, "The Compassionate Instinct" and more

Books we missed, books we raved about, and books that have been revived in print.

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It would be easy to dismiss Snark (Simon & Schuster, $12), David Denby's screed against snark, as snark itself. After all, if you're Maureen Dowd, Bill O'Reilly or an anonymous blogger, who are among its targets, this little book might even seem malicious. But that would be snarky. Better to see the book as an entertaining intellectual exercise in which Denby, a movie critic for the New Yorker, dissects snark, which he defines as "a strain of nasty, knowing abuse spreading like pinkeye through the national conversation."

Denby is not calling for the end of snark. Rather, he is calling for better snark. Snark "exists at different levels of ambition and skill," he explains, "and at the top levels snark crosses into wit." (Examples of those who purvey "high snark" include Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Gore Vidal, Mark Twain, the writers of "The Simpsons" and MSNBC's Keith Olbermann.)

To demonstrate the evolution and corruption of snark, Denby begins in ancient Greece and works his way through ancient Rome (when "invective was a mode of poetry"), through the ages of masters like Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift and on to lesser lights such as Tom Wolfe (whose life "got swallowed up by irony") before landing on the objects of his most heated venom: the blogosphere and Dowd, to whom he devotes an entire chapter.

"Snark, by its very nature, is philistine," Denby writes. "It will never honor the artistically and intellectually ambitious, who see the world as a field of ravishing possibilities or as tragedy." Such insights are undoubtedly thoughtful and high-minded, but if I were being snarky, I also might call them a thinly veiled justification for snobbery.

While Denby -- and your mother -- would say that it is just as easy to be nice (or at least fair) as it is to be mean, the editors of The Compassionate Instinct (Norton, $16.95) offer scientific evidence to demonstrate that truism. This collection of essays from the now online-only magazine the Greater Good highlights research showing that "empathy, gratitude, compassion, altruism, fairness, trust, and cooperation, once thought to be aberrations from the tooth-and-claw natural order of things, are now being revealed as core features of primate evolution."

The book, a product of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, combines hard science with anecdotes and interviews, and features contributions from luminaries such as Frans B.M. de Waal, Steven Pinker, Alfie Kohn and Daniel Goleman. The Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Michael Pollan and Robert Reich also make appearances. Offering answers to such questions as "Does compassion promote altruistic behavior?" (it can), the book may be the ultimate antidote to snark.

From our previous reviews

-- Philipp Meyer's novel American Rust (Spiegel & Grau, $15), "a tale of murder and the struggle for redemption in a Pennsylvania steel town," offers a sadly relevant lesson about "a poor economy's human costs," according to Ron Charles.

-- Land of Marvels (Norton, $14.95), by Barry Unsworth, a historical novel set in 1914 Mesopotamia, can be read "as a corrective to the arrogance and overweening self-confidence that led the United States" into Iraq, Jonathan Yardley commented, or simply "as singularly skillful entertainment."

-- Meghan O'Rourke called A Jury of Her Peers (Vintage, $16.95), by Elaine Showalter, a "generous, thought-provoking study" of American female writers from 1650 to the present.

-- Ronald Cotton spent 11 years in prison for rape before being exonerated by DNA evidence. He and his accuser, Jennifer Thompson-Cannino, are now friends and co-authors of Picking Cotton (St. Martin's, $14.99), which Kate Tuttle called an "unusual joint memoir."

-- Norah Vincent's Voluntary Madness (Penguin, $16), a chronicle of the author's self-imposed stay at three psychiatric treatment centers, "addresses timely topics" about mental health care in America, wrote Carolyn See.

-- Lords of Finance (Penguin, $18), by Liaquat Ahamed, a former World Bank economist and investment fund manager, is a historical work about the role central bankers played in the Great Depression. But, Frank Ahrens noted, "parallels to today's global financial collapse come with regularity throughout, sometimes causing spit-take laughs, sometimes shudders."

-- In The Lost City of Z (Vintage, $15.95), New Yorker writer David Grann follows the footsteps of Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett, an explorer who disappeared in 1925 in the Amazon. The result is "a thrill ride," Marie Arana wrote, that weaves history and daring personal experience.

Krug is The Post's monthly paperback columnist.

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