Are the Rich Necessary?
By Hunter Lewis
(Axios Press, 282 pages, $20)
In this odd book, the author attempts to lay out “fundamental economic arguments” on both sides of the provocative question in his title. He also asks if private profits are necessary and whether government can protect us from the excesses of the profit system. In marshaling opposing positions, Lewis, the founder of Cambridge Associates, a global investment firm, often pits the likes of Al Sharpton against Milton Friedman. Fair fight. In his conclusion, he departs from his evenhanded approach to present an argument that the rich, instead of paying taxes above a certain amount, should be allowed to give to their own charities. In making this antigovernment case, he gives his game away. —Jesse Eisinger

A Nation of Counterfeiters
By Stephen Mihm
(Harvard University Press, 464 pages, $30)
Long before financial pundits fretted over yield curves and trade deficits, America’s fragile economy faced a more prosaic threat: counterfeit currency. Mihm’s colorful (and sometimes dense) account of our early economic history follows a bedraggled cast of con artists, engravers, and gangsters who fueled the Republic’s nascent capitalist endeavors with illicit currency. From the Vermont woodlands to the jostling thoroughfares of Manhattan, this cat-and-mouse tale of subterfuge and deceit culminates in the birth of the Federal Reserve and a true national currency. It’s a story that in many ways mirrors the country’s ascendance from a rangy colonial outpost to an unrivaled economic power. —Gabriel Sherman

Cool It
By Bjorn Lomborg
(Knopf, 272 pages, $21)
Lomborg, a Danish business professor, challenges Al Gore and his followers to calm down. Yes, the world is warming, and yes, humans are to blame. But in all the panic, we’ve miscalculated the risk and botched the remedies. Lomborg’s No. 1 enemy is the Kyoto Protocol; he thinks its emission-reduction requirements will siphon off wealth that could improve lives now and fight climate change more efficiently long-term. Dollar for dollar, he argues, mosquito nets and water filtration do more good than carbon-emissions caps, which might reduce temperatures a fraction of a degree over the next century. But what about those melting glaciers, rising seas, and polar bears? Lomborg claims the damage has been “sexed up” for the sake of rhetoric, and notes, in the case of polar bears, that certain populations have actually grown in the past half century. Still, Lomborg is no global-warming denier. He simply wants to lower the temperature of the debate while urging governments to fight climate change in ways that might pay greater dividends—in energy-conservation research, for example. —Mary Bridges

The Economic Naturalist
By Robert H. Frank
(Basic Books, 226 pages, $26)
Cornell University economics professor Frank simplifies riddles of the modern world that have perplexed his students over the years. Many of his explanations startle, as when he shows why Brazil recycles a greater proportion of aluminum cans than the U.S. does; others—his case for why a high school might stop naming valedictorians, for example—are rooted in common sense. Although Frank presents the reader with several eye-openers, most of his answers could be boiled down to single sentences. —Jessica Liebman

The Siege of Mecca
By Yaroslav Trofimov
(Doubleday, 320 pages, $26)
Trofimov’s study of the 1979 seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Islamic militants begins with all the menace of a political thriller. The author then steps back to examine how this act of global jihad, underreported in the West, inspired today’s generation of terrorists. Trofimov, a Wall Street Journal reporter, provides context through a vivid history of the site and the rise of ultrafundamentalist Wahhabism, and re-creates the battles at the mosque in riveting, if gruesome, detail. The occasional sensa­tionalism doesn’t detract from his argument that Osama bin Laden and his operatives are the ideological descendants of the Mecca radicals, but with far greater resources. —Jen Itzenson

Evil Inc.
By Glenn Kaplan
(Forge Books, 352 pages, $25)
A fatal explosion at Ayvil Plastics leaves divisional director Ken Olson widowed and wrongly accused of negligence. Like a John Grishamesque protagonist, Olson devotes his ruined life to exposing the truth and employs his brother-in-law (who just happens to be a private investigator) to help him. Their quest takes them up the corporate ladder and through offshore bank accounts in search of the grimy truth. Predictable? Absolutely. But you’ll still want to see if justice is served. —Jennifer Close

Flawless
By Joshua Spanogle
(Delacorte, 496 pages, $23)
Despite his ominous use of the word ’tude on the second page, Stanford medical student Spanogle has concocted an absorbing, pulse-quickening thriller about a pharmaceutical company gone corrupt. In 125 staccato chapters, he pits renegade former C.D.C. doctor Nate McCormick—think Jack Ryan with an M.D.—against the makers of an unapproved cosmetic drug that promises a face-lift in a syringe but instead causes massive tumors. Spanogle propels his tale with the urgency of an ambulance siren: McCormick juggles a best friend’s betrayal, a bloodthirsty Chinese gang, and his own recklessness as he figures out the drug’s dark secrets and why it’s even more dangerous than anyone thought. —Julia Ramey