Noteworthy paperbacks

A selection of summaries from The New York Times Book Review:

ELASTIC: Unlocking Your Brain’s Ability to Embrace Change, by Leonard Mlodinow. (Vintage, $16.) Our capacity to stretch beyond the bounds of our preconceptions and other deeply held beliefs, what Mlodinow calls “elastic thinking,” is essential to innovation, creativity and independent thought. He offers an engaging guide to the brain’s power to solve problems, weaving scientific research, politics and literature. BRASS, by Xhenet Aliu. (Random House, $17.) Elsie and Lulu, the mother and daughter whose potent relationship forms the core of this debut novel, are desperate to leave behind their hardscrabble lives. As Times reviewer Julie Buntin put it, the book “offers a reminder that assumptions — whether about a place, or a person as close to you as your mother — never tell the full story.”

THE WINE LOVER’S DAUGHTER: A Memoir, by Anne Fadiman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) In her study of her father, literary critic Clifton Fadiman, the author uses his infatuation with wine to explore the motivations that guide connoisseurship and hedonism. Although Fadiman does not share her father’s ardent love of the drink, her wine-focused vignettes sketch a portrait of their complicated relationship.

MACBETH, by Jo Nesbo. Translated by Don Bartlett. (Hogarth Shakespeare,

$16.) In his reimagining of Shakespeare’s tragedy, the Norwegian crime writer draws out the play’s noir elements, transposing its moral choices and plot to 1970s Glasgow as the city strained under corruption, violence and addiction. Times reviewer James Shapiro praised the adaptation, calling the book “a dark but ultimately hopeful ‘Macbeth,’ one suited to our own troubled times, in which

‘the slowness of democracy’ is no match for powerhungry strongmen.”

THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, by Daniel Ellsberg. (Bloomsbury, $18.) Ellsberg, best known as the former military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers, makes an impassioned call for reducing the risk of nuclear destruction. Although widespread fears about nuclear war have largely receded since the end of the Cold War in 1991, Ellsberg argues that there’s plenty of reason for concern. TANGERINE, by Christine Mangan. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $16.99.) In a novel that borrows from Paul Bowles and Patricia Highsmith, two characters, neither a trustworthy narrator, get caught up in a mysterious disappearance in Tangier.