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Tash Aw's The Harmony Silk Factory chronicles the rise and fall of a Chinese businessman, told from the point of view of three narrators.

Opium harvested from poppy fields in Afghanistan is helping to fund the insurgency throughout the country. Author Gretchen Peters says the growing alliance between drug traffickers, terrorist groups and the Taliban has made the Taliban richer and more ruthless.

Mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook in his Harvard University dorm room. Within months, he became the youngest self-made billionaire in history. Ben Mezrich's new book The Accidental Billionaires charts his meteoric rise.

The wedding announcements of the Sunday New York Times — so careful in their cataloging of academic degrees and parents' professions — presented Rob Baedeker and his fellow members of the Kasper Hauser's comedy group with a perfect opportunity for satire.

William Halsted is credited with creating the United States' first surgical residency program and transforming the way operating rooms are sterilized. He was also a morphine addict. Plastic surgeon Gerald Imber details Halsted's dual lives in the new biography Genius on the Edge.

Romanian novelist Herta Mueller was awarded the 2009 literature prize for her depictions of "the landscape of the dispossessed." Her first novel, Nadirs, has just been reissued. Critic Alan Cheuse has a review.

Most people wouldn't describe the periodic table of elements as gripping, but Sam Kean makes it just that in his new book, The Disappearing Spoon.

"You can no longer talk about what black America thinks or feels," says Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Eugene Robinson. His new book, Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America, describes how African-American communities are becoming increasingly disconnected from one another.

Bobby Fischer might have been the greatest chess player who ever lived, but he was a deeply troubled man who descended into paranoia and hatred. Author Frank Brady, who knew Fischer, charts his rise and fall in a new biography.

Alan Cheuse reviews No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy. The novel opens up the world of a murderous sociopath in the desert straddling the Texas-Mexico border.