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Cynthia Hawkins leads a family business that endured the 1965 Watts riots, and the Rodney King riots in 1992. She praises the embattled neighborhood, and says strong community ties brought success.

Reporter-turned-novelist Gene Kerrigan sets his story in Ireland after the 2008 financial crisis. The Rage is a boundlessly readable portrait of a country in which ordinary citizens have been hit the hardest and all the old certainties have vanished.

In her new book, Andrea Stuart explores the intersection of sugar, slavery, settlement, migration and survival in the Americas. Stuart's personal history was shaped by these forces — she is descended from a slave owner who had relations with an unknown slave.

Owners of 3-D printers can create all sorts of imaginative items — cups, tools, jewelry. All they need is a design and the printer. But now some gun parts are being produced with this technology, alarming some in the burgeoning 3-D printing industry.

As NASA moves away from manned missions, the private sector is taking on the task. Those hoping for a ride are as eager as ever, and space exploration hasn't lost a bit of its luster.

It's the entrepreneurs' dream: tapping into China's market of 1.3 billion people. That dream fueled the efforts of two Chinese-American MBAs to take the soft-pretzel franchise — a staple of U.S. shopping malls — to China. Cultural and financial barriers, however, led to a far more challenging reality.

An attention researcher wanted to find out how radiologists would fare in a version of the famous Invisible Gorilla study. He found that 83 percent of the radiologists failed to spot an image of a gorilla on slides they were told to inspect for cancer. It's just one example of how, when people are asked to perform a challenging task, their attention can narrow and blocks things out.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has drawn a lot of attention with her "sort of a feminist manifesto" Lean In. Critic Maureen Corrigan finds that much of the book is bland, but toward the end, Sandberg's intellectual charisma breaks through.

On River Run Thee, Roberts immerses herself and the listener in a history of anguish, and channels it all into a magnetic unity, a postmodern opus.

The New Yorker cartoonist channels her affection for the city into a new tongue-in-cheek guidebook, Going Into Town. "It's just fun," Chast says of New York. "Everything seems to suggest stories."