The anthropologist Franz Boas — he’s the central figure in Charles King’s new book, “Gods of the Upper Air,” below — was more interested in similarities than in differences, ever alert to the things that united human cultures. So maybe he would find a common theme among the 12 titles we recommend this week. Me, I’ll just note how wildly varied they are (an anthology of reporting by Arab women, a study of Supreme Court politics, a gay coming-of-age memoir, a punctuation history and a biography of Confederate sisters, along with King’s book and half a dozen disparate novels), and happily remember the slogan I first saw on a banner at a church carnival years ago: Strength through diversity.

Gregory Cowles

Senior Editor, Books

Twitter: @GregoryCowles

OUR WOMEN ON THE GROUND: Essays by Arab Women Reporting From the Arab World, edited by Zahra Hankir. (Penguin, $17.) In this stirring, provocative and well-made new anthology, put together by the Lebanese-British journalist Zahra Hankir, 19 Arab and Middle Eastern sahafiyat — female journalists — detail their experiences reporting from some of the most repressive countries in the world. “The result is a volume that rewrites the hoary rules of the foreign correspondent playbook, deactivating the old clichés,” our critic Dwight Garner writes. “Each of these women has a story to tell. Each has seen plenty.”

GODS OF THE UPPER AIR: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century, by Charles King. (Doubleday, $30.) This elegant and kaleidoscopic book is a group portrait of the anthropologist Franz Boas and those he influenced, including Zora Neale Hurston and Margaret Mead, who collectively attempted to chip away at entrenched notions of “us” and “them.” “A century ago, the prospect of a common humanity seemed radical to an American public that had been schooled in the inherent superiority of Western civilization,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes. “Boas and his disciples argued for pluralism and tolerance at a time when cross-cultural empathy was deemed not just threatening but almost unfathomable.”

SEMICOLON: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark, by Cecelia Watson. (Ecco, $19.99.) “Style, I’d argue, is 90 percent punctuation,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes in her review of this “biography” of the semicolon. Cecelia Watson reveals punctuation, as we practice it, to be a relatively young and uneasy art. Her lively book tells the story of a mark with an unusual talent for controversy. “Watson covers impressive ground in this short book,” Sehgal writes, “skittering back and forth like a sandpiper at the shores of language’s Great Debates.”