THINKING, FAST AND SLOW. By Daniel Kahneman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.) Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel in economic science in 2002, presents a lucid and profound vision of flawed human reason in a book full of intellectual surprises and self-help value.

TO A MOUNTAIN IN TIBET. By Colin Thubron. (Harper/HarperCollins, $24.99.) Weighed down by grief after the death of his mother, the author makes a pilgrimage to Mount Kailas, venerated by Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and others.

TO END ALL WARS: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918. By Adam Hochschild. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28.) This stirring account concentrates on the appalling losses in the ranks and on the courage of those who decided the war in Europe was not a just one.

A TRAIN IN WINTER: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France. By Caroline Moorehead. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Moorehead meticulously traces the fates of 230 Frenchwomen sent to Auschwitz as political prisoners of the Reich.

VAN GOGH: The Life. By Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. (Random House, $40.) Was Van Gogh a high-I.Q. aesthete or an earnest simpleton? A frugal bohemian or a big spender? A man who took his own life or a man who was murdered? This hulking and energetic biography complicates the picture.

WHO’S AFRAID OF POST-BLACKNESS? What It Means to Be Black Now. By Touré. (Free Press, $25.) The author’s interviews with 105 prominent African-Americans suggest that today’s “black identity” has cleared the way to a liberating pursuit of individuality.

WHY THE WEST RULES — FOR NOW: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future. By Ian Morris. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35.) A Stanford historian argues that we face an immediate choice — East-West cooperation or catastrophe.

A WORLD ON FIRE: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War. By Amanda Foreman. (Random House, $35.) While Union and Confederate guns blazed, a battle was also being waged for English hearts and minds, at both the elite and popular levels.