Irving Louis Horowitz, Hannah Arendt: Radical Conservative. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2012. $29.95. 111 pp.

Irving Horowitz, founding editor of Society, published this book shortly before he died in March 2012. It is a testament to Horowitz’s admiration for the complex genius of a scholar who could not be easily categorized and whose contributions to political philosophy remain the subject of spirited analysis and debate.

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon, 2012. $28.95. 448 pp.

Do liberals and conservatives occupy different moral universes in which the expression of moral intuition is also different? Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia thinks so. He brings the insights of evolutionary and moral psychology to broader public scrutiny and no doubt further refinement.

Sherine Hamdy, Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012. $27.95. 370 pp.

Sherine Hamdy, assistant professor of anthropology at Brown University, adds to an important literature on the intersection of medical ethics, politics, and global health. Her book “sheds new light on contemporary Islamic thought, while challenging the presumed divide between religion and science, and between ethics and politics”

John Patrick Diggins, Why Niebuhr Now? Chicago: University of Chicago Press. $22.00. 152 pp.

The late John Patrick Diggins, left this final work in which he explored contemporary interest in the ideas of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, an interest that spanned the political spectrum among liberals and conservatives alike. He takes exception to the misuses of Niebuhr’s ideas on both the left and right in an effort to explain the real import of those ideas for our time.

Andra Gillespie, The New Black Politician: Cory Booker, Newark, and Post-Racial America. New York: New York University Press, 2012. $35.00. 336 pp.

Andra Gillespie, associate professor of political science at Emory University, chronicles the transformation of black leadership and politics in a case study of Newark, New Jersey. She finds that public rhetoric about black unity is undergoing profound changes as both poor and affluent African Americans relate in new ways to public goals and the leadership responsible for achieving them.