NOW IN B FORMAT. In The Sexual Paradox, psychologist Susan Pinker explores the latest findings of the science of sex differences. Comparing the lives of promising schoolgirls who later opt out of successful careers with those of troubled schoolboys who go on to achieve highly in the workplace, she argues that our biology can shed important new light on the 'gender gap'. Men and women are significantly different – we need to recognize these paradoxical differences, not punish them or legislate against them, if we are to make progress. The Sexual Paradox sheds important – and controversial – new light on a perennial debate.

While moral perfectionists rank conscious beings according to their cognitive abilities, Paola Cavalieri launches a more inclusive defence of all forms of subjectivity. In concert with Peter Singer, J. M. Coetzee, Harlan B. Miller, and other leading animal studies scholars, she expands our understanding of the nonhuman in such a way that the derogatory category of ‘the animal’ becomes meaningless. In so doing, she presents a nonhierachical approach to ethics that better respects the value of the conscious self. After laying out her challenge to moral perfectionism and tracing its influence on our attitudes toward the ‘unworthy’, she then follows with a roundtable ‘multilogue’ which takes on the role of reason in ethics and the boundaries of moral status.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is an exploration of the joys and perils of the modern workplace, beautifully evoking what other people get up to all day – and all night – to make the frenzied contemporary world function. With a philosophical eye and his characteristic combination of wit and wisdom, Alain de Botton leads us on a journey around a deliberately eclectic range of occupations, from rocket science to biscuit manufacturing, accountancy to art – in the name of exploring what makes our jobs either fulfilling or soul-destroying. Along the way de Botton skilfully raises the big questions we all tend to ask of our work: What should I do with my life? How can I combine earning money with attaining fulfilment? What will I have achieved by the end of my career? The book amounts to a celebration and investigation of something as central to a good life as love – but which we often find remarkably hard to reflect on properly. As de Botton points out, most of us are still working at jobs chosen for us by our sixteen-year-old selves. Here, then, is a perfect guide to some of the most vicious anxieties and enticing hopes thrown up by our progress through the working world.

Factory Girls offers a previously untold story about the immense population of unknown women who work countless hours, often in hazardous conditions, to provide us with the material goods we take for granted. A book of global significance, it demonstrates how the movement from rural villages to cities is remaking individual lives and the fates of families, transforming our world much as immigration to America's shores remade that society a century ago.

Most of us have to work. But is work just a means to an end? In trying to make a living, have we lost touch with the idea of making things well? In this provocative and enlightening book, Richard Sennett explores the idea of craftsmanship – the desire to do a job well for its own sake – as a template for living. Pure competition, he shows, will never produce good work. Instead, the values of the craftsman, whether in a Stradivari violin workshop or a modern laboratory, can enrich our lives and change the way we anchor ourselves in the world around us.

Jacob is a man with an overwhelming attraction to female feet. The Baroness is a clothing designer and evangelical sadist. Roy is a wedding band singer entranced by his step daughter. Ron and Laura are simply in love – only Laura lost both her legs in a car accident, and Ron is beguiled by a beauty many would be blind to. How do we deal with desire? Our own, and the desires of others? How do we comprehend desires that are extreme, or unacceptable? And how do those who have them, live with them? In A Map of Desire Daniel Bergner takes us on a journey into human passions suffered, endured, and celebrated. Desire is a sometimes anarchic, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes destructive, sometimes redeeming, and always powerful force. Immersing himself in it through the people whose lives he follows and the scientists he spends time with who are trying to understand it, slowly he exposes and illuminates layers of our humanity.

This edition of Cultural Studies Review brings together a diverse set of essays and new writing that identify particular national tendencies, notions of family, epistemological worries about postmodernity's represented purpose and queries about cultural studies as it is taught and as it could be understood. There is also some careful exploring of where and why we might be at home in our differences and what a felt homelessness might be. To gather these varied strands beneath the heading Homefronts acknowledges, as always, the plurality of the environments that we call home and the battles of representation, and being, that make up the experiences of nation, family, philosophy and academic discipline that render those sites particular and so personal to us.