Tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of the assassination of John F Kennedy, and Julie Middleton reviews two new studies of the charismatic president in the Herald. JFK: Remembering Jack is by Christophe Loviny and Vincent Touze, and “allows novices to get to grips with his life through an easily-digestible once-over-lightly account, rarely-seen public and private pictures, and a CD recording of the memorable sound bites.”

John F Kennedy: An Unfinished Life by Robert Dallek is a more scholarly account, focusing on Kennedy’s affliction with Addison's disease, an adrenal gland disorder which results in anaemia and weakness. Dallek is “even-handed in his assessment … Kennedy's presidency, he says, is better understood as a patchwork of stumbles and significant achievements.”

Also reviewed is Nature Via Nurture by the best-selling author of Genome, Matt Ridley. It’s a study of what makes animals tick, and reviewer Stan Pinnegar is impressed: “By the time the chapter Redesigning People is reached, the reader's appetite is well and truly whetted for more information on what makes us and the rest of the world tick and the book ends all too quickly.”

Richard Loseby’s Looking For The Afghan wins the approval of Margi Thomson. In this follow-up to Blue is The Colour of Heaven, Aucklander Loseby goes back to Afghanistan to find out what became of a friend who had saved his life. “Loseby writes both colourfully and sensitively about his quest and the people he encounters along the way”.

Canadian Ann-Marie MacDonald’s The Way The Crow Flies is “bound for the bestseller lists: even at 730 pages it's a compulsive read, filled with poignancy, tragedy and horror of a frighteningly prosaic kind that contrasts with its dreamlike, optimistic setting amid 1960s suburbia.” And Pat Barker’s Double Vision has “cool, coherent storytelling … The thinking person's thriller.”