Paperback Row - NYTimes.com THE MASTER SWITCH: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, by Tim Wu (Vintage, $15.95.) This history of modern communications - covering phones, radio, television, movies and, finally, the Internet - is organized around what Wu calls "the Cycle": "from somebody's hobby to somebody's industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel - from open to closed system." WHEN THE THRILL IS GONE, by Walter Mosley (New American Library, $15.) In Mosley's third Leonid McGill mystery, the New York P.I. with a murky history as a mob fixer has a lot to deal with: his best friend lies dying in McGill's apartment; McGill's wife has a new lover; and he's taken the case of a nervous woman who suspects her billionaire husband of plotting her murder. KENNEDY AND NIXON: The Rivalry That Shaped Postwar America, by Chris Matthews (Free Press, $16.) Seasoned with fascinating anecdotes, Matthews's portrait - "the first extensive double look since Theodore White's "Making of the President, 1960," " Richard Brookhiser wrote here - argues that the contest between the charismatic Kennedy and the talented yet haunted Nixon propelled America toward Vietnam and Watergate. In POISONING THE PRESS: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington's Scandal Culture (Picador, $20), Mark Feldstein recounts the 25-year battle between Nixon and the muckraker Anderson (1922-2005), who exposed many of the Nixon White House's early scandals in his long-running syndicated column. EVERY RIVEN THING, by Christian Wiman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15.) Wiman, the editor of Poetry magazine, has a rare form of blood cancer, and a sense of mortality lingers in many of the poems in his third collection, a searingly honest meditation on the nature of grief and the human hunger to feel existence. ALMOST CHIMPANZEE: Redrawing the Lines That Separate Us From Them, by Jon Cohen (St. Martin's Griffin, $15.99.) We may share about 95 percent of our DNA with chimps, but it's our differences, not our similarities, Cohen writes in this engrossing synthesis, that reveal "what, exactly, it means to be human." SELECTED STORIES, by William Trevor (Penguin, $18.) Gathering work from Trevor's previous four collections, this volume, one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2010, shows why his deceptively spare fiction has moved readers for generations. Set mainly in Ireland and England, Trevor's tales "are melancholy rather than gloomy," our reviewer, Charles McGrath, wrote, "and they're warmed with radiant little moments of grace or acceptance." VENICE: Pure City, by Peter Ackroyd (Anchor, $21.) Ackroyd describes a Renaissance metropolis pulsating with wealth and luxury yet swimming in sewage and periodically besieged by the plague. He also captures Venice's bewitching effect on artists over the centuries. OLD BORDER ROAD, by Susan Froderberg (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $14.99.) Froderberg's first novel, set against a stifling drought in Arizona, follows the disappointments and betrayals of a spirited young woman's marriage.