No one was ever more suitably named, at birth and by marriage, than Constance Wilde. Her first name conveys her near-endless loyalty to her irresponsible, genius husband, Oscar. Even after the worst of humiliations—after he had taken up with the pretty young Lord Alfred Douglas and been sent to prison for the affair—she could still write in a letter, “What a tragedy for him who is so gifted!”

The new face of boardroom feminism, of course, is Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg. Now, it’s nearly impossible to dislike Sandberg, or to be unimpressed by her wry candor and the indisputable truth of her message. Her new book, Lean In, is a disarmingly self-deprecating career-management advice manual that doubles as a feminist manifesto.

When Hugo Chávez took office as Venezuelan president in 1999, his appeal in the country seemed almost universal. Even many of the old petro-state’s entrenched beneficiaries, the elites with their flats in Paris, London, New York and Miami, welcomed a fresh face to shake up an ossified political system. The poor identified with his dark skin, folksy manner and confidence in speaking truth to power. Here, it seemed, was a leader with the vision, social commitment and broad base to break down the structural barriers that had marginalised so many.

In Stieg Larsson’s best-selling Millennium series, a disaffected teenaged rape survivor, Lisbeth Salander, kicks ass and takes names. Readers and critics hailed Larsson’s creation as groundbreaking. To pick just one representative case, Michiko Kakutani, in her review of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, calls Salander “one of the most original characters in a thriller to come along in a while: . . . the vulnerable victim turned vigilante; a willfully antisocial girl.” One would think the critics had never seen a woman in pants before, let alone one who can hold her own against the

Emily Bazelon’s intelligent, rigorous Sticks and Stones charts the experiences of a few bullied children and synthesizes the scholarship on how to contain or prevent such harm. She focuses primarily on the stories of three kids: an African-American girl, Monique McClain, who became the target of a few girls at her school in Connecticut, went through a depression and finally switched schools and found happiness; a gay boy in upstate New York, Jacob Lasher, who struggled against prejudice but also enjoyed being a provocateur; and Phoebe Prince, an Irish girl transplanted to a town in Massachusetts,