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A strange thing happened when I married a soldier. Whenever I mentioned my husband’s occupation, my subsequent words, whether controversial or trite, would be greeted with the wide eyes and reverential nods Americans now reflexively offer members of the military community. Sometimes I’d even get an awkward, earnest “Thank you for your service,” or “That must be so hard.”

When my mother came for lunch at the Pentagon, I shepherded her through the visitor’s entrance, maneuvered her onto the escalator, and had just ushered her past the chocolate shop when she stopped short. I stopped too, letting an army of crisply uniformed officers and shirt-sleeved civilians flow past us down the corridor. Taking in the Pentagon’s florist shop, the banks, the nail salon, ­and the food court, my mother finally looked back at me. “So the heart of American military power is a shopping mall?”

Appalled by the trial and execution of his mentor Socrates in 399 B.C., the Greek philosopher Plato published his own remembered (or imagined) version of Socrates’ final speech to the citizens of Athens. Today, Plato’s “Apology of Socrates” stands as the most famous example of the literary form that came to be known as the apologia: a text that is not, in fact, an apology at all but rather an elaborate defense.

Donald Trump promises that if Americans send him to the White House, he’ll bring back waterboarding — and techniques that are “a hell of a lot worse.” Why? Because “torture works,” he claims, and even “if it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway.” That’s not Trump’s only bright idea for U.S. counterterrorism policy. He’d also “bomb the hell out of ISIS,” and he favors targeting the spouses and children of Islamic State fighters, too, since “with the terrorists, you have to take out their families.” That kind of rhetoric from the GOP front-runner has rightly alarmed the foreign policy establishment, prompting an open letter this past week from an array of Republican advisers opposing Trump.

By now, the script is familiar: Terrorists attack a Western target, and politicians compete to offer stunned and condemnatory adjectives. British, Chinese, and Japanese leaders thus proclaimed themselves “shocked” by the Paris attacks, which were described variously as “outrageous” and “horrific” by U.S. President Barack Obama; “terrible” and “cowardly” by French President François Hollande; “barbaric” by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi; “despicable” by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon; and “heinous, evil, vile” by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who possesses a superior thesaurus.

There are books that are read and books that are admired, and they are not necessarily the same books. “Worldmaking,” by David Milne, seems destined to be more admired than read. Its subject alone tends to induce a respectful but glazed silence. If the topic is intellectually hefty, the book itself is heftier still (it weighs in at more than 500 pages of text), and the print is so small that readers over 40 would do well to keep their magnifying glasses handy.