Displaying articles for: October 2009

Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose

How a seven-foot skeleton found its way from Monticello to a French naturalist's collection -- and what it told Europe about America. Read more...

Return to the Hundred Acre Wood

Christopher Robin's gentle coterie makes an encore appearance in this revisitation of A. A. Milne's beloved characters. Read more...

Z.

A thriller as effective in its stylish satire as it is transparent in its political sympathies. Read more...

The New Black

A psychoanalyst's call to think of "depression" as a factor of experience -- not illness. Read more...

Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife

Looking past the icon to find the writer. Read more...

Save the Deli

Will the pastrami on rye go the way of the dodo? Read more...

Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates

The authors of Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar return with some deadly jesting. Read more...

Starting Point: 1979-1996

A new collection of essays by and interviews with famed anime creator Hayao Miyazaki. Read more...

A Fine Romance

A case for the distinctively Jewish aspect of the American Songbook. Read more...

Masterpiece Comics

A hilarious -- and literarily astute -- mashup of literary monuments with the styles of cartoonists ranging from Windsor McKay to Charles Schulz. Read more...

Civil War Wives

A southern abolitionist, a general's spouse, and the first lady of the Confederacy. Read more...

The Book Shopper

A life among the leaves. Read more...

My Guilty Pleasure

The followup disc from the pop chanteuse of Disco Romance returns to dance clubs past. Read more...

Boilerplate: History's Mechanical Marvel

An illustrated history of the feats of an armor-plated hero. Read more...

Risk

A professionally suspicious married couple get caught up in the mysterious death of a rich woman's son. Read more...

February 9: Alice Walker was born on this day in 1944. Thirty years after her Pulitzer winner The Color Purple, Walker continues to publish in many genres. Her most recent book is The Chicken Chronicles, a memoir-meditation…

Once held close to the chest and protected by well-understood laws, the valuable information about our lives that we blithely disclose with our every keystroke has the potential…

Books CDs, DVDs to know about now
Alice James

"The moral and philosophical questions that Henry wrote up as fiction and William as science," Jean Strouse writes of her subject's more famous brothers, "Alice simply lived." It took a biographer of sensitivity and brilliance to give that "simply" the profundity it deserves, and the resulting book, now reissued in the peerless NYRB Classics series, is one of the richest life stories you'll ever read.

Midnight in Austenland

The world of Jane Austen's fiction has long been an imaginative playground for writers and readers of a certain stripe. Shannon Hale's Austenland wittily took the next step, setting comic romance in a faux-Pemberly resort for the Darcy-smitten. Her latest returns for more Regency fun, but with a twist: does murder stalk Pembrook Park?

Humble Homes, Simple Shacks...

Childlike retreat? Arts and crafts challenge? Frugal and eco-friendly living option? The notion of the "tiny house" has the surprising potential to fire the imagination. In this exuberant volume of sketches, plans, and commentary, the artist Derek Diedricksen shares his infectious enthusiasm for the idea of the micro-mansion.