Displaying articles for: January 2009

The King of Madison Avenue: David Ogilvy and the Making of Modern Advertising

The life of the original Mad Man. Read more...

The First Person and Other Stories

A collection of short fiction that explores the unsettling consequences of the tales we tell ourselves. Read more...

Somewhere Towards the End

A writer's painstaking account of her recent life, under the shadow of its end. Read more...

Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC 1874-1908

A new biography of the unique essayist, fabulist, and spiritual thinker. Read more...

Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life

An exploration of the parallel careers of two nineteenth-century titans. Read more...

Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation

A manifesto that combines a history of malicious wit with a critique of culture in the age of the blog. Read more...

Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan

The boardroom strategists who made "conservatism" a political watchword. Read more...

Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel

The poet who abandoned his verse -- and left behind a legacy that still haunts readers. Read more...

The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power

The challenges facing the Obama administration. Read more...

William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man

Christopher Byrd on a new life of the romantic iconoclast. Read more...

Sing Them Home

A tale of children orphaned by mother nature, from the author of Broken for You. Read more...

Things I've Been Silent About: Memories

The author of Reading Lolita in Tehran looks back at her homeland, through the lens of her youth. Read more...

Khan al-Khalili

A love triangle in wartime, from the author of the Cairo Trilogy. Read more...

Disquiet

In this family story, homecoming and tragedy are intertwined. Read more...

Banquet at Delmonico's: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America

The men who made Darwin, evolution and "survival of the fittest" the topic of a new century. Read more...

Death Between the Wars: Historical Mysteries Part IV

The final installment in our murderous tour of historical mystery and crime fiction. Read more...

Land of Marvels

Power struggles both great and small contaminate the excavation of an ancient Mesopotamian site in the latest from the author of Sacred Hunger. Read more...

The Liberal Hour: The 1960s and the Remaking of American Life

Did a set of arcane procedural changes upend decades of American political stasis? Read more...

The City and the Mountains

A sly and savage take on the world of fashionable hedonism. Read more...

Shakespeare and Modern Culture

The most revered writer in English may understand us better than we do him. Read more...

Rancid Pansies

Samper Fidelis -- Gerald Samper has finally decided to his own self be true. Read more...

Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America

Revisiting the magnitude of the crisis FDR faced can be both inspiring and overwhelming. Read more...

Esther's Inheritance

The Hungarian novelist portrays an heiress facing a collapsing way of life in this newly translated work Read more...

Bone by Bone

An army investigator revisits a childhood trauma as new questions arise about his brother's disappearance. Read more...

February 10: The Dreadnought Hoax, a practical joke at the British Navy's expense, occurred on this day in 1910. Among the young Bloomsbury conspirators was Virginia Woolf (then Virginia Stephen) and, though she played only a minor…

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.