Displaying articles for: July 2009

The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor

Is the ballyhooed "Ida" the missing link -- or merely the first celebrity fossil? Read more...

The Foundation Pit

A searing satire details the human costs of the Soviet Union's monstrous ambition. Read more...

The King of Vodka: The Story of Pyotr Smirnov and the Upheaval of an Empire

The history of one of the most famous names in liquor is also the history of Russia's emergence into the modern world. Read more...

The Girl Who Played with Fire

The follow-up to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo dives into the enigma of a young woman's past. Read more...

Empire of Illusion

Do our culture's fractured and fevered attentions divert us from the ideal of a functioning democracy? Read more...

Free: The Future of a Radical Price

The editor of Wired explains how we can get what we don't pay for. Read more...

Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life

The novelist examines an age?s obsession -- and her own -- with the mad, bad, dangerous poet. Read more...

The Earth Hums in B Flat

A young girl?s visions spur her to investigate a man's disappearance from her home village in Wales. Read more...

Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone

The political and literary life of the author of a 20th-century masterpiece, Bread and Wine. Read more...

A Short History of Women

A suffragette?s fatal struggle with "the woman question" extends through five generations. Read more...

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

The biographer of Shelley and Coleridge maps the explosive effects of an era of "Romantic Science." Read more...

Rain Gods

The author leaves behind bayous and the Big Easy for a harshly compelling South Texas tale. Read more...

Gabriel García Márquez: A Life

The life of a master of storytelling yields a narrative as weighty as one of its subject's own novels. Read more...

The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates

What the dismal science can tell us about the men who sailed under the Jolly Roger. Read more...

Civic War and the Corruption of the Citizen

A plea for the return of the citizen to the center of political life. Read more...

In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan

In this new look at the NATO invasion of Afghanistan, the author sees echoes of ancient campaigns. Read more...

The Walkable City: From Haussmann's Boulevards to Jane Jacobs' Streets and Beyond

What would life be like if driving weren't the only way to get there? Read more...

Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History

A historian reflects on the contradictions at the heart of her profession. Read more...

Exiles in the Garden

A lost age of Washington power shadows this tale of a photographer's uneasy truce with himself. Read more...

By His Own Rules

In the first full-length biography of the controversial secretary of defense, an infamous career takes on a nearly tragic dimension. Read more...

The Ascent of George Washington: The Hidden Political Genius of an American Icon

How the man made himself into a living monument. Read more...

Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us

The anatomy of a bubble. 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.