Displaying articles for: August 2009

Crow Planet

In the croak of the raven, a naturalist hears the echo of human song. Read more...

The Magicians

Spell-casters in a dark, Narnia-inspired world. Read more...

Everything Matters!

Prophecy and pop culture collide in this story of a life absurdly burdened with apocalyptic knowledge. Read more...

Chasing Icarus

Those daring young men and their flying machines. Read more...

An Expensive Education

A set of would-be world savers finds that global crisis tests the limits of their Harvard learning. Read more...

Strength in What Remains

From the author of Mountains Beyond Mountains, a true tale of survival and self-sacrifice. Read more...

The Unit

An imaginary future in which the "unproductive" -- especially artists! -- are put to chilling use. Read more...

A Paradise Built in Hell

In the wake of catastrophe, the roots of utopias? Read more...

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe

An argument that the rising Muslim populations in Europe augur dramatic transformations. Read more...

Perfecting Sound Forever

Is the history of audio recording a chronicle of decline and fall? Read more...

The Slippery Year

How a couple's midlife crisis led to a family's journey of discovery. Read more...

That Old Cape Magic

In the latest from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, summer memories retain their bittersweet grip. Read more...

The Management Myth

A trained philosopher unthinks his very successful career as a management consultant. Read more...

American Radical

Before there were Daily Kos, The Huffington Post, or Talking Points Memo, there was I. F. Stone. Read more...

The View from the Bridge

A career devoted to the seduction of story -- from Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper to Kirk vs. Kahn. Read more...

The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care

Why the cure for our ailing medical establishment requires a journey over the horizon. Read more...

South of Broad

A saga of friendship?s claims in a Charleston curiously shadowed by Joyce?s Dublin. Read more...

The Maples Stories

A career-spanning compendium of stories about a family that closely resembles the author's own. Read more...

Child's Play

Miss Marple meets Borges in this slippery thriller from Spain. Read more...

The Sages: Warren Buffett, George Soros, Paul Volcker and the Maelstrom of Markets

Can Buffett, Soros, and Volcker chart a course through an economic typhoon? Read more...

Inherent Vice

A tuned-in and turned-on private eye walks the decidedly pscyedelic streets of Los Angeles in 1969. Read more...

Imperial

The author of Europe Central takes on the history and current state of a vast borderland, in a book almost as big as his subject. 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.