Alan Lomax

Few individuals have contributed more to popular culture than the musicologist Alan Lomax, who discovered and popularized such performers as Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie. Without his efforts, chronicled in John Szwed's welcome biography, the musical landscape of the twenty-first century might well be unrecognizable.

June 20: Today is World Refugee Day, as designated by the United Nations in 2001. According to the renowned sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, the modern refugee problem should not be attributed to wars and despots but to a civilization that…

Very few debut novels exhibit the charm, assurance, emotional depth and bravura fabulation which the lucky reader will discover in Helene Wecker's

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