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Reviews & Essays

The Unexamined Orwell

Scholars have pored over his writing, but the life of the author of 1984 and Animal Farm remains mysterious.

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Reviews & Essays

Becoming Ray Bradbury

The legendary sci-fi writer's growth from high school student to master of imagination.

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Reviews & Essays

Amazing Dogs

A "Cabinet of Canine Curiosities" that chronicles four-legged feats, both mythical and real.

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Reviews & Essays

Confessions of a Young Novelist

A "characteristically sly" memoir of the writer's work as an architect of meticulously detailed fictions. 

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Reviews & Essays

The Hollywood Sign

 The history of an icon so entrenched it seems to have grown right out of the hillside.

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Reviews & Essays

Craving Earth

The strange and complex history of pica—the practice of eating dirt.

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Reviews & Essays

The Art of Great Speeches

 What separates a great orator from a tedious windbag? And does it matter?

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Reviews & Essays

Music for Silenced Voices

Beauty and dread in the quartets Shostakovich created in Stalin's shadow.

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Reviews & Essays

The Great Archimedes

The legendary mathematician and his tragic fate.

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Reviews & Essays

Buzz: The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley

A new life of one of the great masters of Hollywood spectacle, a restless and reckless pursuer of excess.

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Reviews & Essays

Geographies of Mars

The Red Planet has inspired scientific fantasies ranging from little green men to monstrous canal-builders.

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Reviews & Essays

Infinite City

Twenty-two versions of San Francisco, in the form of revelatory, provocative maps.

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Reviews & Essays

Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon

The poet remembered for his witty treatment of love lived on the razor's edge of 17th-century political intrigue.

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Reviews & Essays

Barbecue

Was the pig roast the most important discovery Europeans made in the New World?

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Reviews & Essays

Create Dangerously

The award-winning novelist on the suffering in her Haitian birthplace, and the role of the immigrant artist.

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