The Overwhelming Truth

Before she had her first child, as an only child herself, Lauren Sandler was the liaison to all things only among her group of friends ambivalent about expanding beyond their first-born. “People ask as though they want permission [to stop having children],” Sandler says. When she gave birth to her daughter, Dahlia, Sandler began reflecting on her friends’ inquiries only to realize a general lack of information on the subject.

Then Sandler received an email from one of her friends newly pregnant with her second child: “And I know how you feel about that,” her friend wrote, assuming Sandler felt ...

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Framing the Human Quality

Primates is the story of the groundbreaking research of three primatologists – Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey and Biruté Galdikas – as they observed chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans, respectively, over many years of tedious research. Sounds scientific, technical, the poetic equivalent of any given technical paper in the Journal of Astrophysics, right?

Wrong.

The lighthearted, fast-paced story telling of Jim Ottaviani coupled with Maris Wicks’ vibrant, lively and at times shocking illustrations builds a perfect construct between two seemingly unrelated things: hard science and comic books.

“I have never been interested – for any of the books that I have done – in writing a ...

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The Year of Living Dangerously

Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm, Mardi Jo Link’s new memoir, begins with a beer-soaked bang: in this case, the bang of a wedding album landing on top of a bonfire. (It should be noted that when a woman gets drunk at 10 in the morning, builds an impromptu bonfire in her front yard and starts chucking the flotsam and jetsam of her near 20-year marriage into the blaze, she should never underestimate the satisfying hiss of burning wedding photos.) Between pitches into the fire and pulls of Miller High Life, Link gazes with binoculars ...

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A Mammoth Art Project: Sculpting New Life

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To Fall, Then Rise Again

When Alfred Pelikan invited Dean Jensen to his home for lunch, he was simply the retired director of the Milwaukee Art Institute. In the late ‘70’s, Dean Jensen was a feature writer and art critic for the Milwaukee Sentinel. He had just published a chronicle of circus history – The Biggest, the Smallest, the Longest, the Shortest, written largely on his lunch breaks at the Sentinel. Alfred Pelikan was a frequent source, and Jensen didn’t hesitate to accept the lunch invitation.

The two men had “a spirited talk about art” over a kitchen table, after which Pelikan told Jensen ...

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They Who Laugh, Last

                Four Europeans go hiking together and get terribly lost.

                First they run out of food, then out of water.

                “I’m so thirsty,” says the Englishman. “I must have tea!”

                “I’m so thirsty,” says the Frenchman. “I must have wine ...

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Never Give Up

Iranian-American actress Shohreh Aghdashloo is strikingly beautiful, but it’s her voice that is truly distinctive and unmistakable: deep, smoky and influenced by the accents of at least three different countries, it is a voice that belongs to a performer, a cadence you’d want to listen to no matter what she has to say.

Fortunately, Aghdashloo has a fascinating life story to tell, which she recounts in her memoir, The Alley of Love and Yellow Jasmines. The title recalls the narrow lovers’ lanes and fragrant spring blooms of Aghdashloo’s native Tehran. “Once, an interviewer asked me what I ...

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Out of Obscurity

Pouring rain is pummeling Manhattan when I meet David Margolick at a West Village café. I arrive drenched and needing caffeine. Margolick is dry, sipping coffee and has the calm, collected air you’d expect from a seasoned journalist with a prep school pedigree. He has reported for esteemed publications like The New York Times and Vanity Fair and his books cover topics like segregation, the boxer Joe Louis and American law—subjects with which the general public is familiar. His latest book is titled Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns. John who?

I admit ...

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Context Matters

Veteran political writer Jonathan Alter set himself quite a challenge when he decided to write The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies. His publisher wanted the book published now, which meant the reporting had to be done mostly before the 2012 presidential campaign ended. In addition to not knowing whether President Obama or Mitt Romney would win, Alter was told that the Obama campaign decided not to make its staff available for interviews during the campaign to book writers. (“I had to get people who were disobeying the rules to cooperate with me,” Alter told me.) Fortunately for him, he ...

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Five Titanic Ego Clashes That Shaped New Deal New York

Politics ain’t bean bag, and as prodigious personalities such as Franklin Roosevelt and Fiorello La Guardia guided New York City through depression and war, some titanic ego clashes ensued, as I discovered while writing City of Ambition: FDR, La Guardia, and the Making of Modern New York. Here are some of the most memorable ones, chosen with both enduring significance and short-term sensation in mind.

5. Fiorello La Guardia vs. Adolf Hitler

No one brought out Mayor La Guardia’s histrionic eloquence quite like Der Fuehrer—or as La Guardia called him during a brief address in 1937, “that ...

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The Other Side of the Story

The pursuit of that question spurred Edsel on a fascinating adventure that has lasted 15 years now, and resulted in three books about the remarkable efforts undertaken to snatch some the world’s most ...

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What Went Wrong

George Packer’s The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America is a story about change and language: the disappearance of the jobs, social structures, and securities that sustained older generations, and the way we talk about that loss. The book follows three central characters—Dean Price, a struggling energy entrepreneur in North Carolina; Tammy Thomas, a factory worker turned activist in Youngstown, Ohio, and Jeff Connaughton, a D.C. lawyer and lobbyist. Interlaced with their evolving stories are biographies of places—Tampa, Silicon Valley, Wall Street—and of celebrities, from Newt Gingrich to Jay-Z. All are connected by ...

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The Most Surprising Things I Learned Writing The Price of Justice

Laurence Leamer's The Price of Justice: A True Story of Greed and Corruption is out this month. A book Kirkus' critic referred to as "a well-constructed... eye-opening story about the relations among politics, business and justice," The Price of Justice is a fast-paced nonfiction legal thriller that tracks the corruption and mayhem that happened in West Virginia coal country in the 1990s and 2000s. We asked Leamer to provide a list of the most surprising things he learned while writing the book. - Ed.

1)    I had no idea how hard lawyers work and all that goes into the preparation ...

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You Can’t Tell It All

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Rick Atkinson is anticipating this month’s publication of The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945, the final installment of his acclaimed Liberation Trilogy, partly because of the opportunity it’s sure to give him to resume valuable interactions with fans of his books, when he notes how often they–and in this case one gentleman from Texas in particular–actually aid in his writing.

“Governor Rick Perry, with whom I probably don’t have a whole lot in common, other than the fact that he is a reader of military history, called ...

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A City Under Siege

Near the end of Boston’s picturesque Freedom Trail lies a towering monument to the battle of Bunker Hill, visited by thousands of tourists each year. How many of them, when contemplating the 1775 battle, picture Boston under siege, a “vision of Moses: a bush burning but not consumed”? Writing in 1776, Reverend Samuel Cooper used these last words to describe the city around the time of the early Revolutionary conflicts. They also appear in an epigraph to Nathaniel Philbrick’s new book, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution, an account of the prerevolutionary tension in and around ...

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Native Sons & Daughters

“I’m going to be all right” Rodney Mason said out loud three times to his social worker to convince himself, in between sobs, at the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in West Orange, New Jersey, where he was enrolled in physical therapy. Mason, then a 27-year-old former pitching star, had been in and out of trouble on the hardscrabble streets of his native Newark since high school, using and selling drugs, but this time a dispute over a woman led another man to shoot him. That bullet paralyzed him from the waist down and set in motion a transformation—of ...

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The Captain's Log

There are very few indignities of middle age and parenting to which Dan Zevin has not subjected himself. But there is one:

“You know those milking devices they have for men–they have them in bra and vest form?” Zevin asks.

“No.”

“Some fathers wear them and it’s equipped with two fake boobs,” Zevin explains, “with baby bottles in there and people nurse the infant like they’re a lactating mom. Well that’s one thing I’ve never gone for.”

I suppose every man has his limits. With Zevin’s latest offering, Dan Gets a Minivan: Life at ...

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Waging Daily War – With the Plate

Mika Brzezinski is all sharp angles, sharp tongue. As co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, she holds her own with heads of state, celebrities and equally aggressive co-host Joe Scarborough—but backwards and in high heels. At her leanest, she was 118 chiseled pounds in a size-two dress.

Great job, great body, great life, right? “Honestly, I wasn’t happy. I didn’t look good. I looked really skinny, but if you took all the gunk off my face, all the makeup off, and the right clothes off, it actually didn’t work that well,” says Brzezinski. “I’m much ...

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Disturbing Mental Images

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The Book That’s Become the Law

Would you like to have a mental illness? Let me be more precise: Do you seek a name for your suffering? An official diagnosis could enable you to receive health insurance, benefits or special services from schools; to get prescription drugs; and perhaps to conceive of yourself as someone capable of getting better.

Well, has the American Psychiatric Association (APA) got a book for you! The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) does it all, proffering those handy little numerical codes that make its take on suffering seem authoritative and scientific.

“This is the bullshit problem,” says Gary ...

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