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To make it to the oratorical Valhalla that is The Moth Mainstage, you’ve got to have bravery, vulnerability, and a hell of a story to tell. You absolutely cannot have that story printed on sheets of paper.

“People wanted us to do a book for a long time...but I was a little bit reluctant because it’s The Moth—our storytellers are not allowed notes,” says Catherine Burns, artistic director of The Moth, the acclaimed, not-for-profit, live storytelling organization founded ...

With the continuing news regarding the Trump administration’s plans to ignore human-caused climate change, gut the EPA, and generally disdain the natural sciences, it’s more important than ever to pay close attention to books about nature, the environment, and other similar topics. In that spirit, I put forward the following significant books as we enter what is likely to be the hottest spring on record (thanks, Chinese hoaxsters):

The Gulf by Jack E. Davis

“In light of the 2010 devastation ...

When Kelly Rindfleisch wrote the words, “No one cares about crazy people,” she never dreamed Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times-bestselling author Ron Powers would read them. 

“I cannot describe to you the emotion, the shockwave, that hit me when I read that quote,” says Powers, author of No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America, who Kirkus reached at home in Castleton, Vermont.

Rindfleisch, who was Wisconsin Governor Scott ...

Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway. The noted American author, widely admired and often parodied, was many things over his long career, from amateur boxer to open-ocean fisherman and world traveler. Along the way, he dropped into some of the ugliest war zones in the world of his day, casting his lot with the underdog in the fight, whether the French Resistance or Fidel Castro.

Along the way, too, he got tangled up in some heady threads of espionage. So suggests Nicholas Reynolds ...

Since childhood, Ariel Levy has been relegated to the terrible “too”s— too ardent, too aggressive, too male, too much.

“One of the defining experiences of my childhood was being told to tamp it down—not be so loud, not be so forceful, not be so assertive,” says Levy, author of The Rules Do Not Apply. “Everywhere I turned, someone was [sending me] the message, which was you’d better find a way to feminize or you’re not going to be OK ...

A certain American presidential candidate, back when such admissions could shock the yokels, admitted that he had tried cannabis as a student. He never inhaled, he added. The remark elicited much laughter, and it remains a punch line. But, in his endlessly lawyerly way, the candidate was telling us that while he may not have smoked, that didn’t rule out eating a mountain of Panama’s finest.

We owe that possibility, in part, to Alice B. Toklas, whose partnership with Gertrude ...

If someone asked you to guess how many books have been written about Adolf Hitler or Germany’s World War II–era army, you might think, “Do I have to?” And you would be forgiven for reacting that way: even if you don’t know the number of books, you know the tally must be overwhelming (in fact, a cursory search on Amazon lists 23,458 titles about Hitler). That’s one reason Norman Ohler’s Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich is so ...

After the relative doldrums of January and February, the March publishing schedule is packed. In addition to my favorite for the month, Michael Finkel’s The Stranger in the Woods, about the infamous Hermit of North Pond in rural Maine (a book I’ll write about in more detail in the next issue), here are five other intriguing books for your March reading list, featuring quotes from our reviews.

Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch

“This posthumous collection of food pieces by ...