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| Non-fiction |
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|  | Bean, Carl I WAS BORN THIS WAY
March 15, 2010 - Born to a teenaged mother in 1950s Baltimore, the author was raised by neighbors and suffered an extremely difficult childhood. He was sexually abused at a very young age, by his foster uncle and by other men, and his birth mother died of
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| | Bee, Samantha I KNOW I AM, BUT WHAT ARE YOU?
March 15, 2010 - The best pieces here are very funny, and the author's skewed, satirical perspective, honed on the show, is evident throughout most of the book. Particularly memorable essays cover the Canadian writer's pubescent crush on Jesus ("I didn't need to be
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|  | Bellos, Alex HERE'S LOOKING AT EUCLID
March 15, 2010 - Though he has an Oxford degree in math, former Guardian reporter Bellos (Futebol: Soccer: The Brazilian Way, 2002) approaches the subject as an enthusiastic amateur. He begins at the most basic level, with the concept of number itself, looking at
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| | Burden, Wendy DEAD END GENE POOL
March 15, 2010 - Burden and her brothers, "for all intents and purposes" parentless, were reared under the less-than-watchful eyes of hired help and her grandparents. The author's jokes about her grandmother's digestive system aren't funny enough to merit their
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| | Cardella, Avis SPENT
March 15, 2010 - Cardella exposes the self-destructive shopaholic tendencies that plagued her throughout early adulthood. Captivated at a young age by the allure of the fashion world depicted in the pages of Vogue, as well as her mother's glamorous sense of style,
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| | Cobb, William Jelani THE SUBSTANCE OF HOPE
March 15, 2010 - While time alone will reveal the meaning and impact of Barack Obama's election, the author strives to make early sense of an event of such magnitude that it warranted a New York Times headline ("Racial Barrier Falls in Decisive Victory") in the same
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| | Connelly, Karen BURMESE LESSONS
March 15, 2010 - Burma—or Myanmar, as renamed in 1989 by a militaristic government—has been steeped in political turmoil for decades. Known more for its political oppression and resolute opposition leaders than its rich heritage and lush geography, Burma's strife
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| | Ford, Roger EDEN TO ARMAGEDDON
March 15, 2010 - France-based military historian Ford turns in a comprehensive survey of the Great War as it was fought over territory belonging to a rapidly crumbling Ottoman Empire, including Egypt, Iraq, Turkey and what is now Saudi Arabia. With its
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| | Fraser, Evan D.G. EMPIRES OF FOOD
March 15, 2010 - In a follow-up to their previous collaboration, Beef: The Untold Story of How Milk, Meat, and Muscle Shaped the World (2008), Fraser (Environmental Studies/Leeds Univ.) and Improper Bostonian managing editor Rimas draw important lessons from the
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| | Heard, Alex THE EYES OF WILLIE MCGHEE
March 15, 2010 - Determining that there were too many holes in the case against Willie McGee—despite three trials, appeals and public outcry—Outside editorial director Heard (Apocalypse Pretty Soon: Travels in End-Time America, 1999), born in Jackson, Miss., decided
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| | Herzog, Brad TURN LEFT AT THE TROJAN HORSE
March 15, 2010 - The author begins close to Mt. Olympus, Wash.; like his role model, Odysseus, he headed for Ithaca (New York in this case). Herzog took off in a mammoth Winnebago, visiting hamlets called Troy, Calypso, Siren and Plato, as well as some places he
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| | Howard, David LOST RIGHTS
March 15, 2010 - In April 1865, souvenir-hunting soldiers from Gen. Sherman's army ransacked North Carolina's statehouse. One came away, probably unwittingly, with one of the 14 original copies of the Bill of Rights, which he carried to Ohio and later sold to the
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| | Junger, Sebastian WAR
March 15, 2010 - The author dives into the most perilous form of immersion journalism, attempting to create an unflinching account of frontline combat. The prototype of this approach is Michael Herr's peerless Dispatches (1977), a thoroughly unsentimental,
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| | Kaguri, Twesigye Jackson THE PRICE OF STONES
March 15, 2010 - Kaguri, now a university administrator at Michigan State University, was one of the lucky ones growing up in the impoverished rural village of Nyakagyezi, where his father owned a banana plantation. By 1991, while the author was pursuing his studies
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| | Keizer, Garret THE UNWANTED SOUND OF EVERYTHING WE WANT
March 15, 2010 - Harper's contributing editor Keizer (Help: The Original Human Dilemma, 2004, etc.) cites the Epic of Gilgamesh as the first recorded instance of humans being too noisy for their own good—civilization's uproar was so unbearable to the gods that they
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| | Klein, Stefan LEONARDO'S LEGACY
March 15, 2010 - In an excellent translation by Frisch, German science writer Klein (The Secret Pulse of Time: Making Sense of Life's Scarcest Commodity, 2008, etc.) states that early da Vinci scholars were mostly art historians. However, as they assembled thousands
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| | Kravitz, Lee UNFINISHED BUSINESS
March 15, 2010 - Reflecting on his life after losing his job, the author was not pleased with what he found—a workaholic living in self-exile not just from his family but his greater life. He felt diminished because of his firing, and he felt guilty about the
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| | Lane, David INTO THE HEART OF THE MAFIA
March 15, 2010 - British journalist Lane (Berlusconi's Shadow: Crime, Justice and the Pursuit of Power, 2004), the business and financial correspondent for The Economist in Italy, traveled through the southern regions to better understand the Mafia—or, more
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| | Lapp, Anna DIET FOR A HOT PLANET
March 15, 2010 - The author convincingly argues that food is "the integrating lens" for the innumerable responses to climate change. At three meals or more per day, Lapp writes, we are faced with either supporting or resisting industrial food production. So-called
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| | Mallaby, Sebastian MORE MONEY THAN GOD
March 15, 2010 - Using his extensive background in international finance, Washington Post columnist and Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Mallaby (The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations, 2004,
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| | Mariano, Connie THE WHITE HOUSE DOCTOR
March 15, 2010 - Rising up the ranks from captain to rear admiral during her service at the White House, Dr. Mariano was the first woman and first Filipino-American to become the physician to a president and the director of the White House medical unit. She writes
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| | Polakow-Suransky, Sasha THE UNSPOKEN ALLIANCE
March 15, 2010 - How could the young state of Israel embrace apartheid South Africa and become its greatest arms supplier? According to the author in this pointed expos, the 1967 Six-Day War propelled Israel from a socialist to imperialist state, and the moral
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| | Popoff, Alexandra SOPHIA TOLSTOY
March 15, 2010 - From the age of 18, when she married the much-older Leo Tolstoy, Sophia's energy was wholly devoted to her husband, whom she had loved since childhood. She was the inspiration for many of his most accomplished literary characters, his "muse,
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| | Prestowitz, Clyde THE GREAT BETRAYAL
March 15, 2010 - Prestowitz, Asia trade negotiator in the Reagan administration and economic advisor to the Obama campaign, takes an evenhanded view of economic events in this survey of the current fiscal landscape, a survey that is less histrionic than its title
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| | Remnick, David THE BRIDGE
March 15, 2010 - World-ranging because, writes the author, "Barack Obama's family, broadly defined, is vast. It's multi-confessional, multiracial, multi-lingual, and multi-continental." One of his half brothers, born in Africa, lives in China; a cousin is a rabbi;
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| | Richardson, Heather Cox WOUNDED KNEE
March 15, 2010 - The author examines partisan wrangling in the decades after the Civil War that observers of the current scene will find all too familiar. Looking to expand their power, President Benjamin Harrison and a Republican-controlled Congress admitted South
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| | Robin, Marie-Monique THE WORLD ACCORDING TO MONSANTO
March 15, 2010 - It's a wonder, if not a mystery, how the company has managed to sustain business, given its lengthy list of products that have been proven to be deleterious to life on earth: DDT, PCBs, dioxin, Agent Orange, bovine-growth hormones and more. Appalled
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| | Rojas, Clara CAPTIVE
March 15, 2010 - Rojas, a lawyer and former legislator, was captured by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 2002 with her friend, presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt. The author would have been all but overshadowed by her world-famous
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| | Rosen, William THE MOST POWERFUL IDEA IN THE WORLD
March 15, 2010 - In 1829, George and Robert Stephenson's Rocket inaugurated the age of steam-powered locomotion, hauling with it a rich lineage of previous inventions mostly by enterprising men in the Anglosphere—"Great Britain and its former colonies, including the
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| | Salisbury, Stephan MOHAMED'S GHOSTS
March 15, 2010 - The author focuses on two events: the closing of a Philadelphia mosque, Ansaarullah Islamic Society, after the arrest of its imam, Mohamed Ghorab, in 2004 by the Joint Terrorism Task Force and the IRS; and government hostility toward anti-Vietnam
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| | Schoenfeld, Gabriel NECESSARY SECRETS
March 15, 2010 - In December 2005, basing its article on leaked documents, the New York Times reported the details of a National Security Agency program to tap al-Qaeda phone calls and e-mails, which the paper characterized as unambiguously illegal. President Bush
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| | Stack, Megan K. EVERY MAN IN THIS VILLAGE IS A LIAR
March 15, 2010 - Since 9/11, Los Angeles Times Moscow bureau chief Stack has been covering the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon, and her account illustrates the senseless destruction and carnage wrought in the region by the United States and Israel. The author
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| | Stephenson, Paul CONSTANTINE
March 15, 2010 - The author draws on the latest research in this complicated early Byzantine era to fashion a fairly readable work, especially in terms of his treatment of the early spread of "the cult" of Christianity. Constantine (272–337) was the son of an army
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| | Stone, Norman THE ATLANTIC AND ITS ENEMIES
March 15, 2010 - Veteran British historian Stone (International Relations/Bilkent Univ.; World War One: A Short History, 2009, etc.) makes no secret of his politics. However, like equally conservative countryman Paul Johnson, who covered the same period in Modern
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| | Sullivan, James SEVEN DIRTY WORDS
March 15, 2010 - Boston Globe contributor Sullivan (The Hardest Working Man: How James Brown Saved the Soul of America, 2008, etc.) portrays Carlin as a singular cultural figure, connecting the 1950s' "Silent Generation" to '60s hippies, '70s stoners and '90s
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| | Tracy, Lisa OBJECTS OF OUR AFFECTION
March 15, 2010 - Following their mother's death, former Philadelphia Inquirer Home & Design editor Tracy (Journalism/Washington and Lee Univ.) and her sister assumed the task of sifting through a household's worth of antique furniture and collectibles. Faced with
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| | Valby, Karen WELCOME TO UTOPIA
March 15, 2010 - The author starts slowly, but once she gets rid of the early-on clichs ("Roots are rare these days"), she emerges as a sensitive, candid and balanced observer of life in a town that is both everywhere and nowhere. Valby first tries to establish
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| | Vanderwood, Paul J. SATAN'S PLAYGROUND
March 15, 2010 - Historian Vanderwood (Juan Soldado: Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint, 2004, etc.) seems to have enjoyed himself writing this account of Agua Caliente, a gambler's and drinker's paradise that rose in response to Prohibition America—and which was
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| | Watson, Bruce FREEDOM SUMMER
March 15, 2010 - Journalist Watson (Sacco and Vanzetti, 2007, etc.) creates a complete picture of this decisive summer, from the makeup of the young students who risked their lives to volunteer to a comprehensive portrait of a nation on the brink of wrenching change
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| | Waugh, John C. LINCOLN AND MCCLELLAN
March 15, 2010 - In the summer of 1862 a frustrated senator urged Abraham Lincoln to relieve Gen. George McClellan from command, begging the president to replace the Little Napoleon "with anybody." Lincoln was well-acquainted with the general's flaws—his proclivity
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| | Wells, Spencer PANDORA'S SEED
March 15, 2010 - When prehistoric man first sowed seeds some 10,000 years ago, they had no idea they were starting humans down the path to agriculture, settlements and civilization, a state now faced with grave challenges. Wells (Deep Ancestry: Inside the
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| | Ziegelman, Jane 97 ORCHARD
March 15, 2010 - Ziegelman (co-author: Foie Gras: A Passion, 1999) offers the stories of five immigrant families who lived in the building sometime between 1863, when it opened, and 1935. The author's research is both astonishing in its dimensions and enlightening
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| Online Exclusive
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| The Arabian Nights: A New Edition
March 01, 2010 - The most famous tales in The Arabian Nights have flown far beyond the confines of the night-shrouded bedroom in which Scheherazade spins stories to the vengeful king who will kill her come morning (unless she makes sure he just has to know what happens next). "There is no such thing as a canonical text of the Nights with a fixed number of stories," writes Middle East scholar Robert Irwin in his introduction to Volume 2 of Penguin Classics' new three-volume edition. So should we care that Cambridge University scholars Malcolm and Ursula Lyons, for the first time since Sir Richard Burton in the 1880s, have based this English translation on the 1839-42 Arabic edition that contains more stories than any other, usually in fuller versions? We should
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