When you look at the problems that face world leaders, especially in times of crisis, you might think, "You have to be crazy to want to do that job." To psychiatrist Nassir Ghaemi, being "crazy", or, more precisely, having some form of mental illness may be just what is needed for some leaders to be able to accomplish great things during times of great need.

Ghaemi examines, in read more...

What if you were a young and gifted scientist/inventor who dreamed of attending the best college for sciences in the world, but you knew that your application would never be accepted? What would you do to make your dream a reality? These are the questions explored by Lev AC Rosen in All Men of Genius, a wonderful steampunk-infused comedy of manners.

Violet Adams spends read more...

In this heartbreaking and haunting coming-of-age tale, an adolescent boy suffers the loss of both parents. Through a series of reflections and encounters that are seamlessly woven into a plot filled with the intrigue of a John Le Carre novel, family secrets are revealed that bit by bit clarify childhood misperceptions and longings for familial intimacy. Anatomy is aptly used in the title, read more...

What if you were given a nearly impossible task to accomplish, in an equally impossible time frame, with the knowledge that if you were unsuccessful, Earth would be plunged into war with a technologically superior race? This is the scenario for The Android's Dream by John Scalzi.

Harry Creek is an unassuming mid-level diplomat with Earth’s State Department. His job is read more...

During this end-of-the-year holiday season, numerous presentations of The Nutcracker ballet are being performed with ballet dancers dressed as sugar plums, candy canes, waltzing flowers, and other holiday treats. Jennifer Homans’ Apollo’s Angels: a History of Ballet is especially wonderful to read right now. It will be of interest to everyone, not only balletomanes who may read more...

In this gripping psychological thriller, British author S.J. Watson explores the relationship between memory, identity and trust. The results are terrific - and terrifying.

When Christine Lucas wakes up each morning, she doesn't know where she is and doesn't recognize the man beside her - her husband, Ben. Christine is 47, but her memory mysteriously stalled out somewhere in her read more...

If you have ever toyed with the idea of being a chef or a cook, or have had the urge to own a restaurant, especially after watching one of those ubiquitous competition-style tv shows, you might want to think about the reality of a life in food beyond a few hours of a contrived reality. Better yet read this autobiography of a chef and restaurant owner who got into this line of work without a read more...

Although I went in fully prepared to find this book at least mildly irritating (à la The Bedwetter by Sarah Silverman, or pretty much anything by Chelsea Handler, whose titles are always better than her books), Bossypants turned out to be an entertaining read that's perfect for a weekend chuckle or to unwind with before bedtime.

Tina Fey starts off by describing her read more...

At the age of forty-eight, Umberto Eco published his first novel, The Name of the Rose, the eponymous film followed, and a young novelist was born. There followed several other successful novels and the most recent, read more...

A fascinating collection of investigative journalism about real-life mysteries, baffling crimes, and eclectic curiosities by the bestselling author of The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon.

Many of the collection's best essays deal with criminal cases. The read more...

What if there was another New York City, a copy of New York from the 1920s, that was trapped in a parallel dimension and known to its citizens, who have never heard of New York, as the The Empire State? There are boot-leggers, private detectives in overcoats, dames and femmes fatales, rain-drenched streets, and a seemingly never-ending night. There are also police blimps, super heroes, read more...

Eleven-year-olds Celia Durst and Djuna Pearson are best friends, queen bees, and mean girls, as likely to turn on each other as the wannabes and hangers-on who vie for their favor. Until one day after school, when Djuna gets into a stranger's brown sedan and disappears forever.

Twenty years later, Celia is suddenly overcome by a long-repressed memory that packs a wallop. There was read more...

Siblings Annie and Buster have spent most of their adult lives trying to escape the notorious legacy of their parents, the performance artists Caleb and Camille Fang. Growing up, they were frequent participants in the Fangs’ madcap art “happenings,” where they appeared as Child A and Child B. As a family, the Fangs infiltrated parks, airplanes, shopping malls, and beauty pageants like a pack read more...

What makes this book especially compelling is that the authors provide complex portrayals of the many people involved in the case - not only the victim Chandra Levy, but also her family, the various lawyers, FBI and D.C. Police investigators assigned to her case, and former congressman Gary Condit, who was the main focus of the initial investigation. This book also reveals the numerous read more...

What if the usual trappings of the Steampunk sub-genre were extended beyond the Victorian era and beyond the United Kingdom? What would an alternate New York in the 1920s look like? This is the jumping-off point for George Mann’s Steampunk-tinged, noir and pulp influenced novel.

The year is 1926 in an alternate New York from our own. The streets are choked with coal-powered cars read more...

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making may very well delight, successfully melding all sorts of creatures and conventions culled from fairy tales and folklore. Author Catherynne M. Valente, best known for adult fiction, has blown the lid off her usual style with this book, which was initially written in installments read more...

Born to a Danish mother and an African American G.I. father, and raised in Europe, Rachel has never thought of herself as black or white. But when a family tragedy sends her to Portland to live with her grandmother in a predominantly African American community, 11-year-old Rachel suddenly finds herself defined by her race. Though her grandmother is loving and provides Rachel with more read more...

The year is 1845, and crime, poverty, and political corruption are rampant in New York City. The potato famine has driven thousands of Irish immigrants into the city’s slums, and anti-Catholic sentiment is high. The streets are filled with brothels, opium dens, and hundreds of orphaned, abandoned, and runaway children.

It’s in the face of these conditions that the city’s first read more...

Over the past two decades, comics have become so much a part of mainstream culture as to be neither geeky nor cool, nerdy nor hip. However, it would seem that no one told Kate Beaton of this. These comic strips collected from her popular web comic Hark! A Vagrant embrace the perennially unhip topics of science, history, and classic literature, read more...

In April 1967, James Earl Ray escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary by smuggling himself out of the prison bakery in a breadbox. He drifted to Mexico, then to Los Angeles, where he attended bartending school and volunteered for the presidential campaign of Alabama Governor and staunch segregationist George Wallace. During this time, Ray's racist beliefs became an obsession, and he read more...

Recently named one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2011, How To Save a Life is a young adult novel that invites - and deserves - a wide readership. Whether you’re a teen or an adult, you’ll find a lot to like in this insightful, big-hearted novel about a grieving family struggling to move forward read more...

So much medical research today depends upon laboratory-grown human cells which allow researchers to perform repeatable controlled experiments that mimic the human body. During the first half of the 20th century, medical researchers raced to discover and successfully culture these "immortal cells" - cells that duplicate themselves perfectly, continually, and efficiently.

The first read more...

This is the story of an unnamed 14-year-old girl growing up in the farm-implement capital of the world: Zanesville, Illinois. It’s a wry observation of the folly and seriousness surrounding a middle-class life in 1970s America, which includes first flirtations and overworked mothers, the melodrama of cheerleaders and the drama of corporal punishment, telepathy with best friends and feral read more...

The temptation must have been great indeed to refuse an interview with Oriana Fallaci, journalist, war correspondent and novelist. There were those who claimed they never gave interviews, but consented to her request, all with prior knowledge of her work. Henry Kissinger called his interview, "the most disastrous conversation I ever had with the press." And this from the former Secretary of read more...

The premise of Grunwald's charming novel was inspired by a home economics curriculum studied by many young women at American colleges during the first half of the 20th century. To help students gain hands-on experience in homemaking and child-rearing, local orphanages would supply colleges with a "practice baby" to be looked after by student "mothers."

Baby Henry comes to the Wilton read more...

Patti Smith, punk, poet, artist and muse, describes her coming of age in the 1960s in this award-winning memoir. The book describes her hungry childhood and adult life, as well as the time she spent struggling and meeting the instrumental people of her life. Her relationship, first as lovers and later as friends, with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe is described tenderly. In read more...

It would be difficult to imagine two friends more well-matched, more made for one another, as Gail Caldwell and Caroline Knapp. When the two met, both were writers, athletes, and dog lovers. Both were recovering alcoholics, and both were entering middle age, quite contentedly single. Caldwell writes, "Finding Caroline was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her read more...

Meghan O'Rourke, who has been published mostly as poet, has penned a memoir of her mother's death and her own grieving process that is simply remarkable. She has managed to take one of the most personal and painful moments in anyone's life and turn it into a wonderfully written examination of life, death, and all that comes with it.

O'Rourke's mother died of colorectal cancer at age read more...

Mary Gordon has been trailing the women of her generation with novels since 1978, when Final Payments appeared with a protagonist who felt miserable in her sex's traditional role of selfless caretaker. Thirty years later, Gordon's women are still negotiating an equitable place in society, read more...

With 2009's The Magicians, Lev Grossman introduced readers to the dazzlingly imaginative wizarding world of Brakebills Academy, its angsty, college-aged students, and a premise that asked, "What if finding out you could do magic didn't fix anything that was wrong with your life? What if it read more...

Sometimes true love does not take hold at a convenient time, does not make sense to outsiders or create good sense in those whom it grabs and spins around in a whirl of emotion, and so it was with Lady Antonia Fraser, historian and novelist, and Harold Pinter, playwright, director and actor. When they met briefly at a dinner party, January 8, 1975, Fraser said, ". . .now I'm off." Pinter read more...

The uniquely American melodramatic saga of the theatrical Booth family has been told before, but historian Nora Titone focuses on the rivalry between Edwin and John Wilkes Booth as the catalyst for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Raised on an isolated farm in the wilds of Maryland, John Wilkes grew up with a steady diet of the blood and thunder melodramas of the time, while his read more...

What if zombies overran a Star Trek convention? Would the attendees’ devotion to the franchise, and possible familiarity with the science fiction genre, give them an advantage over non-fans in surviving a zombie attack? This humorous and enjoyable question is answered in Kevin David Anderson's and Sam Stall’s Night of the Living Trekkies.

Jim Pike (yes, this pun should read more...

Before he was Ernest “Papa” Hemingway, the big game-hunting, hard-drinking, womanizing giant of American letters, he was an unknown writer striving for the almost mythical bigness he would later attain. And before she became The First Mrs. Hemingway, an often skimmed-over footnote in the writer’s biography, she was Hadley Richardson, a St. Louis woman who played the piano, swam like a fish, read more...

Ernest Cline sets some sort of land speed record in establishing the premise of his debut novel, Ready Player One. In less than ten pages, the reader will learn that:

1. It’s 2044, and the planet has been more or less done in by its own excesses, humanity reduced to poverty, pestilence, and war.

2. The sole bright spot in this world is OASIS, a fully interactive read more...

In this harrowing, eye-opening account, investigative journalist Scott Carney goes inside the multi-billion dollar industry of human bodies, and studies the international market for organs, bones, genetic material, and even live human beings. As readers learn about murky international regulation, and the desperation that drives prospective buyers and sellers into a shady, and often dangerous read more...

2011 was a very good year for fiction, with new titles by heavyweights of contemporary American letters like Jeffrey Eugenides, Ann Patchett, and read more...

In Skippy Dies, Murray visits the humiliation, pain, and disillusionment of adolescence so vividly, don't be surprised if you experience a traumatic junior high flashback while reading it. The book wastes no time delivering on its title - in the opening lines, 14-year-old Daniel "Skippy" Juster, a student at a Catholic prep school in Dublin, keels over in the midst of a doughnut-eating read more...

The early days of space exploration are fascinating. The book and the film version of The Right Stuff provide very personal insights into the lives and the activities of the U. S. Space program which, with rare exception, was very open. By contrast, the early days of the Soviet space read more...

Charles "Teenie" Harris photographed everyone who came into his sight and was of interest to him, from people in an average neighborhood to the very well-known who came to visit Pittsburgh when it was Steel City USA, and the Hill District which was the African American community. His life and experiences cover the twentieth century--1908-1998. A charming, handsome and congenial man with ethics read more...

Sutty, a traveler from Earth, comes to the planet Aka to study its culture and people. However, she arrives in a place very different from what she expects. Instead of a world with an ancient culture and language she finds a planet rushing towards modernization - and in the process losing many of the things that made it unique, the very things she came to study. Everywhere she goes, this state read more...

In the rugged Primorye region of Russia's Far East, people have shared the Boreal Forest with Amur (or Siberian) tigers for hundreds of years. "If I don't touch her," the local saying goes, "she won't touch me." But in December 1997, that delicate arrangement was threatened when a poacher named Markov shot a tiger at close range, wounding its leg. Over the next several days, the tiger read more...

Starting in 2011 and going through the middle of 2012, Southern California cultural institutions have joined together thematically to celebrate the birth of the Los Angeles art scene from 1945-1980. Pacific Standard Time, the name of this unprecedented undertaking that is funded by The Getty, celebrates the multiplicity of artists and works created during this fertile period; the diversity read more...

"You should ask them about it sometime. There's a lot about your parents you don't know. And they won't be alive forever to answer your questions."

On April 25, 1975, GB Tran's family fled Vietnam, just days before Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese Army. A year later, he was born in South Carolina, and grew up a junk food-eating, video game-playing American kid with read more...

Who among us hasn’t, at least once, taken leave of our senses and fallen in love with a wholly unsuitable, entirely wrong-for-us person?

Why We Broke Up, the first young adult novel by Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket, author of the Series of Unfortunate Events books), is a deceptively simple story about a pair of ill-suited lovers who meet cute, fall hard, and end read more...