All Books
- A modern-day Huck Finn travels the Mississippi on a flatboat
No one thought journalist Rinker Buck would succeed in taking a flatboat from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. He proves them wrong in “Life on the Mississippi.”
- Cover StoryWhat can a library card get you? Try a popcorn maker or ukulele.
Public libraries, among America’s oldest institutions, find new relevance in shelves stocked with everything from telescopes to cheese warmers.
- Where the Nile began: The perilous journey to seek the river’s source
An expedition to discover the Nile River’s origin was the “Holy Grail” of 19th-century exploration, as Candice Millard’s “River of the Gods” shows.
- Mohsin Hamid’s novel ‘The Last White Man’ imagines a post-racial world
British Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid explores a provocative question: Can white supremacy persist, if no one is white any longer?
- Survival tale ‘The Wall’ pits a woman against strange forces
Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer’s survival novel tells the story of a woman trapped behind a strange, impenetrable wall in a Bavarian forest.
- Bracing cultural criticism flows from the pen of Elaine Castillo
Provocative and pointed literary criticism in “How to Read Now: Essays” challenges people to become better, smarter, less Euro-centric readers.
- How Sasha Alsberg stays true to herself in the romance genre
Sasha Alsberg, who has a half-million followers on social media, explains how she stays true to herself and how she wrote her novel “Breaking Time.”
- How ‘Bull Durham’ went from long shot to movie classic
Director Ron Shelton’s “The Church of Baseball” tells the story behind his most famous film – one of the most popular sports movies of all time.
- Singer, dancer, pilot, spy: Josephine Baker’s wartime career
Fame gave Josephine Baker a cover for espionage during World War II, when her frequent tours enabled her to smuggle secrets out of occupied France.
- Giving Black women in pop music their due: Q&A with author of ‘Shine Bright’
Journalist and super fan Danyel Smith champions the role of Black women in pop music in “Shine Bright,” which combines memoir with music history.
- She overcame bias as a woman in science. Her memoir is testimony.
Lindy Elkins-Tanton, lead scientist for NASA’s Psyche mission, describes challenges and successes in “A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman.”
- Need a summer escape? Travel to coastal Maine, East Germany, occupied France.
The 10 best books of July flaunt Cold War-era spies, ice-cap explorers, and Maine summer people.
- Native American superhero comics leap stereotypes in a single bound
A bookstore in New Mexico fosters a community of Native artists, writers, and fans of the flourishing Indigenous comic book genre.
- If ‘work is the new religion,’ does society lose out?
Silicon Valley strives to meet workers’ every need. But what happens when employees get so ensconced in work that they disengage from outside life?
- Friendship tested, lives transformed in sublime novel ‘Fellowship Point’
Coastal Maine provides the setting for “Fellowship Point,” Alice Elliott Dark’s resplendent novel about caring for the places we love.
- ‘Star-Spangled Banner’: How its meaning changes with each generation
America’s national anthem forged a vision of unity. Today, says a musicologist, it can also highlight “whether the country is living up to its ideals.”
- The heyday of shopping malls is gone, but far from forgotten
Shopping malls, the once-gleaming symbols of suburban American prosperity, are ripe for reinvention and reuse, writes an architecture critic.
- From the particular to the universal: Cross-cultural stories
“A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times” by Ethiopian American writer Meron Hadero highlights immigrant stories of dislocation and identity.
- A history of American thought on abortion: It’s not what you think
With Roe and Casey overturned on Friday, legal scholar Geoffrey R. Stone, author of “Sex and the Constitution,” talks abortion history’s evolution in American thought.
- The fall of Tyrannosaurus rex and the rise of mammals on Earth
Tyrannosaurus bones help piece together the story of dinosaurs’ demise, while mammals emerged and adapted, in two outstanding natural history books.