Two things seem indisputable: American healthcare costs are irrationally inflated and Americans are not commensurately healthy. Nortin M. Hadler, M.D (The Last Well Person: How to Stay Well Despite the Health-Care System) has the requisite irreverence and skepticism toward medical providers and the healthcare labyrinth to write a
Not being a fan of Guns N’ Roses, or whatever motherlode of music they mined, I nonetheless accept that the lead figures of commercially successful bands can’t help but have interesting narratives attached to their careers. Considering the mercurial Rose has reportedly been a Malibu hermit since the early
Margot Livesey—whose newest opus, House on Fortune Street, you should include in your to-be-read list—writes: When I was almost five my father married my stepmother and we began to spend our summer holidays in Pitlochry, the small Scottish town where my stepmother’s sister lived. There
Iowa Writer’s Workshop guru Ethan Canin (Carry Me Across the Water) has a number of well-regarded books under his belt, most notably his story collection The Palace Thief. His newest effort takes a scion of the working class, Corey Sifter, from estate yard boy to U.S. senatorial
The latest opus from Wang Anyi (Baotown) is set in post-World War II Shanghai, and traces the survival of ghetto girl Wang Qiyao, who is deeply impressed with the incandescence of 1940s Hollywood and must hide her “decadence” from the various ebbs and flows of Mao and Co.’s
A family that includes William and Henry and Alice James is an obvious motherlode of story, information, and speculation—all that remains is for Paul Fisher to build a coherent, insightful narrative about these fascinating siblings. Asked what is new about his James family book, Fisher explains: Until just a
Jim Holt, who writes for a number of smart publications—The New York Times, The New Yorker, Slate, Lingua Franca, and then some—tries to answer the question, “What’s so funny?” Being the engaging and skillful writer he is, he is not obliged to succeed for this book to
There is some quibbling regarding the use of the word “empire” in Pekka Hämäläinen’s fascinating new history of the powerful and unrecognized Comanche tribe of the American Southwest and Northern Mexico. Nonetheless, this highly original narrative details the tribe’s accomplishments and impressive geographical reach throughout the 18th and
Physicist Alan Sokal is famous for his 1996 Social Text article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” written as a parody of postmodernism (it is included in this book). Of course, it caused much warranted fulmination in academic circles, as well as a stir in the
The Eugene V. Debs story is a moving, albeit instructive one, though he likely will never be given his due as one of the great figures of American history. Jailed for speaking out against the so-called “war to end all wars,” Socialist Debs ran for president in 1920, garnering
