Scientists make mistakes all the time, but those bumps in the road are often smoothed out in the legends that surround the greatest discoverers. Mario Livio, an astrophysicist, now turns the tables on those scientists. His intent in his well-researched and beautifully written new book is “to correct the impression scientific breakthroughs are purely success stories.”
When your father is Aristotle, life in ancient Greece is at least interesting. Annabel Lyon’s new novel considers the daughter’s plight.
Is there a part of your past that won’t leave you alone? In three new novels, three very different women re-examine who they were at points in their lives when everything familiar disappeared.
The British generals who lost the Revolutionary War were plenty capable, says scholar Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy. But their American counterparts were just that good.
James E. Atwood, author of “America and Its Guns,” to discuss how we came to revere firearms and accept gun deaths.
Bob Barry has photographed international jazz musicians for more than three decades, and a new exhibit of his images at the American Jazz Museum documents their spirit and energy as they played.
In “The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls,” Anton DiSclafani creates a precarious world where the possible loss of social standing, reputation and income seem as real as the Great Depression setting.
George Packer isn’t aiming to dissect America’s fall in “The Unwinding” as much as he’s trying to feel the emotional and personal truths the country’s fall has produced. In the end, “The Unwinding,” is a book that manages to be both sad and uplifting, much like the turbulent times it describes.
Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini’s most ambitious work begins in a rural Afghan village in 1952 with an impoverished laborer who must give up one of his children or watch the rest starve.
In Alex Grecian’s “The Black Country,” a team of Scotland Yard investigators has been called to the British Midlands, north of London, and asked to determine why a human eye has been found in a bird’s nest.
The black Los Angeles detective Easy Rawlins, believed dead at the end of the Walter Mosley’s last book, has another case to explore on the streets of the American dream city in the new novel “Little Green.”
Expansiveness is a strength of Meyer’s novel — it’s easy to become immersed in this hot, wide-open landscape — but also a weakness. By starting with the violence and romance of the Wild West, Meyer creates for himself the perhaps unfair challenge of making modern-day corporate politics as compelling as a battle on horseback.
In her novel ‘A Nearly Perfect Copy,’ Allison Amend plots a twisting tale that blends art-world fraud and cloning.
A novel detailing Scott Joplin’s life needs to deliver a syncopated experience. That’s how Eric Bronson, author of “King of Rags,” thinks his new book reads.
One of the keys to encouraging reading is to make it fun with exciting and funny books. Middle-grade readers who find an author they like, especially one who has books in a series or multiple series lines such as Lemony Snicket and Eoin Colfer, may have an entire summer of reading to dive into.
Theroux has no patience for the “slum tourism” or “poverty porn” that has mushroomed in Africa. Nor does he approve of safari tourism or Hollywood humanitarians, the Bonos and Oprahs and Angelina Jolies, who use Africa’s hunger and squalor to burnish their outsize egos.
Susan Nussbaum’s new novel, “Good Kings Bad Kings,” enlarges readers’ empathy, opening our eyes to the realities of disabled youth.
In the fourth Robert Langdon novel, the Harvard symbologist is caught up in a conspiracy in Florence tied to Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy.’
David Stockman, author of “The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America,” finds little hope for Main Street on Wall Street. Stockman speaks at 6:30 p.m Wednesday at the Central Library.
When so many adult fiction offerings read like variations on a theme of emotional impotence, is it any wonder readers are turning to young-adult novels for spellbinding stories and authentic connection?
“The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945” is the third volume of Rick Atkinson’s Liberation Trilogy, which details the triumph of the Allied powers in Europe and North Africa. He began researching the project in 1999. But, arguably, he began working that story 18 years before that, during a three-hour drive through southeastern Kansas.
In the third volume of Rick Atkinson’s Liberation Trilogy, he reconstructs the period from D-Day to V-E Day by weaving a multitude of tiny details into a tapestry of achingly sublime prose.
A reader-friendly version of more than 200 years of U.S. Army history would seem a contradiction in terms. But that’s what Kansas City area military scholar D.M. Giangreco achieves with “The United States Army: The Definitive Illustrated History.”
“When you are handed your screaming newborn for the first time,” Jim Gaffigan writes, “you are simultaneously handed a license for gallows humor.” The comic will discuss his new book Tuesday at Unity Temple on the Plaza.
“Epic” is a word used too often to describe lesser work, but Marie Arana’s marvelously readable “Bolivar: American Liberator” is a biography that earns its adjectives.
