The Walls Around Us: The Thinking Person's Guide to How a House Works
David Owen
With wry wit, Owen tells about his Connecticut house and how it works, or doesn't work, lacing his humor with informative vignettes. Continue reading »
Owen (The Walls Around Us) sounds like a reasonable human being but for his obsession with golf: as he puts it, ``Monks feel about God the way I feel about golf.'' But even those who spurn the links Continue reading »
Owen served as co-chairman of the steering committee of the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia in 1992-1995. From a negotiator's vantage point, he describes the search for a just Continue reading »
Around the House: Reflections on Life Under a Roof
David Owen
In 1991, New Yorker staff writer Owen wrote his wonderful The Walls Around Us: The Thinking Person's Guide to How a House Works. Or just as often, how it doesn't work. Now we find out just why he was Continue reading »
Look Out: The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View
Edward McPherson
Guggenheim fellow McPherson (The History of the Future) presents a charming, idiosyncratic meditation on the human urge to see further, and more, in this cultural history of the Continue reading »
Japanese studies scholar Sheftall turns to the bombing of Nagasaki in this harrowing follow-up to Hiroshima. In his opening passages, Sheftall briefly surveys Nagasaki’s Continue reading »
Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur
Jeff Pearlman
Biographer Pearlman (The Last Folk Hero) chronicles the brief, chaotic life of rap legend Tupac Shakur in this excellent biography. Shakur was born in 1971 to mother Afeni, a Continue reading »
The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding
Joseph J Ellis
This incisive history from Pulitzer winner Ellis (American Sphinx) probes the contradiction between the Revolutionary era’s defense of universal rights and its complicity in Continue reading »