Indescribable—except to mention the author’s position as professor of religion at Columbia, and that it contains some of the finest prose and photography you’ll find... Read More

The author, a novelist, wrote these sparkling, discursive essays during Japan’s brutal World War II occupation of Shanghai. Readers are likely to consider her a carefree... Read More

Few memoirs have the concision, modesty, and charm that mark this late-life work by Donald Keene, America’s most renowned scholar and interpreter of Japan. As a Columbia... Read More

Americans are familiar with a romanticized view of geisha life in Japan, one that includes art and music, poetry and social status. Not all geisha, however, live such a life, as... Read More

Deák’s experience as a writer and picture-researcher in her prize-winning Picturing America (1988) stands her in good stead to this sparkling appraisal of New York. An... Read More

Shrewdly capitalizing on the marquee recognition factor of Shakespeare in Love, Charney, Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University and past president of the... Read More

As the future of literature and the humanities at the university level are crucial to the independent thinker, Carl Woodring’s Literature is an important book for those, such... Read More

The degradation of North American sea beaches symbolizes the timeless struggle of civilization to tame wilderness, a struggle which, according to New York Times science editor... Read More

If hunger has no ambition, why do we still buy so many things once our basic needs are fulfilled? According to Twitchell, culture critic and author of Lead Us Into Temptation,... Read More

In a successful compilation, even a mini-biographical sketch can have the effect of eliciting energized interest in the subject with a wish to pursue reading. And Birnbaum... Read More

Finding Fran traces the lives of two women with apparently similar backgrounds who proceed to follow strikingly different paths. Author Lois W. Banner, a professor of history... Read More