Michele Weldon’s diverting essays concern womanhood and are written from the vantage of her sixties. From childhood forward, Weldon discusses her career, friendships, and feelings of invisibility. A cancer survivor, she threads regrets... Read More

"A Series of Fortunate Events" is a lighthearted exploration of the roles that chance and coincidence play in human existence. That there is life on Earth at all, let alone human life, is a happy accident, Sean B. Carroll writes.... Read More

Lisa Braxton’s historical novel "The Talking Drum" captures a vibrant immigrant community in its death throes. Petite Africa is in trouble. The city of Bellport plans to demolish this rundown, immigrant-majority neighborhood and build... Read More

Jennifer Hosten, the first black woman to be crowned Miss World, shares her inspiring story of winning the pageant, and what happened afterward, in her memoir "Miss World 1970". Born and raised in Grenada, Hosten dabbled in modeling as a... Read More

Look forward to gorging on wit, food history, and strong opinions in Jay Rayner’s Last Supper, an entertaining, bon mots-studded consideration of the feast that the British journalist threw for a lucky circle of loved ones following... Read More

The judicial system’s bias against minorities has deep roots, acknowledges Garrett Felber in Those Who Know Don’t Say, which argues that the penal, or carceral, state expanded due to “dialects of discipline.” It shows that police... Read More

A memoir about E. J. Koh’s formative years, "The Magical Language of Others" is structured around forty-nine letters, all that remain of a one-way correspondence from her mother over the seven years that they lived apart. Functioning... Read More

"Why Are We Here?" synthesizes interdisciplinary sciences to explain how terrestrial life developed and what might threaten it in the future. Bruce Brodie’s fascinating "Why Are We Here?" sweeps the origin, evolution, and future of... Read More