Almost any modern work on archaeology, geology, science, medicine or even Egyptian or Chinese history will present some intriguing fact (be it the germ theory of disease, the operation of volcanoes, the interpretation of hieroglyphs or... Read More

This is the book no parent wants to have any reason to read. But according to the FBI, nearly 1.4 million people under the age of eighteen are arrested each year for committing some offense (and that figure doesn’t include minors... Read More

Public Art: Burhan Dogançay’s father, a painter, sent him to Paris from Istanbul to study economics. He had to promise not to study art or play soccer. Dogançay kept his promise, more or less, until he graduated and visited New York.... Read More

It is difficult to imagine the activity of reading in the post-industrial age without the presence of the novel. The novel as modern readers know it, despite its many forms and distinctive subgenres, remains a direct descendant of the... Read More

Conventional wisdom states that soap operas are escapist fantasies for lonely, passive women. This book goes far beneath the skin of this myth and succeeds not only in dispelling it, but also in showing the unique characteristics of this... Read More

Delightful Designs: When Boston’s Museum of Fine Art (MFA) announced that it was planning to mount an exhibit featuring cars (March 6 to July 3, 2005), the Brahmins of the New England art community were alarmed. Then a month before the... Read More

“In the region of the unknown, Africa is absolute.” Since Victor Hugo made this comment in the 1880s, thousands of books have shed light on the Dark Continent. Most authors, including the popular recent trio of Alan Moorehead,... Read More

Humans have been interested in making more than one copy of an image since we dipped our hands in ochre and pressed them to the wall of a cave. “The demise of pictures in single copies” writes Richard Benson “is one of the first... Read More