Mary Mable Rogers?… Even her name is unmemorable, more readily evoking a prim spinster than a nubile femme fatale. But at the turn of the century… Mary was the last woman to be hanged in the state of Vermont. And weirder still—she... Read More

While Clyde’s stories happen to be set in the Southwest, they can be read as reports from the front lines of the dominant culture anywhere in America. People live in single family homes, drive cars, go to shopping malls and eat dessert... Read More

“I guess even bad television can be a force for good in the world,” Finkie Finklestein muses at the end of Kashner’s fine first novel about a man who idolizes Frank Sinatra. It is the kind of quirky idea that makes the book fun to... Read More

Nominated for federal judgeship, John Winston has the legal experience and clean record of a perfect candidate, except a mysterious caller to his office has reminded him about Hill 1080. For Winston, the call brings back a flood of... Read More

If a foreword by former first lady Rosalynn Carter is not enough to make one take this handbook seriously, then the subject matter will. “Am I dead yet?” one seriously ill patient is quoted to have asked his nurse. When told no, he... Read More

“The incidence of obesity in the United States had held steady at about 14 percent of the population since 1960 … between 1981 and 1991, it shot up to a quarter of Americans.” From Weight Watchers to Slimfast, Thigh Master to... Read More

In his recent bestseller, Shadows in the Sun, ethnobiologist Wade Davis includes an unsettling theory from Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson. Wilson asserts that this past century will be remembered not for its wars or technological... Read More

The renaissance of Virginia Woolf still blooms. Successively reborn into our polemical age of interdisciplinary feminist studies, her witty and passionate rebellion against Victorian/Edwardian cultural, literary and sexual patriarchy has... Read More