Nick Harkaway © Clare Cornwell

A Handbook for Staying Human in a Digital Age: Nick Harkaway’s Blind Giant

Welcome to the beginnings of a purely digital society. Will this brave new world of ours be heavenly or hellish? That's the question blogger and novelist Harkaway is here to answer.

May 13, 2012

Confessions of a Scary Mommy and 6 Unusual Reads About Motherhood

To all the mommies out there, I hope you're having a relaxing day of pampering. But if it's not exactly what you expected, take heart.

May 11, 2012

Girl Walks Into a Bar by Rachel Dratch: Funny, Sure, But Surprising Too

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a female comedienne/actress writes a book on her mishaps in life and love, starting with herself as an awkward child and wrapping up the book with a happy ending. If this story is, in fact, old news to you, prepare to be refreshed by Dratch's telling.

May 9, 2012

The Man Who Froze the World: Mark Kurlansky’s Birdseye

Mark Kurlansky wrote a book-within-a-book when he put together Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man. The author of Salt and Cod could not resist penning a new history of a ubiquitous consumable: ice.

May 5, 2012

Breaking Away From a Hasidic Life: Deborah Feldman’s Memoir, Unorthodox

No reading English-language books. Attending college is not allowed. Always wear long skirts and thick stockings. No dating boys. TV, radio, and newspapers banned from the home. Welcome to the world Deborah Feldman grew up in and join her on her transforming journey in her candid memoir, Unorthodox.

April 28, 2012

A Feast for the Senses and Intellect: Adam Gopnik’s The Table Comes First

The various food movements sound complicated and how we actually arrived at this place in our culture that so esteems food can seem a mystery. But now, Gopnik, best-selling author and veteran writer for The New Yorker, takes an intellectual stab at the basis of how we eat and why we eat what we eat in his latest book

April 27, 2012

Oaxaca Journal: In Mexico, Oliver Sacks Looks at Ferns; Hilarity Ensues

Well, not exactly hilarity. You will never see a film adaptation of Oliver Sacks' Oaxaca Journal in your Netflix queue. But this quirky little book is a romance -- about nature, knowledge, and camaraderie.

April 25, 2012

The Wonders of Friendship, Aging, and Headstands: Anna Quindlen’s Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

Much like she did with her popular column, “Life In the 30’s,” Quindlen writes invitingly about everyday life, though the focus is now on life in the 50s and 60s. Still, what’s wonderful about Quindlen’s writing is that she manages to be universally relatable.

April 24, 2012

The Great Inversion: A Change Is Coming to Downtown and Other Lessons in City Planning

A change is coming, and it has the potential to turn your hometown upside down. Are you ready for it? Alan Ehrenhalt addresses the issue in his book The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City.

April 23, 2012

The Best Occupy Wall Street Book the Occupiers Never Made: Robert B. Reich’s Beyond Outrage

For a movement criticized for being unorganized and without a clear message, Reich's Outrage serves to crystalize their concerns with the gravitas of a respected economist and the clarity of a man not stoned and drumming on a bongo in Zuccotti Park.

April 18, 2012

Inside the Circus: Your First-Class Ticket to the 2012 Political Race

Politico's Mike Allen and Evan Thomas have teamed up to write four eBooks documenting the GOP race to the White House. The aptly named Inside the Circus marks their second foray in the POLITICO-sponsored series, one that's proving to redefine journalism as we know it in the twenty-first century.

April 10, 2012

Home Run Derby: John Grisham’s Calico Joe and 4 Other Great Baseball Books

John Grisham's latest, Calico Joe, and the imminent arrival of springtime have us thinking about -- what else? -- baseball.

April 7, 2012

The Biography of a New American Icon: Paul Barrett’s Glock

Ford. Dell. Glock? Actually, yes. Because this Austrian gun manufacturer has become so deeply embedded in modern American culture that Gaston Glock's name has been synonymous with "gun" to a whole generation. Paul M. Barrett's book, Glock: The Rise of America's Gun, is a compulsively readable story about this cultural icon and its inventor.

April 4, 2012

On the Aftermath of Japan’s Earthquake: March Was Made of Yarn

In Elmer Luke and David Karashima’s collection March Was Made of Yarn: Reflections on the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown, readers are led by the hand to the scene of a disaster unlike any other, where earth’s mighty hand meets one of mankind’s most mammoth achievements.

April 2, 2012

How to Be Damn Near Perfect in 6 Scientific Steps, by Garth Sundem

The author of Brain Trust swings by Everyday eBook to share six of the top tips gleaned from 130 interviews with prize-winning scientists.