Stories from a glacier-shaped landscape
If you’re new to Rick Bass’s edgy, glorious, and often brutal settings, this collection is a perfect place to start.
Salinger, by David Shields and Shane Salerno
For a large percentage of students, Salinger can still pack a tremendous punch, and he still connects with the spiritual seeker inclinations that are common among university students.
Travels with Dan Brown
I find Dan Brown's use of the word fact charming. Fact: I'm powerless to say precisely what he means by it.
The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg
Charles Duhigg's book will remind readers of Malcolm Gladwell's best work. It represents the best "popular brain science" genre can offer.
Why Read Moby-Dick? by Nathaniel Philbrick
The title of Nathaniel Philbrick’s slim new meditation foregrounds the questions at the heart of every assignment made by every English teacher: Why read this book? Or that book? For that matter, why do we assign reading in the first place?
God’s Arbiters, by Susan K. Harris
Once upon a time, there was a large, wealthy and powerful country that wanted to help a smaller, struggling, powerless country find a pathway into a more stable, democratic, freedom-loving and civi...
Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1
To commemorate the 100-year anniversary of Mark Twain's death, a crack team of editors at the massive Mark Twain Project at the University of California-Berkeley, headed by Harriet Elinor Smith, h...
Occult attraction
Dan Brown’s latest megablockbuster exposes aspects of our current spiritual morass in several ways....
Grief work: After a child dies
When my wife and I see news reports about the deaths of young people, as we did after the grisly slaughter at Virginia Tech last April, we inevitably think back to June 1999, when we lost our son, ...