Books Archive

The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun - I don’t know Gretchen Rubin very well --- we’re Facebook friends, occasional e-mail pals and, once a year or so, we have lunch --- but I would have said she’s

The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss - There are men and women who write beautifully, every word inevitable, the paragraphs building into chapters, the chapters adding up to a great book, and we never suspect that their

The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America - Guest Butler Stephen Mo Hanan is an award-winning actor, singer and playwright. He has recently completed a memoir about his adventures, internal and otherwise.   California criminalized LSD possession in

The Help - I first heard about "The Help" soon after it was published in February of 2009.  But it was 444 pages. I put it off. Very quickly, the novel became a bestseller. Soon “The

The Help: An Exchange of Letters - I’m not the guy you go to when you want to find The Hot and The New, but after months of watching women on the bus weep as they read

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries from a Secret World - Our best teacher is Nature, though we frequently ignore it --- even those of us who say, and know, "Nature always bats last." The specific instructor here is trees,

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate―Discoveries from A Secret World - “The Hidden Life of Trees"  reminds us that an individual tree is an endangered species, likely to die young. A community of trees is a forest. In a forest, a

The Horse Boy: A Father’s Quest to Heal His Son - Video The movie trailer To be the parent of an autistic child like Rowan Isaacson --- I can't imagine it. Life gets reduced to tantrums and the space between them.

The Hundred Dresses - This is the best book I have ever read for children about bullying. It doesn't preach. It doesn't talk down. It just tells a story. Teachers who read it to

The Ice Princess - Nine million people live in Sweden. Camilla Läckberg has sold three million books there. She is, her publisher boasts, “the most profitable native author in Swedish history.” And if Läckberg and her supporters

The Informer - It may be a sign of our times that Berlin between the world wars, in the period when Weimar gave way to Nazism, seems much on our cultural consciousness. The

The Intrusions - I had a deadline. But I started to read “The Intrusions,” and then it was 3 AM, and I still have a deadline. Consider yourself warned. If you read this book,

The JFK Assassination Diary: My Search for Answers to the Mystery of the Century - The 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy brings out the hustlers --- writers who have penetrated the conspiracy, who know the secret history, who will be happy to

The Joy of Drinking - The Joy of Drinking Barbara Holland   Civilization,

The Kali Yuga - What if what's going on is bigger than politics, economic inequality, jingoism, racism and sexism? What if we’re experiencing a series of prompts that, taken together, should open our eyes

The Killer Inside Me - The first time I read this book, I wasn’t right for days. This is not an uncommon experience. The killer is Lou Ford, deputy sheriff of Central City, Texas (population: 48,000). He's

The King of Halloween and Miss Firecracker Queen: A Daughter’s Tale of Family and Football - I get 20 books a week. I always read the first page. And then, sadly, another book goes into the Goodwill bag. This book arrived last week. This is how it

The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement - In 1968, Taylor Branch published Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63. I sat down one weekend and didn’t get up until I’d read all 900 pages. Branch went

The King’s Speech - Handicapping the Academy Awards is an American ritual. I find this weird. It’s not as if you and I made any creative contribution to these films or stand to profit

The Kitchen Whisperers: Cooking with the Wisdom of Our Friends - It’s said that the French kings had Lafite rubbed on the lips of their newborns so they’d enter life knowing a standard of quality. As a first taste memory, that’s