NPR Book Notes
Best Books Of 2009
Big And Beautiful: Best Gift Books of 2009()
November 24, 2009 Reviewer John McAlley selects gems from the worlds of fine art, fashion, photography, science, lit-crit and cartoons. These luxe volumes will be gracing coffee tables long after the lights and wrapping paper are gone.
Best Books Of 2009
Alan Cheuse's Book Picks To Warm A Winter's Night()
November 23, 2009 Book reviewer Alan Cheuse selects the highlights of this holiday season: futuristic dystopias; things that go bump in the night; portraits from Norman Rockwell's America; gay New York; a celebration of our immigrant adventures; one writer's journey to manhood; and, of course, Long John Silver.
Best Books Of 2009
The 10 Best Cookbooks Of 2009()
November 25, 2009 If you're the kind of person who's always believed that a book can teach you to do anything, this year's crop of cookbooks will prove you right. Cooks lacking confidence will find comfort in detailed instructions and comprehensive how-tos.
What We're Reading
What We're Reading: Nov. 24 - 30, 2009()
November 24, 2009 This week, Michael Crichton's last book, ever, sails the seas of pirate adventure. In story collections: Alice Munro's strong and subtly mysterious women; Ha Jin's immigrants caught between two worlds. And a space-program history finds surprising drama in the unmanned voyages.
You Must Read This
Damned 'From Here To Eternity'()
November 23, 2009 Author James Ellroy was 12 when From Here To Eternity showed him a new, damned world: Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, in the months before the Pearl Harbor attack. Ellroy had already come to see the world as a harsh place, but the book gave him characters at the outset of America's most perilous moment and ultimate ascent. He says you must read it.
Book Reviews
A Conservative Read On Palin's 'Going Rogue'()
November 17, 2009 Sarah Palin may be the Republican party's next big hope, but commentator Rod Dreher says her new book, Going Rogue, does little to bolster her image. She may be the perkiest small-town American in the spotlight, but Palin is selling her personality, not a platform.
Books
McCann, Stiles Win National Book Awards()
November 19, 2009 The 60th annual National Book Awards were handed out Wednesday night in New York. Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, a novel about daring, luck and mortality in 1970s New York, won the fiction prize. T.J. Stiles' biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt, The First Tycoon, was the nonfiction winner, and Keith Waldrop's Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy won for poetry.
What We're Reading
What We're Reading, Nov. 17 - 23, 2009()
November 17, 2009 This week's staff picks: Biographies from bad-boy Andre Agassi and 'Rogue' politician Sarah Palin. Stephen King returns to form in a new novel, Zadie Smith fascinates in collected essays, and science writer Nicholas Wade argues that God is just an evolutionary adaptation.
Fiction
A Haunting American Dream Set In 'Luna Park'()
November 16, 2009 Writer Kevin Baker says he never thought he'd be "hip enough" to venture into graphic novels. But with illustrator Danijel Zezelj, he has created Luna Park — a ghostly graphic novel set in the decaying amusement parks of Coney Island. It profiles a Russian immigrant plagued by nightmares of the Chechen War.
Author Interviews
'Mad Scientists,' Building The Future For 50 Years()
November 15, 2009 If you've used a GPS system — or if you happen to be using the Internet to read this — you can thank DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. For 50 years, the smallish, somewhat secretive division of the Pentagon has been mostly off-limits to reporters. Now author Michael Belfiore has profiled the agency in a new book.
