It takes an intellectual scholar with the knowledge, depth and curiosity of Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt to take a tale ancient and unknown and turn it into a compelling saga.  

With her tough, tense and taut tale of one rural family’s bitter and bloody fight for survival in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, 2011 National Book Award-winner Jesmyn Ward has secured herself a place among such other great Southern writers.  

It’s always a treat when a book comes along that lives up to the hype. That is the case with John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead, a collection of 14 brilliant experiential essays in which the writer places himself at the center of the story. The 37-year-old Southern-born Sullivan is now being compared with first-person journalists like Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and David Foster Wallace.  

Most histories of World War II are successful because they focus on specific battles or campaigns. The global conflict that seemed to define the last century was so complex and multifaceted, it would seem foolhardy to attempt to cover it in one book.
  

It’s hard to believe it has been 50 years since President John F. Kennedy and the days of Camelot in the White House. Fortunately, this anniversary already has produced two revealing new portraits of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, one a written appreciation of his life by television commentator Chris Matthews, the other a recently unsealed conversation between historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Jacqueline Kennedy, conducted just four months after President Kennedy was assassinated.  

Albert Brooks, one of the most creative and influential comedians and filmmakers of the last 40 years, has turned his attention to writing fiction with his suddenly serious yet wholly entertaining first novel, 2030: The Real Story of What Happens To America. In his futuristic tale, Brooks envisions a dystopian America in which we’re living longer but not necessarily happier lives.