Simon & Schuster, 2011 Looking for talk of George Eliot and Charles Dickens and Muriel Rukeyser? Look no further than Sylvia Nasar's Grand Pursuit. Well, I had to get your attention somehow, right? Because I know that by the time most of you get to the subtitle of
"If you just read one book this year, read this one." Perhaps more than any other book I've read this year, Monoculture makes me want to say that. Which is ironic: because Monoculture is about one story. (And I know how much you all love to read stories.) The premise
Jacqueline L. Tobin's From Midnight to Dawn: The Last Tracks of the Underground Railroad (with Hettie Jones) Doubleday, 2007 Midnight was the code-name for Detroit; it was the gateway to Canada, the last overtly dangerous stop on the Underground Railroad, which many slaves travelled out of America in pursuit of
James Fitzgerald's What Disturbs Our Blood Random House, 2010 At first glance, James' Fitzgerald's might seem like a charmed life. But What Disturbs Our Blood would not have come into being if that had been true. It takes some digging (in the archives) and some prying (from the mouths of
Ken Wiwa's In the Shadow of a Saint A Son's Journey to Understand His Father's Legacy Random House 2000 - Vintage, 2001. As much as this book is about its author Ken Wiwa, as much as it is about his father Ken Saro-Wiwa, as much as it is about fathers
