The beloved character Salvo Montalbano, like its author, the late Sicilian novelist Andrea Camilleri ("il padre di Montalbano"), can be brusque and ornery, but he has a strong ethical code and passionate commitment to justice.
John Hersey covered Hiroshima and America's race riots with empathy, courage, and profound humility. Jeremy Treglown's biography, Mr. Straight Arrow, should bring a new generation of readers to Hersey's work.
Against the backdrop of Dutch East Indies colonialism and Nazi sympathizers, two families come together amidst the ashes of World War II in Mieke Eerkens' moving family history, All Ships Follow Me.
Marie-Janine Calic's history of Southeastern Europe is undeniably well-researched, but it's also a cumbersome reading experience for anyone but the specialist.
Historian Richard Noakes interviews with PopMatters on his work, Physics and Psychics, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, which offers fascinating insights into the 'heretical' activities of some of the most eminent scientists in Victorian Britain.
In a new edition to the sequel to How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, ¡Yo!, Julia Alvarez structures the story of a writer and her voice by allowing everybody but the writer herself to have a voice.
Equal parts gritty and subtly heartening, tragically jarring and emotionally resonant, Ruchika Tomar's debut A Prayer for Travelers is one of the strangest and most enjoyably wrought coming-of-age stories to appear in recent years.
Chris Schwartz's memoir on founding Ruffhouse Records attempts to be many things but doesn't fully deliver on any of them, making for a conventionally-structured memoir that often reads as slapdash and dry.
Scholar Qiana Whitted's EC Comics: Race, Shock & Social Protest explores a different path in EC Comic's history: their work with social justice stories and the resulting censorship in 1950s America.
"White flights" for Jess Row denotes the "postures of avoidance and denial" about whiteness — as a privilege, a cultural norm, and a burden — adopted by white authors, academics, and critics.
Culture and media critic Kate Eichhorn's The End of Forgetting explores how relentlessly documenting young lives allows little room for the unfettered joys of imaginative freedom and perpetuates a seemingly endless state of childhood.
Focusing on vinyl records and the labels that released them, An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels traces the parallel rise of social movements in the second half of the twentieth century and the vinyl record as the dominant form of music distribution.
Critic Herb Childress exposes some uncomfortable truths in The Adjunct Underclass that are both painfully difficult for adjunct professors to admit and essential reading for those concerned with the cultural and intellectual future of America.
In Solid State, acclaimed Beatles historian Kenneth Womack offers the most definitive account yet of the writing, recording, mixing, and reception of Abbey Road. (excerpt)
Is the ghost-child forming pixel-by-pixel in Ana Galvañ's Press Enter to Continue a repressed memory, a government-induced hallucination, or something weirder still?
Zürich's Institute of Landscape Architecture explores the fragile connection between mankind and nature in a multimedia project that merges science with art, turning sounds and images of a changing alpine glacier into a moving call to action.
While the art world is full of excellent artists, few have the comics savvy to construct the sort of complex narratives and image-text relationships that Sarah Lightman achieves in her memoir, The Book of Sarah.
