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Haunted house tale

Mystery ILLUS.jpg

While you're taking your staycation this summer and dining on local foods, you can also enjoy a classic haunted house story with a decidedly local flavor.

Updated: Jun. 21, 2009 6:05 AM | Full story

Dads of all sorts share hard-earned wisdom

Fatherhood sure has changed since Ward Cleaver raised the Beaver. Need proof? Check out "The Book of Dads," edited by Ben George.

Updated: Jun. 21, 2009 6:03 AM | Full story

Raleigh-born Andrew Johnson never backed down from a fight

David O. Stewart's fast-paced "Impeached" frames President Andrew Johnson's famous impeachment trial within what historians term "Presidential Reconstruction." Johnson, the slaveholding Tennessee Democrat who served as Abraham Lincoln's second vice president, assumed the presidency following Lincoln's April 14, 1865, assassination.

Updated: Jun. 21, 2009 6:03 AM | Full story

How baby snark grew into a curmudgeon

In this lumpy, unsentimental and ultimately very sad memoir, Joe Queenan writes that as a teenager he dreamed of making "a living by ridiculing people," and it didn't seem to matter all that much where he went to college, since "one couldn't actually major in satire or invective."

Updated: Jun. 12, 2009 2:54 PM | Full story

Story of her success

Imagine Sarah Dessen as a fourth-grader, sitting in her family's living room. "I had a little typewriter, and I'd sit and type up my stories and put them in a folder," she recalls.

Updated: Jun. 14, 2009 6:47 AM | Full story

In celebration of the bookworm

Book review:The term "bookworm," which dates back to Shakespeare's contemporary Ben Jonson, has never been a very flattering description. In her new book "Enchanted Hunters," Harvard professor Maria Tatar tries to reclaim voracious reading as a marvel, not an escape.

Updated: Jun. 6, 2009 8:17 PM | Full story

The magical marriage of math and science

Book review:Pick up any high school physics textbook. Turn a page or two, and you will find a mathematical equation. College texts have equations on virtually every page.

Updated: Jun. 6, 2009 8:18 PM | Full story

Summer reads

Summer brings thrillers, summer brings beach reading, summer brings James Patterson -- as do winter, spring and fall.

Updated: Jun. 7, 2009 6:30 AM | Full story

Teen sleuth on a mission

John Hart had me at "I've."

Updated: May. 22, 2009 1:30 PM | Full story

Eccentric Jimmy unlike your everyday criminal

Reading Denis Johnson's new thriller, "Nobody Move," one almost senses the author luxuriating in the wanton pleasures of pulp fiction.

Updated: May. 22, 2009 12:15 PM | Full story

Faking it at Princeton

As a 4-year-old, Walter Kirn had a kindly adult mentor who taught him that knowledge was "a way to assess your location, your true position, not a strategy for improving your position."

Updated: May. 22, 2009 1:30 PM | Full story

Political crusader

I once covered a Billy Graham crusade unlike any other: Several hundred students began chanting "bull hockey" or words to that effect.

Updated: May. 22, 2009 1:30 PM | Full story

Getting on with going green

The world is not short of presentations making "the business case for sustainability." What it does lack is actual sustainable businesses -- because no such business exists.

Updated: Apr. 17, 2009 1:43 PM | Full story

A life beyond baseball

Though never famous in his lifetime, outfielder Archie "Moonlight" Graham was immortalized in "Field of Dreams," the 1989 movie based on Ray Kinsella's novel, "Shoeless Joe."

Updated: Apr. 18, 2009 6:41 PM | Full story

Grandmas inspire poignant novel

As a debut novelist, Todd Johnson tells me, he's a bit of a publicity nightmare.

Updated: Apr. 16, 2009 10:53 AM | Full story

Reconstructing Reconstruction

Book review:What historian Bernard A. Weisberger called "the Dark and Bloody Ground of Reconstruction Historiography" began in the early 20th century with the writings of the first professional historians trained at Columbia University.

Updated: Apr. 12, 2009 6:29 AM | Full story

Beasts behaving badly

Book review:When the 85-year-old firm Bear Stearns crashed and burned in little more than a week in March 2008, it became a harbinger of the credit crisis that snowballed later in the year and led to the global financial meltdown.

Updated: Apr. 12, 2009 6:29 AM | Full story

Cuba, our nettlesome neighbor

Book review:In his introduction to "That Infernal Little Cuban Republic," Lars Schoultz compares Cuba with the neighbors across the street who irritate you.

Updated: Apr. 12, 2009 6:30 AM | Full story

Tale of Southern ladies aces the laugh-cry test

Books:When I teach Introduction to Writing Short Fiction, I tell my students that if their story makes me laugh out loud or cry real tears, they get an "A."

Updated: Apr. 12, 2009 6:30 AM | Full story

Lofty love song

Book review:For more than a generation, few words in American public life have been uttered with such contempt as liberal.

Updated: Apr. 5, 2009 6:10 AM | Full story

All-star spring lineup

Mysteries:Typically, the new mysteries of March and April are a little like spring training baseball games: appealing enough if you're a true fan, but little noted nor long remembered an hour after they're finished.

Updated: Apr. 5, 2009 6:11 AM | Full story

To feather a nest, a wild goose chase

At the start of Patrick Somerville's magical debut novel, a very pregnant Marissa Bishop makes a request.

Updated: Apr. 3, 2009 4:11 PM | Full story

Carolina revolution

On March 15, 1781, at Guilford Courthouse near present-day Greensboro, Lord Charles Cornwallis's army of British regulars and German mercenaries defeated an American force of Continentals and militia commanded by General Nathanael Greene. "Long, Obstinate, and Bloody" is the first book-length account of battle.

Updated: Mar. 22, 2009 6:27 AM | Full story

Poetry slammed: Not as easy as it looks

The Weave Room:The first poem ever uttered may have been an occasional poem.

Updated: Mar. 22, 2009 6:29 AM | Full story

A crime novel, but better

Tim Gautreaux's fine new book could be mistaken for a conventional crime novel. "The Missing" features the kidnapping of a precocious child who has a beautiful mother, an alluring singer on a riverboat.

Updated: Mar. 22, 2009 6:31 AM | Full story

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