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In the '50s, four people collaborated to create a pill so women could enjoy sex. They fibbed about their motivations and skirted the law. Jonathan Eig details the history in The Birth of the Pill.

In a new memoir, Leon Panetta says he and other presidential advisers argued to leave some U.S. forces in Iraq after 2011. That might have left Iraq in better position to fight ISIS, he tells NPR.

Once upon a time, a historian went hunting for fairy tales. He found hundreds, but his collection was long thought lost. But now they've been found, and several are reprinted in The Turnip Princess.

In God's Bankers Gerald Posner explores the history of money, power and the church. During World War II, he says, the Vatican made money off of the life insurance policies of Jews sent to death camps.

One of rock music's most loved, feared and prolific scribes, the 72-year-old Christgau says he knew early on that he liked criticism better than journalism: "I didn't want to get into people's faces."

Esther Freud's new novel Mr. Mac and Me traces an unlikely friendship between a lonely boy and a struggling artist. Reviewer Heller McAlpin says the book has both technical prowess and grace.

New York Times columnist Roger Cohen looks back on his life and asks: Could a family's constant movement — four countries in four generations — contribute to a mother's struggle with mental illness?

Lost in a deep depression, Marie Mutsuki Mockett visited a temple owned by her mother's family near Fukushima. There, she found traditions and ways of thought that helped her work through her grief.

Painter's daughter Esther Freud weaves her own experiences into the story of a lonely little boy in a British seacoast town, who befriends the great Art Nouveau designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

We saw a lot of dystopias in both films and books this year. Author Jason Sheehan has had enough. He plans to celebrate the new year with some science fiction that's actually hopeful about the future.