Search results for

The gleaming stainless steel arch in St. Louis is, officially, a monument to westward expansion. But in The Gateway Arch: A Biography, Tracy Campbell argues that the monument's meaning is more complicated. He tells NPR about the controversies, the clout and the costs behind the 630-foot structure.

Benjamin Alire Saenz won this year's PEN/Faulkner award for his latest collection of short stories, Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club. The real-life Kentucky Club is just south of the U.S.-Mexico border, and Saenz joined a reporter there to talk about life in two countries.

Neal Thompson's new biography traces the life of the newspaper cartoonist who became an international celebrity and media superstar. Ripley's pioneering mix of the strange, the shocking and the barely believable shaped the way Americans saw the world.

NPR comics critic Glen Weldon has a new, comprehensive biography of the classic American hero: Superman. Reviewer Elizabeth Graham says Weldon's survey of the Man of Steel's many lives in Superman: The Unauthorized Biography is "reliable, witty and informative."

In his latest book, the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food turns his attention to how we use the four classical elements to transform plants and animals into food, and argues that home cooking can remake the American food system.

At 19, the heroine of Isabel Allende's florid, frenzied Maya's Notebook is in a tailspin of drugs, prostitution and crime. Sent by her grandmother to hide out with an old friend on an island off Chile, she finds love and redemption. Reviewer Mary Pols doesn't buy it.

The Irish writer scandalized audiences with her 1960 novel, The Country Girls. Half a century later, she looks back on her childhood in a small village, her fame and its accessories and above all, her ceaseless drive to write.

Colin Broderick's new memoir, That's That, chronicles his childhood in Northern Ireland during the modern-day "Troubles." Broderick says growing up in what was essentially a war zone seemed normal to him at the time.

Food porn and pirate adventure are two great tastes that taste great together in Eli Brown's Cinnamon and Gunpowder. When a pirate kidnaps a chef to serve her own gustatory pleasures, his creativity is taxed as he prepares feasts — like a Regency-era Iron Chef — using only shipboard supplies.

Philipp Meyer (American Rust) has crafted a multigenerational epic that captures the Lone Star State's contradictions and vast sweep. Critic Michael Schaub calls The Son "one of the most solid, unsparing pieces of American historical fiction to come out this century."