Henry Petroski traces the origins of the pencil back to ancient Greece and Rome, writes factually and charmingly about its development over the centuries and around the world, and shows what the pe...

SUMMARY:In suburban Georgetown, a killer’s Reeboks whisper on the floor of a posh home. In a seedy D.C. porno house, a patron is swiftly garroted to death. The next day Amer...

From Publishers WeeklyShortly after ex-spy Lang Reilly's sister dies in an explosion in her Paris home, a reproduction of a painting by the 17th-century artist Poussin, which his sist...

EDITORIAL REVIEW: Today, nearly forty years after his death, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck remains one of America’s greatest writers and cultural figures. Over the next year, his many works publis...

Amazon.com ReviewA Letter from Author Sarah Addison Allen She put a penny on her windowsill and cracked the window, because her grandmother once said that ...

From Publishers WeeklyThomas Bolden, successful 32-year-old investment banker and Harlem Boys Club Foundation trustee, has come a long way from his turbulent childhood on the mean streets ...

SUMMARY: chapter oneNathalie DupreeThe first actual cooking teacher who took both my money and my grief for imparting culinary secrets to me was the inimitable, unclassifiable queen of the Southern ki...

Recently rediscovered by art historians, and one of the few female post-Renaissance painters to achieve fame during her own era, Artemisia Gentileschi led a remarkably "modern" life. Susan Vreeland...

SUMMARY: "It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born." First, the unthinkable: a security breach at a secret U.S. government facility unleashes the monstrous product...

SUMMARY:They watched Danilo Silva for days before they finally grabbed him. He was living alone, a quiet life on a shady street in Brazil; a simple life in a modest home, ce...