Wall Street Journal: Books
- A Pirate's Guide to First Grade
Friday - 09/03/2010 - 08:54 PMMeghan Cox Gurdon reviews "A Pirate's Guide to First Grade," James Preller's story of a boy who's accompanied to school by a ghostly crew of buccaneers.
More | Talk - The Great Northern Migration
Friday - 09/03/2010 - 09:07 PMAn underappreciated American revolution—the mass movement of blacks from the South beginning early in the 20th century—finally gets its due.
More | Talk - Ephemera in Full
Thursday - 09/02/2010 - 10:22 PMThe Library of America's "H.L. Mencken: Prejudices" shows that the Sage of Baltimore was not always sagacious. R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. reviews.
More | Talk - Bookshelf: Reading, Writing, Radical Change
Monday - 08/30/2010 - 08:03 PMIn "Crisis on Campus," Mark C. Taylor urges bold reforms for universities—for example, eliminating tenure. Naomi Schaefer Riley reviews.
More | Talk - Mockingjay
Friday - 08/27/2010 - 09:08 PMSuzanne Collins ends her Hunger Games trilogy with "Mockingjay," a novel eagerly awaited by fans of the futuristic saga about young rebels fighting against an evil government. Meghan Cox Gurdon reviews.
More | Talk - John O. McGinnis: When Justice Comes Naturally
Thursday - 08/26/2010 - 07:44 PMWhenever the Senate must consider a Supreme Court nominee, originalists and believers in the "living Constitution" vie for supremacy. In "Constitutional Illusions & Anchoring Truths," Hadley Arkes suggests a third way—letting natural law guide the members of either camp
More | Talk - Black Voices From the Pulpit
Wednesday - 08/25/2010 - 07:28 PM"Preaching With Sacred Fire," edited by Martha Simmons and Frank A. Thomas, presents an anthology of African-American sermons, from the slave era to the modern day. Eric J. Sundquist reviews.
More | Talk - Unpaved, Good Intentions
Tuesday - 08/24/2010 - 08:08 PMIn "Interstate 69," Matt Dellinger traces the story of an attempt to build a highway extension that shows no sign of finding an on ramp.
More | Talk - Airplane Reading
Friday - 08/20/2010 - 10:07 PMWith "Why We Fight" editor Simon Van Booy enlists the help of Sophocles, Dickens, the Bible and a host of other sources in pondering mankind's taste for aggression. Dave Shiflett reviews.
More | Talk - Can We Choose Happiness?
Thursday - 08/19/2010 - 11:23 PMIn "Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science," Sissela Bok traces the history of how we have defined happiness. Paul Beston reviews.
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- Why God Did Not Create the Universe
Saturday - 09/04/2010 - 12:07 AMThere is a sound scientific explanation for the making of our world—no gods required. An excerpt from the new book by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow.
More | Talk - Rediscovering Europe's War-Time Writers
Thursday - 09/02/2010 - 09:54 PMA growing number of war-time memoirs have begun to be unearthed by discerning French and British publishers.
More | Talk - The Labor of Living
Tuesday - 08/31/2010 - 07:13 PMIn "The Company Town," Hardy Green surveys towns from Hershey, Pa., to Gary, Ind., where a single business or industry once controlled nearly every aspect of life—sometimes to the good, sometimes not.
More | Talk - When the Killing Stopped
Sunday - 08/29/2010 - 07:36 PMIn "The Great Silence," Juliet Nicolson describes how the British tried to reorient themselves and start again after the carnage of World War I. Elizabeth Lowry reviews.
More | Talk - The Sincerest Form of Ridicule
Friday - 08/27/2010 - 09:47 PM"Beowulf," Raymond Chandler, Henry James—they've all suffered the satirist's needle. John Gross compiles some of the best examples in "The Oxford Book of Parodies."
More | Talk - Bush Returns to Arena With Memoir
Thursday - 08/26/2010 - 10:58 PMAfter remaining mostly out of view and silent on policy debates since leaving office, George W. Bush is about to promote his memoir, to be published a week after the Nov.
More | Talk - Oxford Readies Giant Chinese-English Dictionary
Tuesday - 08/24/2010 - 10:28 PMFive years, 300,000 words, 370,000 translations: It all adds up to the largest single volume English-Chinese, Chinese-English dictionary ever put together.
More | Talk - Adoption Dispatches
Monday - 08/23/2010 - 06:02 PMIn "Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other," Scott Simons writes about a process that is expensive, baffling, arduous—and miraculous.
More | Talk - Power Struggles, Family Style
Thursday - 08/19/2010 - 06:40 PMJonathan Franzen's novel "Freedom" offers a portrait of suburban life where everyone's fighting for happiness—at the expense of others. Sam Sacks reviews.
More | Talk - A Renegade and His Regrets
Wednesday - 08/18/2010 - 06:52 PMA Confederate general refuses to quit fighting after Appomattox, heads into Mexico to defend the French, and ends up back in the U.S., renouncing his pro-slavery views and becoming a model citizen.
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- Blair, Donald Dewar and the Scottish Colourist Paintings Confusion
Friday - 09/03/2010 - 06:36 PM
More | Talk - Unbreakable Sports Records
Thursday - 09/02/2010 - 06:31 PMESPN's "Sport Science" host John Brenkus calculates the ultimate achievable athletic feats in "The Perfection Point." David M. Shribman reviews.
More | Talk - An Ally Remembers
Wednesday - 09/01/2010 - 07:56 PMIn "A Journey," Tony Blair, Britain's former prime minister, describes his political rise, his attempts to transform the Labour Party and his stalwart support of America—with troops and eloquence—during the Iraq war.
More | Talk - Hollywood Gives Book Early Push
Monday - 08/30/2010 - 12:09 AMThe film company who bought the rights to Nicholas Sparks's new novel, "Safe Haven," on sale Sept. 14, is launching online and print promotions for the story--a year ahead of the movie version's release.
More | Talk - The Lost Art of Real Cooking
Friday - 08/27/2010 - 09:04 PMIn "The Lost Art of Real Cooking," Ken Albala and Rosanna Nafziger champion the pleasures of "traditional food." Aram Bakshian Jr. reviews.
More | Talk - Contemplating Death From Above
Thursday - 08/26/2010 - 09:53 PMIn World War I, it was the trenches that captured the imagination of poets. In World War II, it was aerial combat. A review of Daniel Swift's "Bomber County."
More | Talk - The ABCs of E-Reading
Wednesday - 08/25/2010 - 09:19 AMBook lovers have long worried that technology would lead to the demise of long-form reading. But research shows that owners of e-readers may be reading more than ever before.
More | Talk - Lorenz of Arabia
Sunday - 08/22/2010 - 06:01 PMBefore World War I, Germany tried to build a railway from Berlin to the heart of the Ottoman Empire. During the war, it tried to foment a Grand Jihad in Muslim lands.
More | Talk - Hurting for Ages
Friday - 08/20/2010 - 10:01 PMIn "The Pain Chronicles," Melanie Thernstrom traces the history of pain as a medical and cultural phenomenon. Wes Davis reviews.
More | Talk - Judge Crater and the Ever-Vanishing City
Wednesday - 08/18/2010 - 08:11 PMNew York author Peter Quinn talks with the Journal about his new historic novel and his years as a speechwriter for two New York governors.
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