Books

True “dog people” are considered such because they think so highly of the canine. Not only do they consider their dog almost as much a part of the family as the children, they tend to respect a dog’s patience, tolerance and unqualified devotion. I know because I’m one of them. …

Some journalism doesn’t fit the inherent constraints of newspapers or magazines. Often, that is because the subject is too massive and requires longer periods of investigation than what these formats tend to demand in immediacy. Terry McDermott’s exploration of the 9/11 terrorists, Perfect Soldiers, is an example of this. McDermott, …

I went to North Korea in 1998 and it was, and no doubt still is, a most fascinating, if spooky, place.

Literary types like to dismiss genre fiction, yet judging by the number of novels that are near- (or far-)misses, a detective novel is as difficult to write well as any other.

Mal. Zoe. Jayne. Wash. Inara. Simon. River. Kaylee. Shepherd Book. Serenity. If those 10 names don’t leave you shaking your head at the stupidity of FOX Network executives, Finding Serenity isn’t the book for you. Finding Serenity is a collection of essays exploring the short lived FOX Television series Firefly. …

There probably isn’t a middle ground on Terry Jones’s views of the “war on terror.” You either agree with him or you don’t. Yet even if you do, Terry Jones’s War on the War on Terror comes off more as toss-off than lasting political commentary. Jones, whose biggest but not …

Marketing Playbook: The Manual for Growing Organizations The world of business is a strange one. Artsy people often think of corporations as drab, soulless places, but nothing could be further from the truth. Companies are home to many wonders and mysteries, as most anyone who’s worked in one will tell …

Hello To All That: A Memoir of War, Zoloft, and Peace recounts in time-shifting chapters the author’s depression, pharmaceutical cure, and subsequent formative experience as a freelance war correspondent reporting from the siege of Sarajevo in 1993-4. The parallel stories are interesting and vividly told. But readers expecting something heavy, …

Eternal life may be changing from a death-defying fantasy to something more mundane, as this new book reveals...

In the age of George W. Bush and Al Qaeda, it’s easy to lose sight of what is ultimately the most important conflict of all: the battle to save the environment.