Clara’s story unspools in a compelling and engaging way. "Clara at the Edge" is a weird and engaging story of a widow, some wasps, and a traumatic past, a story that explores the importance of human connection. Seventy-three-year-old... Read More

Ward’s humorous book uses the American Southwest and its inhabitants to tell a beautiful story about a place, people, and time. A small town in the American Southwest and its diverse denizens are the focal point of the three... Read More

In this cookbook worth savoring, entrancing cooking instructions involve lots of snappiness, whooshing, and wine. Tourist-trodden Venice may be the star attraction of Italy’s Veneto region, but for native food writer Valeria Necchio,... Read More

This historical look at the Standard Oil Company is enlightening on several levels and proves that the lessons of the past have never been more salient. The rapid rise of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company coincided with a... Read More

Richard Robbins’s "Overtaken by the Night" is an extremely detailed account of Vladimir Dzhunkovsky’s life. His story spans not just one, but several of the most tumultuous periods in modern Russian history, and Robbins nicely... Read More

The Collected Letters adds a new portal to the identity of the man most responsible for introducing Zen Buddhism to the West. Edited by his daughters, Joan and Anne Watts, these assembled letters of Alan Watts—the British-born writer,... Read More

McNally provides a brutally frank and damningly well-documented account of the war’s sordid background. The 1873 Modoc War pitted the small but fierce Modoc tribe against the United States government, which sought to expel them from... Read More

Jha’s stories of community-based change are both inspiring and informative. Sandhya Jha’s "Transforming Communities" demonstrates how ordinary people can come together to dramatically improve their communities. As the director of the... Read More