Book Reviews

It took over five years for Nathaniel Rich to finish his first novel — maybe because he was writing The Mayor's Tongue secretly, first as a college student, and then while writing film criticism during the day.

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The clock on our Three-Minute Fiction contest is ticking. Stay tuned, and we'll reveal our latest winner on Sunday.

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David Shenk argues that discipline, not giftedness, is vital to greatness.

Suppose that, in 19th-century America, the forces of good and evil battled for the soul of the new republic — what we now know as the Civil War. Author Seth Grahame-Smith explores that premise in a new book you can really sink your teeth into.

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Memoirs of surviving brain surgery and a difficult childhood, a primer on the art of conversation and a history of a northern slave estate.

A memoir of how cooking helped save the marriage of Paula Butturini and her husband, reporters traumatized by war.

A group portrait of Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith and Andrew Weil and their experiments with hallucinogens in the early 1960s.

Henry M. Paulson’s account of his tumultuous term as George W. Bush’s last Treasury secretary.

Paranoia strikes deep in this journalist’s survey of conspiracy theories in Western politics.

This ambitious, angry novel’s capitalist is more reliably loathsome than its jihadist.

An entertaining memoir-cum-travelogue of a grad student’s improbable education in Russian language and literature.

The great campaign books of the past are about more than the back-room drama that dominates recent releases.

Paperback books of particular interest.

In this novel with echoes of Anne Frank’s diary, a Jewish child is hidden in a brothel during the Holocaust.

The comedian Chelsea Handler beats out Karl Rove for the top spot on the hardcover nonfiction list with her new collection.

A real-life mass poisoning in Tokyo in 1948, possibly linked to notorious wartime medical experiments, is the basis for this highly original crime novel.