Robert Kurson

last updated 8 January 2015

Patrimony by Philip Roth (Vintage, $13). A brave and loving and beautifully honest farewell by the author to his dying father. It is impossible to read Roth’s true account without realizing how we say goodbye to our aging parents every day—and that we say goodbye to ourselves just as often.

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The Napoleon of Crime by Ben Macintyre (out of print). The astonishing true story of 19th–century master thief Adam Worth, whose genius and daring purportedly made him the model for Sherlock Holmes’ archnemesis, Professor Moriarty. Author Macintyre is a gorgeous writer—as good as they come in narrative nonfiction—and he makes Worth’s world and obsessions as real as if we’d joined the master on his grandest heist.