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Book of the week: Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong by Terry Teachout
feature With Terry Teachout’s “taut and well-paced” new work on Louis Armstrong, the jazz world finally has a biography “that does justice to the man and his music,” said Ted Gioia in The W
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Author of the week: Leila Meacham
feature Roses, Meacham's sweeping saga of the south, is drawing comparisons to Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind.
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Also of interest ... in lives on the edge
feature Daring Young Men by Richard Reeves; The Harvard Psychedelic Club
by Don Lattin; You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier; The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kfeature -
Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America by Peter Biskind
feature Star is both an “exhaustive” treatise on an intriguing career and “so salacious” that readers “may never look at some Hollywood icons the same way ever again,”
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Book of the week: Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage by Elizabeth Gilbert
feature Elizabeth Gilbert resurfaces with Felipe, the man she fell in love with at the end of Eat, Pray, Love, and marriage.
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Also of interest ... in fashion photography
feature The Sartorialist by Scott Schuman; Avedon Fashion: 1944–2000; Resort Fashion by Caroline Rennolds Milbank; Who Shot Rock & Roll <
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Book of the week: The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education by Diane Ravitch
feature The respected scholar has become convinced that two reform ideas she helped push into the mainstream—charter schools and standardized testing—are destroying public education.
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Author of the week: Jules Feiffer
feature The Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist grew up dreaming that creating a daily newspaper strip would be his escape from the Bronx—and chronic pipsqueak-dom.
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Also of interest ... in ghouls and otherworldly creatures
feature Angelology by Danielle Trussoni; Still Life by Melissa Milgrom; Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith; The Poisoner’s Handbook by Deborah Blum
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Three Days Before the Shooting by Ralph Ellison
feature Three Days Before the Shooting is the full, unfinished text of Ralph Ellison’s would-be follow-up to Invisible Man. A 400-page extract, which was posthumously published 11 years ago as
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Book of the week: Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend by James S. Hirsch
feature James Hirsch spent seven years working to persuade Mays to participate in this full-length biography. His hard work has paid off.
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Author of the week: Raj Patel
feature Patel's new book, The Value of Nothing, has a messianic theme: It argues that we must abandon our appetite for perpetual economic growth or face extinction.
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Also of interest ... in exploring foreign lands
feature Country Driving by Peter Hessler; Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick; The Last Train From Hiroshima by Charles Pellegrino; A Dead Hand by Paul Theroux
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Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Elizabeth Abbott
feature Abbott’s “sprawling, often fascinating" book shows how the quest for sugar helped spawn the trans-Atlantic slave trade and how it lures millions of people into bad diets.
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