The author’s recounting of his “psychospiritual growth” follows his story from boyhood to medical school and beyond, detailing his slow introduction to the world of altered consciousness. He recalls the desire to reinforce his “masculine qua masculine credentials” among his peers, his first rum-and-Coke (“I gulp down the rest of the drink,” he writes. “It […]
Bold and ambitious, Miss Harriet Morrow has wrangled herself a position as the first female field operative for the Prescott Detective Agency, quite an experiment for agency principal Theodore Prescott. Maybe it’s her ankles, which Prescott deemed “thick and sturdy” in her interview, but Harriet just isn’t built like other women in the late 1890s, […]
Fifteen months after cult leader Patrick Nye ended his group’s hostage-taking at a theatrical gala by detonating bombs that killed 43 people, the case is ready to go to trial—with one hitch. John Horner, a senior advocate to the Crown Prosecution Service, needs someone to comb through the material that’s been excluded from the mountain […]
Between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, writes Wood, historian of American architecture and urbanism, New York City “grew into one of the world’s largest, most important, and dynamic cities.” Roughly 1 million buildings—an astonishing number—went up in the city during that period. In his deeply informed and informative account, Wood describes how population […]
Atara wears a crown everywhere she goes—in fact, her name even means crown. One day, her mom reads her a book about Purim, and Atara sees herself in Queen Esther; while Esther hid her Jewish identity, for a long time Atara never told her parents she was really a girl. Just as Esther’s crown made […]
Eleven-year-old Nick Sixsmith and her mother, Theo, pause their itinerant lives as arborists to return to Mistwood, the home of the ancient, magical ironwood trees. Frustrated by their inability to determine the cause of a rapidly spreading blight, Theo returns to the home she abandoned before Nick’s birth to look for clues in the ancestral […]
In “Origin Story,” a piece that’s less about looking back than moving forward, the female protagonist muses: “Freedom wasn’t to be found in words but in being alone…thinking thoughts that would not appear in her stories because they were shameful in their intimacy and small in scope, the product of a lack of imagination or […]
O’Neill, a University of Southern California historian, excavates the story of two East African princes who boarded a British ship with the intention of traveling to London, only to be sold into slavery in Jamaica. After years of enslavement, the princes persuaded a lawyer to help them regain their freedom, setting up the next stage […]
In 1787, Mary Wollstonecraft is fired from her position as governess of three young women on the charge of being overly progressive; the incident is a microcosm of her uphill struggle to affect “an end to women’s blind obedience.” She returns to London to pursue her ambition to become a writer, and with the encouragement […]
“Nothing ever happens if you don’t say yes, even if…it seems like a bad idea at the time,” writes Vilanch at the end of a meandering catalog of onscreen disasters, some so improbable that it’s amazing they made it past the cutting-room floor. Take a sitcom with Charo, the cuchi-cuchi Spanish “force of nature” who […]