Through A Glass, Clearly: Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars

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One comes away from Ghost Wars with two seemingly paradoxical impressions: 1. unlike most civilians, American leaders saw 9/11 coming years before it happened; and 2. barring a run of stupid luck, they had almost zero chance of stopping it, given the realities of the pre-9/11 world.
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Embracing The Other I Am; or, How Walt Whitman Saved My Life

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The first edition of Leaves of Grass is a poetical Declaration of Independence in so many ways it can be hard to keep track of them all.
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Cleaning Out the Virtual Attic: On The Road, the Book App

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In April 1951, when Jack Kerouac fed the first pieces of what would become a 120-foot scroll of paper into his Underwood portable to write the first draft of his novel, On the Road, he was, in one sense, blowing up the typewriter to make his own primitive homemade word processor. Sixty years later, Kerouac’s publisher is, in its own quiet way, blowing up the book to make – what, exactly?
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Solving for X: Malcolm X and White Readers

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If the “angriest black man in America” no longer hates you, Malcolm X's story seems to tell white people, then maybe you’re not all bad.
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Zoo York Revisited: T.J. English’s The Savage City

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In March 1986, my first winter in New York, I was mugged in a deserted parking lot a few blocks north of Madison Square Park while coming home from a party downtown. It’s a funny story, actually.
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Boom! Crash!: A Handicapper’s Guide to Panic Lit

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The winners and the also-rans in the race for the best book on the Financial Panic of 2008.
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Pitons in the Monolith: Jonathan Franzen’s Despair and the Millennials’ Dream

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The crisis Franzen described 15 years ago this month would seem doubly urgent for today’s young writers, yet twentysomethings are entering the literary arena in droves. The question’s not “Why Bother?” but “What gives?”
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The Stories We Tell Ourselves: Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife

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Let’s just get this out of the way up front: Téa Obreht is the real deal.
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The Great Read Shark: Fear and Loathing at 40

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When the Flower Children finished sitting in and singing mean songs about the president, most cut their hair and found jobs. But not Raoul Duke.
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