Tag Archives: company

Secret Selves The first three books that came to mind will (I hope!) offer meta-inspiration for your own self-reflective projects. In “The Hidden Writer,” Alexandra Johnson considers, with uncommon sensitivity and immersive storytelling, the ways in which the work of seven diarists — including the celebrated early-19th-century 7-year-old Scottish prodigy …

EMPRESS The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan By Ruby Lal Illustrated. 308 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $27.95. The story of Nur Jahan, the daughter of Persian immigrants who became queen of the Mughal Empire, approaches the status of legend in South Asia. She has been the subject of comic …

AROUSED The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything By Randi Hutter Epstein 313 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $26.95. This is a well-written and informative book about the history of hormone research. The interested reader will learn how scientists have come to understand what hormones are …

IN SEARCH OF MARY SHELLEY By Fiona Sampson 304 pp. Pegasus Books. $28.95. There have been more than 20 biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, including one in 1951 by Muriel Spark and one in 2001, considered by many to be definitive, by Miranda Seymour, who had access to previously unpublished …

Mary Jane McCaffree Monroe, who as social secretary to Mamie Eisenhower helped organize countless White House functions, then went on to set down the protocols for reception lines, state dinners and more as co-author of a pivotal reference book, died on July 23 in Juno Beach, Fla. She was 106. …

LIGHT OF THE STARS Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth By Adam Frank 262 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $26.95. Near the beginning of his engaging and accessible book “Light of the Stars,” Adam Frank strikes a familiar environmental alarm bell: “It’s like we’ve been given the keys …

NUMBER ONE CHINESE RESTAURANT By Lillian Li 290 pp. Henry Holt & Company. $27. THE EMPEROR OF SHOES By Spencer Wise 328 pp. Hanover Square Press. $26.99. Culture and commerce have long been easy bedfellows in the complicated relationship between the United States and China, so it’s unsurprising that two …

JULY 20, 2018 Welcome to LARB Ball, our new sports and culture column! From race and gender to fandom and sociability, athletics and education, fashion and advertising, the pleasures of play, the concussions, the anthem, the protests, the gambling, the violence, the money — this is the world of sports we seek …

NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCES … AND OTHERS, by Robert Gottlieb. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) An esteemed book editor who can write well about nearly anything here brings erudition and passion to essays on romance novels, Hollywood classics and, especially, ballet. “The best pieces — on Wilkie Collins, the demi-divinity Lady …

Rowbottom traces all of this with a sure hand, drawing details from her mother’s unfinished memoir and shaping them so that they make sense in her own. Much of the writing is lush yet alert to specifics. An ailing Midge, her chest hollowed out by a mastectomy, “sat at the …