Books

Radical bombers battle strikebreaking capitalists while Clarence Darrow squares off against the "American Sherlock Holmes" in this very popular history of a trial that mixed murder, politics and celebrity in 1910 Los Angeles.

An anti-social Goth gal-pal adds fun and a bracing feminist perspective to Stieg Larsson's witty, hard-boiled tale, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

Brenda Wineapple's highly engaging biography White Heat examines the poet's enduring friendship with editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

A new novel three decades in the making features time travel, screwball hidden identity plots and lively background music. Reviewer Maureen Corrigan calls The Little Book by Selden Edwards an "an ideal late-summer reading getaway."

As war continues and the economy sags, Maureen Corrigan recommends three historical works that provide insight into coping with trying times.

Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead reviews A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and the American Experimental Music by George E. Lewis. The book tracks the history of Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, an organization that promoted the development of new jazz styles.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan picked out two debut books by young writers that mix personal history and social commentary

With plenty of nods to The Great Gatsby Joseph O'Neill's Netherland explores dreams and ambition in post-Sept. 11 New York City. Maureen Corrigan calls the novel "marvelous."

Fresh Air book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews John Edgar Wideman's new book, Fanon (a Novel), which mixes fiction, biography and memoir in an effort to capture the life and mind of psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon.

The debut short-story collection by Nigerian writer and Jesuit priest Uwem Akpan offers a sobering view of a world in which atrocity is commonplace, and the unthinkable is the everyday.