How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror
by Reza Aslan
There are places where the multiplicity of our modern identities is neatly reduced: public restrooms (male or female), invite-only parties (in or out), tax forms (upper, lower, middle brackets). For Reza Aslan the airport is such a place: an “identity directory” in which “we are most determinately defined, registered, and catalogued….
Cathedrals of Science: The Personalities and Rivalries That Made Modern Chemistry
by Patrick Coffey
With physicists and evolutionary biologists routinely hitting bestseller lists, chemistry can start to seem an unsexy scientific pursuit. In Cathedrals of Science, Patrick Coffey returns to headier days for the field, when the work and relationship between a dozen-odd chemists — their brilliant collaborations, bitter one-upmanship, shifting loyalties and long-standing grudges — came to define modern chemistry and show how exactly scientific theories come to attributed and accepted.
Los Angeles City Council motions are not known for their poetry. But the Council’s decision six years ago to change the name of a few blocks of Clarence Street in East L.A. — then best known for providing a moniker to a street gang — to Gabriel García Márquez Street, moved its members to write phrases of art, if purplish ones. “The world of García’s fiction is a magical realm where the strange and exotic can suddenly become comfortably familiar, and the whole concept of an objective reality is put in question….
Tippecanoe and Tyler Too: Famous Slogans and Catchphrases in American History
by Jan R. Van Meter
Barack Obama might have been the more praised public speaker, but John McCain too managed some crowd-pleasers on the campaign trail. The best, perhaps, was his defense of his Iraq war platform, which called for increasing the number of troops there….
Orson Welles was born on May 6, 1915, and directed his most acclaimed film, Citizen Kane, at age 26. Years later, after a couple disastrous movies and a sojourn in Europe, he would reunite with one of its stars, Joseph Cotton, in The Third Man. Welles' character, Harry Lime, is the missing center of the movie until he appears, finally, and explains his motives for entering a less-than-savory line of work....
