Books
The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy by Bill Simmons 
The online sports columnist's 700-page treatise leaves no doubt that basketball will always come first, and it's a blast to listen when a “true fan” like Simmons is doing the talking.
Novel of the week: Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving
The “essential power” of Last Night in Twisted River proves strong enough that Irving’s excesses “do not overwhelm it,” said Floyd Skloot in The Boston Globe.
Book of the week: When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women From 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins
Collins’ ambitious survey of American women’s social and political progress over the past half-century is “remarkable.” Every signpost of the shift in women’s fortunes gets a fresh look.
Also of interest ... in past American battles
D-Day by Antony Beevor; The Big Burn by Timothy Egan; The American Civil War by John Keegan; Empire of Liberty by Gordon S. Wood
Author of the week: Irene Vilar
Now married with two children, Vilar's memoir, Impossible Motherhood, reveals the pathological desire for control over her body that led her to have 15 abortions in 15 years.
Glenn Beck: The new Oprah?
The power of the Fox News host to promote a certain kind of book
Agassi drug scandal: Tennis legends react
Andre Agassi has rocked the tennis world by confessing he used meth—and then lied about it. Will his reputation survive?
Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns
It’s about time someone wrote a “thorough and largely unbiased” biography of one of 20th-century America’s most influential political thinkers, said Brian Doherty in Reason.
Book of the week: Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance
Freakonomics authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner are back with another "beautifully contrarian" collection of data-driven arguments.
Novel of the week: The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk
The Nobel laureate's new book is a spellbinding love story about a young Turkish man who destroys his life pining for the woman he slept with just before marrying someone else.
Author of the week: Jonathan Safran Foer
It’s simply wrong, says Foer, that the “crudest” of human senses—taste—“has been exempted from the ethical rules” governing all other human desires. His new book, Eating Animals, advocates a veritable boycott of factory-farmed animals.
Also of interest ... in screen celebrities
How to Be a Movie Star by William J. Mann; I Am the New Black by Tracy Morgan; American Rebel by Marc Eliot; American on Purpose by Craig Ferguson
'Going Rouge': A Sarah Palin parody book
What publishers of a book mimicking Palin's memoir hope to accomplish
Author of the week: Jeff Kinney
The author of the Wimpy Kid picture books has become a hero to the grammar school set, and parents love him for turning their children into readers.
Also of interest ... in books inspired by books
Anne Frank by Francine Prose; The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett; Good for the Jews by Debra Spark; Why This World by Benjamin Moser
Book of the week: The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb
Crumb’s intensely physical style makes the "elemental conflicts" and passions in the stories of the book of Genesis palpable.
Logicomix written by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou; illustrated by Alecos Papadatos and Annie di Donna
The quest for a logical foundation to mathematics is the subject of this "extraordinary" 350-page comic book and extraordinarily unlikely international best-seller.
Novel of the week: Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Lethem’s new novel occasionally offers a witty vision of New York and a “brilliant” evocation of contemporary alienation, but remains a disappointment overall.
Suzanne Somers’ controversial cancer advice
Why the actress' new book 'Knockout: Interviews With Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer' is causing a stir
Debunking SuperFreakonomics
Have contrarian authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner gone too far with their take on global warming?
