Read Beat (...and repeat)

Among the blurbs on the back of Kelefa Sanneh's "Major Labels," a book about popular music, is this from David Letterman: "Kelefa Sanneh has achieved the impossible. 'Major Labels' somehow manages to unspool everything you need to know about 50 years of music, but more impressively, he makes you care about all of it. Even the stuff you don't care about." The...

Named by The Washington Post as one of the best feel-good books of 2021, "The Comfort Book" is the ideal read for your next plane trip, especially in the travel explosion of 2022 when you may be forced to settle down and wait in some airline terminal. “It is a strange paradox, that many of the clearest, most comforting life lessons are learnt while we are at our lowest," notes Haig,...

Erich Schwartzel details the rise of the Chinese film industry and how the Asian nation has been able to dictate to Hollywood. "Red Carpet" shows that American interests, hungry to take advantage of the huge  market, have been forced to yield to Chinese demands when it comes to anything that might put that country in a bad light. In his interview with Steve Tarter, Schwartzel points out...

Want to make sense of our volatile economy? Feel powerless in a world where billionaires and mighty corporations seem to make all the rules? You need to meet Joe Saul-Sehy and Emily Guy Birken who are here to tell you that personal finance can be a lot more fun than you think.  Their book is “Stacked—Your Super Serious Guide to Modern Money Management” only it’s not so serious. Saul-Sehy was a fin...

In the early ’90s, young Tiffanie Drayton and her siblings left Trinidad and Tobago to join their mother in New Jersey, where she’d been making her way as a domestic worker, eager to give her children a shot at the American Dream.  But it didn't take long for financial realities to upset that dream. As housing costs rose, Tiffanie and her family were uprooted, moving from Texas to Florida the...

Grant Golliher qualifies as the modern-day cowboy who tries to help others adopt the cowboy spirit. "I'm the lucky cowboy that showed up and married the rancher's daughter. This beautiful piece of land, and the safe harbor I found in my marriage, would become the setting for me to find my true calling in life," he notes. Golliher is referring to Jane, his wife, and the Diamond...

“Star Trek” isn’t just an old TV show—it’s an industry.  Or as Ryan Britt, the author of “Phasers on Stun!” might say, a universe. Britt’s new book beams us down to the show’s origins back in the 1960s, its acceptance after initial resistance and relates the offspring of the series—both film and TV shows. “Mr. Spock and Data weren’t just cool space superheroes to me as a kid, they were beacons of...

Columbia University professor Jeremy Dauber serves up a treatise on the great American comic that takes you through over 150 years of history. He goes all the way back to Thomas Nast, who fashioned images of Uncle Sam and Santa we still abide by, and runs through the comics of the 21st century. There’s Superman, of course, and all the super folks that followed along with the moral panic of the Eis...

Cynthia Clampitt wants you to explore the Midwest. Her new book, “Destination Heartland,” serves as a guide to places of interest and foods of interest in a 12-state region. “The region sometimes called ‘flyover country’ offers a multitude of great places to land,” she said. Now you might find an entire volume of Midwestern attractions that Clampitt didn’t include. She makes no claims to this bein...

Eugene Linden can say I told you so but he'd rather see progress towards heading off a catastrophe that he suggests is coming unless citizens of the world take climate change seriously. Indeed, it may be too late for seriously. What we face now is urgency, he says in his 11th book, subtitled "A People's History of Climate Change, From 1979 to the Present." Linden revisits some...

Armstrong, who has written previous books on "Seinfeld" and "Mary Tyler Moore Show," goes back to the early days of television in this one. She focuses on four women who had a big impact on the TV medium. Irma Phillips defined the soap opera, establishing a format that would run for decades across all networks. Gertrude Berg turned a hit radio show into one of TV's first h...

For many of us, the sentiment has been that the only good insect is a dead insect. After all, if they're not swiping plants in a farm field, they're buzzing around, destroying the ambience of a picnic or outing. But insects have a big role to play in the wide world of life, says Oliver Milman, whose book,  "Insect Crisis," spells out the dangers this world will be in if we let...

The title is the answer Washington Post writer Travis Andrews received when he wondered to his newspaper associates why Goldblum had developed such a following even though he hadn't appeared in any recent "A" movies. That led to this book, an interesting cruise through the spectacle of the Goldblum Factor, that intangible something that defines some celebrities, making them eminentl...

Louisa Lim grew up in Hong Kong and later covered China and Hong Kong for a decade as a correspondent for BBC and NPR. Her previous book, "The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited," recalled China's brutal suppression of protest in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Now a teacher at the University of Melbourne in Australia, she found herself immersed in familiar territory w...

"This is Where You Belong--Finding Home Wherever You Are" covers Melody Warnick's own experience of moving about in the United States, never staying anywhere longer than a couple of years, traveling from California to Utah to Iowa to Texas--until she got to Blacksburg, Va. There, Warnick has found peace and stability--not because Blacksburg is a model city or one of those places tha...

Building a future for coral reefs may not seem to be a priority in a world threatened with climate change, an ocean festooned with plastic and alarming extinction rates being registered even in insects, always thought of as the planet's ultimate survivors. As Juli Berwald notes in her interview with Steve Tarter, coral reefs aren't just pretty places to view while on vacation. Coral reef...

"Generation Sleepless--Why Tweens and Teens Aren't Sleeping Enough and How We Can Help Them" is a mouthful of a title but Heather Turgeon and Julie Wright have a lot to say when it comes to the sleeping habits of our youth. In an interview with Steve Tarter, Julie Wright explains that sleep is just as important to teens as it is to babies. One of the points made in "Generation...

Yet another book on President Kennedy? It's true but Mark Updegrove, the author of four previous books dealing with U.S. presidents, tries to cut through the myth and the conspiracy theories with this effort. Updegrove, who served as the director of the LBJ Presidential Library for eight years and now heads the LBJ Foundation, doesn't shy away from acknowledging that Kennedy was badly ou...

Francie Hinrichsen has made a career out of helping small businesses get their brands and websites in order but she found another passion: helping women entrepreneurs. She started Founding Females "where I get to root for women," she said. And she wrote this book, a step-by-step guide on how women can get that business started. "Everything's in the mind. That's where it al...

Lisa Scottoline fits into the category of celebrity writer very nicely. Having sold over 30 million copies, her books are published in over 35 countries.  So you might think that launching a new book, “What Happened to the Bennetts,” a mystery about a family that's moved into a witness protection program after a deadly carjacking incident, would be, well, routine. Instead, Scottoline opened a...

Elizabeth Williamson has excelled at three of the top newspapers in the country: Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Her reporting skills are in evidence in "Sandy Hook," a book that not only covers the tragic shooting that occurred on Dec. 14, 2012 when 20 first graders and six educators were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. but the strange a...

Arthur Brooks always wanted to be a French horn player. And became one, winding up playing professionally in the United States and Europe. In his early twenties, however, he realized he wasn’t getting better at his instrument. He was getting worse. “I visited famous teachers and practiced more, but I couldn’t get back to where I had been. Pieces that had been easy to play became hard; pieces that...

A lot of what people think is being recycled, isn't. That's Jennie Romer talking. A San Francisco attorney who first looked into the problem of  plastic bags and plastic pollution 15 years ago, Romer's book is a guide to better recycling. While nine states now have laws that ban plastic bags, "we still have quite a few places where that's not happening," she said. 

Evison's seventh novel chronicles 170 years of American history but it's not chronological. We skip back and forth between the California gold rush, the building of the transcontinental railroad and modern life. "Evison pulls off a wonderful high-wire act of storytelling that few would attempt," noted Jason Mott, author of "Hell of a Book."

Adam Tooze, a history professor at Columbia University, is the author of "Shutdown--How Covid Shook the World's Economy." Never before did the global economy contract by 20 percent in a matter of weeks as it did in 2020. While the number of people contracting covid as well as the heated debate over mask use and opening of facilities is finally easing, it's important to understa...