“[Claudel's] latest novel, Brodeck, arrives like a fresh, why-haven’t-we-known-him discovery, revealing him to be as dazzling on the page as he is on the screen…. Brodeck is the Brothers Grimm by way of Kafka…. [Claudel] audaciously approaches a subject that seems thoroughly covered and makes it fresh. His nightmarish fairy tale captures the essential, inescapable evil at the center of the Holocaust, the human urge to destroy Others … a compulsion existing beyond time, place or politics.”
—The New York Times Book Review

The Age of Wonder is a colorful and utterly absorbing history of the men and women whose discoveries and inventions at the end of the eighteenth century gave birth to the Romantic Age of Science. Through the lives of William Herschel and his sister Caroline, who forever changed the public conception of the solar system; of Humphry Davy, whose near-suicidal gas experiments revolutionized chemistry; and of the great Romantic writers, from Mary Shelley to Coleridge and Keats, who were inspired by the scientific breakthroughs of their day, Richard Holmes brings to life the era in which we first realized both the awe-inspiring and the frightening possibilities of science.

Blake Bailey’s bestselling biography details the life of a literary icon. John Cheever spent much of his career impersonating a perfect suburban gentleman, the better to become one of the foremost chroniclers of postwar America. Written with unprecedented access to essential sources—including Cheever’s massive journal, only a fraction of which has ever been published—Bailey’s Cheever is a stunning example of the biographer’s art and a brilliant tribute to an essential author.

Read more about the awards on the NBCC site here.

Read more about The Maeve Binchy Writer’s Club and Heart and Soul.

Irish Soda Bread with Dried Cherries & Raisins

I like to keep it seasonal around here, and with St. Patrick’s Day right around the corner, this is the bread for me. If you follow along with the photos on Recipe Girl’s post, you’ll see that this bread couldn’t be easier to make.

Daintea Bread

Just look at this lovely loaf! Cookie Baker Lynn offers up this lightly sweet cake as an antidote to the quantity-over-quality mentality: just a slice (or maybe two) of this lemony bread will satisfy your afternoon hunger pangs. I can see this being the perfect accompaniment to a cup of tea.

Salami Rolls

Salami rolls. The name alone makes me want to high-five everyone in my office. What a brilliant idea from Baking Delights!

Sweet Potato Mascarpone Bourbon Bread

This is one of those recipes wherein you consider the name and think, “Yes, I like every single one of those words.” I bet the sweet potato and mascarpone makes for an incredibly moist bread, and the bourbon gives it a nice kick. The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group recently engaged in a bake-off with our Operations and Information Technology group (yes, it gets pretty corporate around here), and I suspect if I had come across She Simmers’s post earlier, I woulda had the competition in the bag. But alas, Knopf Doubleday lost to OPSIT’s well-executed Little Baby Jesus Cake and Lemon Meltaways.

Monkey Bread with Cream Cheese Glaze

Now this is what I meant by those alluring cake-breads. Monkey bread barely falls into the category of bread, considering the biscuity dough is dipped in melted butter, rolled in brown sugar and cinnamon, and topped with cream cheese glaze. Nope, monkey bread definitely falls into the give-me-a-heart-attack dessert category. But I’m not complaining, and neither is Smitten Kitchen.

If this post has given you a hankering for breadmaking, but you’d like to start with the basics, sign up for our cooking newsletter—next week I’m going to e-mail out the recipe for James Beard’s authoritative oatmeal bread recipe.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is the world-renowned novelist, playwright, critic, and author of Wizard of the Crow. He is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.

Read more about Heart and Soul.

In Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience, Stephen S. Hall examines the way recent brain science is shedding light on these timeless human virtues. He refers to them as eight “neural pillars of wisdom.” Among the findings in each area are:

1. Emotion Regulation – Studies at Stanford University, including brain imaging experiments, have shown that older people process emotion differently than younger people on average. They are less likely to dwell on the negative, tend to value relationships more, and rebound from setbacks more quickly.

2. Compassion – Electrophysiological measurements of the brains of Buddhist monks in the midst of compassion meditation have identified a unique pattern of brain activation, known as a “gamma oscillation,” which may coordinate and synchronize mental activity in disparate parts of the brain during empathic understanding and acts of loving-kindness.

3. Moral Judgment – Cognitive neuroscientists, in a series of brain scanning experiments over the past decade, have identified a neural circuit involved in moral reasoning, and have shown that moral judgment can change depending on whether we are physically close to another person (“up close and personal” judgments) or are acting at a distance.

4. Humility – Business psychologists have shown that the combination of intense professional will and extreme personal humility are the essential traits in turning a good company into a great company; by contrast, CEOs who rank high in narcissism measures tend to be leaders—but bad ones. They put personal drama and egotism ahead of company performance.

5. Altruism – Scientists have used brain-scanning experiments to identify a tentative circuitry in the brain that monitors situations of social injustice, and seems to prompt a form of behavior known as altruistic punishment—decisions in which a person sacrifices personal gain to punish a rule-breaker.

6. Patience – A sense of imagination about the future, a capacity which resides in the brain’s prefrontal cortex, helps suppress the impulse for immediate gratification, according to brain scanning experiments, and helps people plan goals and remain optimistic about the future.

7. Sound Judgment – Building on a huge amount of neuroscience that has been investigating decision-making, scientists are now teasing apart the process of neural valuation—how the brain attaches value to various choices. This may turn out to be the neural answer to a question asked by philosophers for centuries about the central challenge of wisdom: how do we decide what is most important?

8. Dealing with Uncertainty – Scientists at Princeton University, UCLA and elsewhere have been investigating how the brain reacts when it encounters the unexpected. Animal experiments suggest that habit allows us to react more quickly when the world is unchanging, but that in an environment of great flux, habit slows down our neural ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

Ishawooa, Wyoming, is far from bucolic nowadays. The sheriff, Crane Carlson, needs no reminder of this but gets one anyway when he finds a kid not yet twenty murdered in a meth lab. His other troubles include a wife who’s going off the rails with bourbon and pot, and his own symptoms of the disease that killed his grandfather.

Einar Gilkyson, taking stock at eighty, counts among his dead a lifelong friend, a wife and—far too young—their only child; and his long-absent sister has lately returned home from Chicago after watching her soul mate die. His granddaughter, Griff, has dropped out of college to look after him, though Einar would rather she continue with her studies and her boyfriend, Paul. Completing this extended family are Barnum McEban and his ward, Kenneth, a ten-year-old whose mother—Paul’s sister—is off marketing spiritual enlightenment.

What these characters have to contend with on a daily basis is bracing enough, involving car accidents, runaway children, strokes and Lou Gehrig’s disease, not to mention the motorcycle rallies and rodeos that flood the tiny local jail. But as their lives become even more strained, hardship foments exceptional compassion and generosity, and those caught in their own sorrow alleviate the same in others, changing themselves as they do so. In this gripping story, along with harsh truths and difficult consolation come moments of hilarity and surprise and beauty. No one writes more compellingly about the modern West than Mark Spragg, and in Bone Fire he is at the very height of his powers.

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Mark Spragg is the author of Where Rivers Change Direction, a memoir that won the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers award, and the novels The Fruit of Stone and An Unfinished Life, which was chosen by the Rocky Mountain News as the Best Book of 2004. All three were top-ten Book Sense selections and have been translated into fifteen languages. He lives with his wife, Virginia, in Wyoming.

Meet Mark Spragg on his book tour

Included in this new paperback edition is a new afterward!

When Joe Torre took over as manager of the Yankees in 1996, they had not won a World Series title in eighteen years. In that time seventeen others had tried to take the helm of America’s most famous baseball team. Each one was fired by George Steinbrenner. After twelve triumphant seasons—with twelve straight playoff appearances, six pennants, and four World Series titles—Torre left the Yankees as the most beloved manager in baseball. But dealing with players like Jason Giambi, A-Rod, Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Roger Clemens, and Randy Johnson is what managing is all about. Here, for the first time, Joe Torre and Tom Verducci take readers inside the dugout, the clubhouse, and the front office, showing what it took to keep the Yankees on top of the baseball world.

“One of the best books about baseball ever written.” —Daily News

Click here for an excerpt.

We all recognize wisdom, but defining it is more elusive. In this fascinating journey from philosophy to science, Stephen S. Hall gives us a dramatic history of wisdom, from its sudden emergence in four different locations (Greece, China, Israel, and India) in the fifth century B.C. to its modern manifestations in education, politics, and the workplace. We learn how wisdom became the provenance of philosophy and religion through its embodiment in individuals such as Buddha, Confucius, and Jesus; how it has consistently been a catalyst for social change; and how revelatory work in the last fifty years by psychologists, economists, and neuroscientists has begun to shed light on the biology of cognitive traits long associated with wisdom—and, in doing so, begun to suggest how we might cultivate it.

Hall explores the neural mechanisms for wise decision making; the conflict between the emotional and cognitive parts of the brain; the development of compassion, humility, and empathy; the effect of adversity and the impact of early-life stress on the development of wisdom; and how we can learn to optimize our future choices and future selves.

Hall’s bracing exploration of the science of wisdom allows us to see this ancient virtue with fresh eyes, yet also makes clear that despite modern science’s most powerful efforts, wisdom continues to elude easy understanding.

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For twenty-five years, Stephen S. Hall has written about the intersection of science and society in books, magazine articles, and essays, primarily in The New York Times Magazine. He is the author of five previous critically acclaimed books, including Invisible Frontiers and Merchants of Immortality. He has received numerous awards, including in 2004 the Science in Society Journalism Award for book writing from the National Association of Science Writers and, in 1998, the William B. Coley Award from the Cancer Research Institute. In addition to science, Hall has written extensively about travel, baseball, and Italy. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and two children.

Meet the author on his book tour