February is Black History Month and reading is one of the finest ways to celebrate and honor the contributions of African Americans. This year the Milwaukee Public Library will host a “Read-In” along with schools, churches, libraries and bookstores across the country. This unique event, part of the Twenty-First National African American...

As a professor of science journalism at UW-Madison, Deborah Blum has not lost the storytelling skills she honed as a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. She put them to excellent use a couple of years back in Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death, a wonderful account of 19th-century investigations...

South Africa had been a racial battleground since Dutch settlers arrived in the 1600s, and old antagonisms only worsened in the 1940s when the white minority government imposed the apartheid regimen of strict segregation and subjugation. As journalist/author Dominique Lapierre writes in A Rainbow in the Night, the generation of leaders...

Poetry is synonymous with affairs of the heart; ergo, an evening of fine wine, gourmet chocolate and poetry sounds like a perfect way to show your love this Valentine’s season. This year Cupid has sent his arrow to the Artavina Gallery in Waukesha, where romance will take flight in the form...

Terry Teachout’s previous biographical subjects are George Balanchine and H. L. Mencken, so it’s a boon to Louis Armstrong fans that Teachout chose the great man for this new life story. Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) brims with insightful quotes...

For William Faulkner, destiny was a grim piper, forcing humanity to dance like puppets to the tune of a broken instrument. Swarthmore English professor Philip Weinstein sets out to find the melody linking the dour tone of the great writer’s fiction with the dour facts of his life. Becoming Faulkner is a compact biographical analysis that benefits...

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you,” Ray Bradbury said. It is debatable as to whether Bradbury was actually advocating abstinence by choosing the pen as poison, but no matter what you find intoxicating...

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott is a seminal and frequently overlooked character in the folk music revivals of Britain and America in the 1950s and ’60s. It’s not hard to discern why he has been overlooked, given that he is such an elusive and unreliable character...

Most of us imagine mathematical geniuses as mad eccentrics with unkempt Einstein hair and almost total unawareness of everyday society. The stereotype fits Grigori Perelman like a comfortable shoe. After posting online the solution to one of math’s most challenging problems, the Russian recluse refused to accept...

Everyone knows that Wisconsin winters consist of blankets of snow and frigid temperatures. Author Robert Goolrick has used this well-known frozen tundra as the backdrop for his novel A Reliable Wife, a turn-of-the-20th-century tale that...