Dec 14
2010
Christopher Hart is the author of a number of illustrated art instruction manuals, including the bestseller Manga Mania: How to Draw Japanese Comics. His book Cartoon Cute Animals: How To Draw th...
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Dec 14
2010
Christopher Hart, author of the hugely popular book Manga Mania: How to Draw Japanese Comics, has written a number of bestselling illustrated art instruction manuals. His latest effort is...
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May 3
2010
Janet Poppendieck is the author of Free For All: Fixing School Food in America, one of our Featured Books. She is also a Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and has written two previous book...
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Dec 31
2009
Lauren Weber is a former staff reporter for Newsday and Reuters. Her nonfiction book In Cheap We Trust: The Story of a Misunderstood American Virtue is one of our Featured Book titles.
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Oct 25
2009
Anne Akers Johnson is one of the stable of authors who contribute to the Klutz series of how-to books. We're not sure how much of this is written by her personally and how much is produced by com...
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Oct 25
2009
We here at Wordcandy love Klutz books. This line of easy-to-follow, intelligently packaged how-to books has been breaking down a variety of kid-friendly subjects—everything from simple embro...
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May 4
2009
Elizabeth Warren is a professor at Harvard, where she teaches contract, bankruptcy, and commercial law. She is also the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel overseeing the U.S. bank bailout...
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Jun 24
2008
Former journalist Karen Abbot is the author of Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul, one of our rare nonfiction Featured Book picks. According to...
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Mar 6
2008
Journalist Scott Bittle is the executive editor of Public Agenda Online, and (along with Jean Johnson) the co-author of Where Does the Money Go? Your Guide to the Federal Budget Crisis, one of our...
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Mar 6
2008
Wordcandy doesn’t review much nonfiction, but we were pleasantly surprised by Jean Johnson and Scott Bittle’s Where Does the Money Go? Your Guided Tour to the Federal Budget Crisis. Miraculously, Johnson and Bittle have managed to write a politically unbiased book on an important-but-drier-than-dust subject that is both informative and entertaining...
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Mar 6
2008
Jean Johnson is a writer, the executive vice president of Public Agenda, and (along with Scott Bittle) the co-author of Where Does the Money Go? Your Guide to the Federal Budget Crisis, one of our...
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Nov 5
2007
Michael Dobbs has been a corporate executive, a political adviser, an academic, and an author. His historical novel Never Surrender, a fictionalized account of Winston Churchill's experience at t...
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Sep 27
2007
Michael A. Stusser is a Seattle-based journalist, writer, and game inventor. His (semi) non-fiction book The Dead Guy Interviews is one of our Featured Book titles.
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Apr 25
2007
Nancy Pearl, author of Book Lust, is America's best-known librarian. She's a regular commentator on NPR's Morning Edition, developed the One Book, One City program, and served as the model for ...
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Sep 25
2006
David Kamp’s The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation is a sprawling, gossipy account of some of America’s most influential post-World War II culinary icons. It doesn’t fully deliver the explanation promised by its subtitle (although I doubt that any single book could), but it works beautifully as a human-interest story, dipping into the careers of everyone from Alice Waters to Emeril Lagasse...
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Jul 5
2006
Marion Nestle is a New York-based university professor, and the author of the excellent nonfiction book What To Eat. Filmgoers with strong stomachs will remember her from Supersize Me, where she ...
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Jul 5
2006
Wordcandy doesn’t review much nonfiction. It’s not that we have anything against nonfiction. It's just that the nonfiction books we tend to read (and then pass along to each other, because, hey, misery loves company) are frequently depressing, and none of us want to linger over the subjects in question—global warming, voter fraud, the contents of a McDonalds hamburger—long enough to write a halfway decent review...
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Mar 21
2006
Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is one of the most famous pieces of writing in the English language. It is an unfinished novel in verse—Chaucer got down about 17,000 lines before his death in...
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Mar 21
2006
Playwright Christopher Durang is best known for his award-winning black comedy Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You. I admit, I find large doses of Durang to be rather grating—the man is ...
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Jan 28
2006
More than one critic has compared the English poet Christina Rossetti to Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of George Eliot’s Middlemarch. (A character, by the way, that I have always longed to kick in...
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Jan 11
2006
We would not be the first to compare Stephen King with Charles Dickens. Both were staggeringly prolific, both frequently used an obnoxiously faux-avuncular tone to address their audience, and bot...
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Aug 25
2005
Farley Mowat, author of the Canadian classics Owls in the Family and Never Cry Wolf, is actually quite the figure of controversy in Canada. His detractors (including The Toronto Star) have sugges...
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Mar 20
2005
David Macaulay is the author of a series of semi-fictional books about how things are built. His stories about the construction of cathedrals, castles, mosques, and pyramids, all of which are ill...
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Jan 7
2005
Truman Capote was a high school dropout-turned-journalist-turned-novelist-turned-socialite who achieved tremendous success at a remarkably young age, produced one of the most iconic novellas of th...
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Dec 7
2004
Although Robert Graves primarily thought of himself as a poet, he is best known as the author of the 1934 novel I, Claudius. A chatty faux-memoir, I, Claudius is possibly the most educational pot...
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Aug 11
2004
I have only read the first of John Lanchester's books, 1996's The Debt to Pleasure. This wickedly amusing book begins as an epicurean memoir and ends up as the only horror/cookbook hybrid I've ev...
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