Dibs

From Dolly Parton (apologizing for claiming that Jews control Hollywood) to David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz (apologizing for killing people), this densely packed grab bag — subtitled “25 years of public apologies and the appalling behavior that inspired them” presents transcripts of mea-culpas from famous figures in many fields alongside capsule reminders of what they [...]

Pop Art originated in Warhol’s New York, but in the early ’60s it spread to Los Angeles, where a new generation (perhaps “clique” would be a better word) of artists embraced this new fad, characterized by the ironic glamorization of mainstream cultural detritus. (Think Warhol’s soup labels and Hockney’s swimming pools.) To be frank, most [...]

This new paperback edition of Rockmore’s 2005 hardcover original re-introduces mathe-fanatics to the dizzying world of Bernhard Riemann, the genius behind the legendary Riemann Hypothesis. More famous to the general public as the man who developed the multi-dimensional geometry that opened the door to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Riemann also hypothesized a technique for predicting [...]

Sex. Writing. Writing. Sex. You’ve always gotta wonder what those two words are doing together in the first place, because I mean … who really wants to get all cerebral and speculative about something so primal and, um, personal? Okay, writing that exists for the very purpose of turning you on, that’s one thing. (And [...]

The day a full colostomy bag figures prominently in the plot of a mystery novel is the day when you realize that mysteries have reached a whole new kind of high-water mark — which is where they should have been all along, in the graphic land of guts and gurgling noises. Nothing’s cute or cozy [...]

True-crime fans are a separate subculture. Yes, we read other kinds of books too, but a guilty incomparable I-know-what’s-coming thrill springs from these quickie page-turners that follow certain conventions: each covers a fairly recent American crime of passion in extreme detail, usually starting with a graphic description of the crime scene and then delving way, [...]

A Möbius Strip is more than just a parlor trick or childhood toy; it’s a revolutionary topological discovery that has had profound effects on science and cosmology. Invented by otherwise-obscure 19th-century German mathematician August Möbius, this bizarre one-sided and one-edged miracle has a seemingly infinite number of astounding attributes and holds deep ramifications for how [...]

“Unspeak” is Poole’s alternate word for euphemisms, which are, as we know, alternate words for other words. Pledging to unravel today’s cleverest and most devious semantic knots while exposing lying liars, the edgy Brit lashes out at those who say, for instance, “tragedy” and “terrorist,” arguing that these are political expediencies rather than true descriptions. [...]

With the revealing subtitle The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power, this is essentially an expanded rewrite of Smedley Butler’s 1935 anti-war pamphlet War Is a Racket. Carroll traces the history of the Pentagon, and the entire military apparatus of the United States — working on the fundamental assumption that all of America’s [...]

Fundamentalist Christians — in Sweden? Not just that, but Lapland, in this deeply felt character-driven mystery that starts with the partial dismemberment of a preacher and sends a smart Stockholm lawyer back to her snowy hometown. Larsson gets deep inside the heads of even minor characters who pop up only once in the narrative and [...]