Search results for

American history is filled with powerful men who have have honed their competitive strategies around the card table. In Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker, author James McManus details how the game's logic is reflected in our history of battles and business.

When David Sax was 11, his father handed him The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and said: "Read this if you want to know where I came from." Mordecai Richler's novel about an ambitious teen from Montreal's Jewish working class helped Sax learn to appreciate the immigrant drive.

Widely considered one of the greatest tennis players of all time, Andre Agassi admits in a new autobiography that he hates tennis, "with a dark and secret passion." Always has. He's here to talk with host Terry Gross about what he calls the "contradictions" at the core of his life.

Thousands of people will visit Arlington National Cemetery on Veteran's Day — just a snapshot of the four million visitors who pass through America's revered burial ground each year. Author Robert M. Poole discusses his new book, On Hallowed Ground, which traces the history of the nation's most celebrated military cemetery.

So what if it's pure literary estrogen? Author David Sax says Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love the best comeback story he's ever read. Sure, Gilbert's memoir is often dismissed as a beach read for unhappy housewives, but Sax says the haters are missing the point.

Is the biblically inspired Angelology the next Da Vinci Code? James Hynes' Next causes us to inaugurate the genre "Mick lit" (think middle-aged men and the Rolling Stones).

Since the U.S. invasion, 4 million Iraqis have had to leave their homes. An additional 2 million have left the country entirely, and many are still outside its borders. NPR's Deborah Amos tells the story of these displaced Iraqi citizens in her new book, Eclipse of the Sunnis.

Though the 2010 FIFA World Cup is still weeks away, writer Cord Jefferson feels Americans could do with an early tune-up on the world's most popular sport. Here are three books to put your soccer ball in motion.

The New Testament contains multiple versions of the life and teachings of Jesus. Bart Ehrman, the author of Jesus, Interrupted,, says they are at odds with each other on important points regarding the life, death and divinity of Jesus.

In Gabrielle Zevin's novel The Hole We're In, the Pomeroy family is in money trouble, and every move seems to make things worse. Zevin's characters may seem like monsters, but the author says they're just trying to do their best under difficult circumstances.