Search results for

Marco Polo sits in the garden of Kublai Khan and weaves tales of spider cities, gold cities and dream cities. Author Eric Weiner explains why the best travel book he has ever read isn't about a real place. What's your favorite book about an imaginary journey? Tell us in the comments.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal was the top commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, relieved of command after a controversy in 2010. In his memoir, My Share of the Task, he describes a culture gap between the military and civilian worlds that complicated the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan.

As a young girl reeling from the revolution in Iran in 1979, author Roya Hakakian discovered the great Persian poet Ahmad Shamlou. His poems made her realize the importance of breaking from tradition. Has a poem ever changed your thinking this way? Tell us in the comments.

Will Self's latest book, Umbrella, is a complex and brilliant novel set in a North London psychiatric hospital. Reviewer Annalisa Quinn says it shines a light onto 20th century psychiatry with inventive and dazzling prose.

In a new book, Civil War historian Bruce Levine says that from the destruction of the South emerged an entirely new country, making the Civil War equivalent to a second American Revolution. Integral to the Union's victory, he says, were the nearly 200,000 black soldiers who enlisted.

David Esterly's life was changed in the 1970s when he came across wood carvings done by Grinling Gibbons more than 300 years earlier. Esterly became a wood carver, and even re-created one of Gibbons' pieces that was destroyed in a fire.

David Goldhill lost his father to infections acquired at a hospital in 2007. Since then, the business executive has been spurred to action. In his new book, Catastrophic Care, he talks about problems in the insurance-based American health care system and how we can fix it.

Scientist and writer Bill Streever is fascinated by the extremes at both ends of the thermometer. In Cold, he visited some of the chilliest places on Earth. Now, in his latest book, Heat, he travels to the world's very hot spots.

Though former MI5 director Stella Rimington knows better than anyone that Ian Fleming's From Russia With Love is not a realistic portrayal of life in the intelligence services, she still loves this tale of sex and violence. Which is your favorite Bond book? Tell us in the comments.

Juliann Garey's novel, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See, is a searing exploration of mental illness. Author Ellen Forney says it's a vivid and accurate depiction of bipolar disorder.