Search results for

Heart of a Samurai tells the true story of 14-year-old Manjiro, a boy who was shipwrecked, rescued by whalers and taken to America. It was the late 1800s, when Japan was cut off from the outside world — until Manjiro returned and influenced the shogun to open the country to diplomacy.

John Thavis covered the Vatican from Rome for nearly 30 years while working for the Catholic News Service. In his new book, The Vatican Diaries, he describes a place much less organized and hierarchical than the public imagines.

"If we want to make media better then we've got to start consuming better media," says open-source-Internet activist Clay Johnson. His new book, The Information Diet, makes the case for more "conscious consumption" of news and information.

Two years after the King of Pop died, his brother Jermaine Jackson has released the memoir You are Not Alone. It tells of the Jackson 5 and Michael Jackson's childhood, career and struggles. Jermaine Jackson speaks with Michel Martin about his book and how his family has been coping.

In 2003, a hospital nurse named Charlie Cullen was arrested under suspicion of injecting patients with lethal doses of a variety of medications. He is now considered one of the nation's most prolific serial killers. Journalist Charles Graeber explains how the hospital system failed to stop Cullen.

Journalist Jonathan Alter regards the 2012 presidential contest as the most consequential election of recent times. In his new book, Alter argues that President Obama's re-election prevented the country from veering sharply to the right, and he dissects the campaign and the events that led up to it.

Nathan Wolfe travels to the viral hot spots of the world, where viruses first jump from animals to humans. The scientist spends his days tracking emerging infectious diseases before they turn into global pandemics.

Shin Dong-hyuk is the only person known to have been born in North Korea's prison camps and gotten out alive. Journalist Blaine Harden tells the story of Shin's daring escape.

As a child, poet Philip Schultz struggled in school, but it wasn't until his son was diagnosed with dyslexia that Schultz finally had a name for what had frustrated him all those years. In My Dyslexia, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet revisits his childhood struggles and how he coped.

In the peak of the pandemic, unemployed with lots of free time, I took a chance and tinkered with making clay creations. I felt a sense of immense pride — coupled with the nagging desire to do better.