Examines the role of sports in both primitive and modern societies, and addresses why people play and watch sports.

A concise portrait of the founder of psychoanalysis discusses his advocacy of the "talking cure" method of therapy, his pioneering role in establishing modern understanding of the human unconscious, and his enduring influence on modern psychiatry.

The NBC news anchor and former White House correspondent evaluates the American dream of the past, present, and future as experienced by four generations of his and other families.

In Mississippi in the early 1900s, ten-year-old David Logan's family generously shares their well water with both white and African-American neighbors in an atmosphere of potential racial violence.

One of America's most respected writers takes an epic journey across America, Airstream in tow, and asks everyday Americans what unites and divides a country as endlessly diverse as it is large. Standing on a wind-scoured island off the Alaskan coast, Philip Caputo marveled that its Inupiat Eskimo schoolchildren pledge allegiance to the same flag as the children of Cuban immigrants in Key West, six thousand miles away. And a question began to take...

Fourteen-year-old Matilda, an apprentice bonesetter and practitioner of medicine in a village in medieval England, tries to reconcile the various aspects of her life, both spiritual and practical.

The author is the thirty-year-old proprietor of Baohaus, the hot East Village hangout where foodies, stoners, and students come to stuff their faces with delicious Taiwanese street food late into the night, and one of the food world's brightest and most controversial young stars. But before he created the perfect home for himself in a small patch of downtown New York, he wandered the American wilderness looking for a place to call his own. He grew...

"In the spirit of Sid Mukherjee's Emperor of All Maladies, a medical history that is both a collective narrative of women's bodies and a call to action for a new conversation around personal health, self-improvement, and the future of healthcare for everyone"--

The gap between rich and poor has never been wider . . . legislative stalemate paralyzes the country . . . corporations resist federal regulations . . . spectacular mergers produce giant companies . . . the influence of money in politics deepens . . . bombs explode in crowded streets . . . small wars proliferate far from our shores . . . a dizzying array of inventions speeds the pace of daily life.These unnervingly familiar headlines serve as the...

In 1949, Florida's orange industry was booming with cheap Jim Crow labor. When a white seventeen-year-old Groveland girl cried rape, vicious Sheriff McCall was fast on the trail of four young blacks who dared to envision a future for themselves. Then the Ku Klux Klan rolled into town, burning homes and chasing hundreds of blacks into the swamps. So began the chain of events that would bring Thurgood Marshall, the man known as "Mr. Civil Rights," into...