Dig it. That’s what they do, the folks who work in marble and granite quarries. And they dig it deep—creating pits that descend vertiginously like inverted cathedrals. Words such as pit and hole hardly suggest the architectural grandeur—shaped by decades of canny engineering—that characterizes the quarries Canadian landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky presents in this marble slab of a tome. Known for ranging around the globe in search of dramatic interactions with the environment (ship breaking on Bangladeshi beaches, dam building in China’s Three Gorges), Burtynsky visited quarries in Vermont, Italy, Portugal, and India, as well as returning to China. Then

Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie never expected to reach a US audience with her second novel, the 2007 Orange Prize–winning Half of a Yellow Sun (just released in paperback by Anchor). The novel depicts the lives of a thirteen-year-old houseboy who serves and is educated by a revolutionary university professor; the professor’s girlfriend, a sociology instructor from an elite family; and an aspiring Biafran—an Igbo-speaking Englishman—during the Biafran War (in which the Igbo people, who reside in southeastern Nigeria, attempted to secede). She wondered, “Why would Americans be interested in an African war that happened in the 1960s?” So she

Shelves at used-book stores in Japan more resemble the cat-food aisle at Wal-Mart than they do the cramped and haphazard arrangements in their American counterparts: row after row of gleaming books, identically thick and tall, differentiated only by the color on the label. Tokyo’s most notable secondhand-book store, Book Off, even employs in its logo an insipid smiley face similar to the Evil Empire’s.

If you are looking for signed first editions of the canonical novels of Don DeLillo, you need to be prepared to shell out roughly $375 for White Noise, $200 for Mao II, $175 for Underworld, and $160 for Libra. In contrast, a signed first edition of the 1980 autobiography Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League, by Cleo Birdwell, will set you back $425. How did an obscure book by a total unknown outstrip four of the most highly regarded works of fiction of the past three decades? Because, as DeLillo

It is surprising to learn that until this season, when no less than two biographies of Ethel Merman are being published on her centennial, she has attracted little serious interest. Besides her two memoirs, Who Could Ask for Anything More? (1955) and Merman (1978), the single prior biography is by one Geoffrey Mark, a self-professed “walking encyclopedia of show biz history.” But Mr. Walking Encyclopedia writes with all the sympathy and insight of a twelve-year-old. Here he is, describing Merman’s tumultuous and painful divorce from Robert Six, then chairman of Continental Airlines: “Ethel once again flew to Mexico for a

I honestly believe that 1/2 the people who read about the Mitfords are motivated to do so by a kind of fierce jealousy which drives them where they do not want to go. —Diana Mitford to Deborah Mitford, May 13, 1985 Several years ago, Charlotte Mosley found herself at lunch with her mother-in-law, Diana Mosley (née Mitford). Grumbling about the latest request by an outsider to illuminate yet another aspect of Mitford life, Diana looked at her youngest son, Max, and her daughter-in-law and said: “Why don’t one of you do something for a change?” Perhaps forgetting that Jonathan

In December 1996, the corrupt, discredited Guatemalan military and a decimated guerrilla army signed a peace accord, under United Nations supervision, ending thirty-six years of civil war. Less than two years later, the Guatemalan Archdiocese Office of Human Rights (known by the Spanish acronym odha) published a fourteen-hundred-page study of wartime atrocities, based on six thousand interviews conducted around the country with traumatized survivors and perpetrators of la violencia. This final report from the church’s Recovery of Historical Memory (remhi) investigations counted 150,000 dead and 50,000 dis­appeared and held the military primarily responsible. Its recommendations were no less powerful for

Tucked in among the many gems—culinary, historical, literary, religious, and otherwise—stashed throughout Gillian Riley’s new Oxford Companion to Italian Food is “The Pope’s Kitchen,” a luscious, whimsical sonnet by the nineteenth-century Roman poet Gioachino Giuseppe Belli, which I cannot bear to include here in anything but its entirety:

Like other progressive projects, including the civil rights and labor movements, the body of knowledge and practice commonly identified as feminism is in crisis. Beleaguered by conservatives crying “feminazi” and betrayed by beneficiaries who, depending on their location on the spectrum of identity, declare feminism white, imperialist, middle-class, separatist, unsexy, or just plain irrelevant, feminists have, by necessity, grown accustomed to conflict. The heat of this contestation has played a significant role in forging intersection theory, postcolonial criticism, and Third Wave activism. But it has also spawned “left melancholia,” an enervating malaise that robs workers for cultural justice of their

It’s been fewer than forty years since Bella Abzug was first elected to Congress on the Democratic ticket, and yet her tradition of firebrand politics is virtually absent from today’s party. The current firebrands are Republicans, who operate using the very politics of fear that Abzug so resolutely challenged during her lifetime. She was indeed fearless, taking on the anticommunists of huac, Richard Nixon (she was the first to call for his impeachment), and Jimmy Carter, who appointed her only to sack her as head of the National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year. Readers of this fine

Gram Parsons was just twenty-six years old when he died. In his lifetime, he released exactly one album under his own name, and as a member of various bands—none for long—he contributed to only a handful of recordings; the highest any of those albums reached on the charts was a sorry no. 77. Yet more than three decades after his death from a heroin overdose in Joshua Tree, California, there are as many biographies of Parsons as there are albums that include his voice. The latest addition is David Meyer’s Twenty Thousand Roads, the most thorough exploration yet of the