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A year after dozens of migrants arrived on the island of Martha's Vineyard in what was widely seen as a political stunt, their unusual arrival has proven a significant legal advantage.

Henry Folger once spent nearly a year's salary on a William Shakespeare first folio. In The Millionaire and the Bard, Andrea Mays chronicles his obsession with collecting the playwright's work.

In the first memoir from a prisoner still being held at Guantanamo, Mohamedou Ould Slahi tells how he went from his native Mauritania to joining al-Qaida in Afghanistan to the U.S. prison in Cuba.

In his new memoir, Allen Kurzweil goes looking for his childhood tormentor — and discovers he's served time for involvement in an international fraud scheme so wild and colorful, it could be a movie.

George Mallory, famed mountaineer, perished in his attempt to be the first man to summit Mount Everest. Tanis Rideout's debut novel combines the tale of that famous climb with the lesser-known story of George's wife, Ruth.

In Words From the White House, linguist Paul Dickson looks at the ways presidents have used the office to create and shape American language. Presidents, Dickson says, must be eloquent and spontaneous, but they also need to communicate in a way that gives listeners something to latch onto.

In the early 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a controversial study in which participants were led to believe they were administering painful, high-voltage shocks to other subjects. Gina Perry, author of Behind the Shock Machine, says the study has "taken on a life of its own."

Despite being a big city paper, The New York Times has featured Verlyn Klinkenborg's editorials about life on his farm for years. A new collection of his essays, More Scenes from the Rural Life, offers even the city slickers a chance to daydream about cows.

New York Times Magazine reporter Mark Leibovich's new book This Town is a lively look at media, politics and money in Washington. Leibovich tells NPR that most people outside don't understand what a carnival of money and celebrity the city has become.

Jennifer Lin-Liu's On the Noodle Road takes readers on a journey along the former Silk Road, looking for the origins of the noodle. But reviewer T. Susan Chang says that the book gets tied into knots when the quest turns cold.