Search results for

Southern food and culture expert John T. Edge sees the food truck craze as a great democratic portrait of America. His new cookbook highlights some of the most creative and cheap food cooked in trucks these days.

What does the Internet look like? Journalist Andrew Blum decided to find out. His new book, Tubes, is a journey into the Internet's physical infrastructure — where our data is stored and transmitted.

Christina Baker Kline's new novel incorporates a true piece of American history. One of the book's protagonists, an Irish orphan, is packed onto a train and sent to the Midwest. In real life, "orphan trains" were intended to save children from the streets, but sometimes resulted in near-slavery.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's latest book tells the story of Ifemelu and Obinze, who fall in love as students in Nigeria but soon emigrate to different countries: Ifemelu to America and Obinze to England. Adichie tells NPR's Scott Simon that Ifemelu's discovery of racial identity mirrors her own.

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.

In 14 years on Saturday Night Live, Darrell Hammond did many impressions, including Bill Clinton and Al Gore. But few of his cast members knew that Hammond struggled with drugs, alcohol and self-cutting as the result of systematic childhood abuse.

"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.

"Poetry holds the knowledge that we are alive and that we know we're going to die," poet Marie Howe tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. One of Howe's most famous poems, "What the Living Do," was recently included in The Penguin Anthology of 20th-Century American Poetry.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind talks about his unflattering picture of rivalries and dysfunction within President Obama's first economic team in his book Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President. Some of officials quoted in the book say they were misquoted or that their comments were taken out of context.

In Sybil Exposed, Debbie Nathan explores the life of Shirley Mason — the psychiatric patient whose life was portrayed in the 1973 book and 1976 TV movie. Mason later admitted to her psychiatrist that she'd made the whole thing up — but not before the story manufactured a psychiatric phenomenon.