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Salon: Books

Book reviews, author interviews and publishing news from Salon critics and staff.

The road to Wikipedia How do we know what we know? A new book takes a long view of knowledge, from ancient oral traditions to the rise of universities and the Internet. We drive as we live No wonder traffic will never improve. We are doomed by our behavior, as a drive in New York with "Traffic" author Tom Vanderbilt reveals. The souls of young Muslim folk What it's like to be America's new "problem" in the age of terror. The heretic Giordano Bruno has been called a martyr to science and an occultist, but a new book argues that the brilliant philosopher's unconventional behavior did him in. A fraud's life Can great art spring from a lie? Two new books about forgers raise provocative questions about the links between authenticity and genius. This is not my beautiful wife Meteorology meets conspiracy in Rivka Galchen's exquisite first novel about a man who mistakes his wife for an impostor. The devil and David Carr The veteran newspaperman discusses his alternately horrifying and uplifting memoir about the journey from crackhead to crack New York Times reporter. Thomas Frank on the Bush administration: Sabotage by design The author of "What's the Matter With Kansas?" discusses the corrosive relationship between conservatives and business, liberal bias and his new book about Republican misrule. Forging the missing case for war In further chronicles of Bush government deceit, author Ron Suskind drops a bombshell: The White House ordered the CIA to fake a letter linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida. The man who shook the Kremlin Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who died this week, was instrumental in bringing the Soviet Union to its knees, and he never wavered from his belief in a writer's moral responsibility to truth and beauty. Why won't you blurb me? I had an agent and a book deal for my first novel. All I was missing was quotes for the back cover. Next time, remind me to suck up to more famous writers. How Kafka-esque is Kafka? The Czech writer has become the prophet of our absurd era, but a new book intends to strip the author of his saintly reputation. Touched by a vampire Preteen girls -- and their grown-up moms -- are sinking their teeth into Stephenie Meyer's gothic "Twilight" books by the millions. Move over, J.K. Rowling.