Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Grave takes a ground-level view of how burial sites have transformed over time and how they continue to change. As a cemetery tour guide, Allison C. Meier has spent more time walking among tombstones than most. Even for her, the grave has largely been invisible, an out of the way and unobtrusive marker of death. However, graves turn out to be not always so subtle, reve...

Driving through the panhandle of Oklahoma-a land so flat and seemingly empty that its name of No Man's Land drifts through your thoughts as you look at the endless horizon-it's still easy to imagine the blight of the Dust Bowl. The dust has now long ago settled in Oklahoma, and the Woody Guthrie Center opened in 2013 in Tulsa, encouraging one of his biggest fans, Bob Dylan, to establish his own archives on the same block. Yet Guthrie's writings about the experience of being a migrant, the ...

**One of NPR’s Great Reads of 2016“A lively assemblage and smart analysis of dozens of haunting stories…absorbing…[and] intellectually intriguing.” —The New York Times Book ReviewFrom the author of The Unidentified, an intellectual feast for fans of offbeat history that takes readers on a road trip through some of the country’s most infamously haunted places—and deep into the dark side of our history.**Colin Dickey is on the trail of America’s ghos...

**A revelatory biography of Robert Redford, written in close collaboration with the extraordinary actor and director himself, revealing the complex man beneath the Hollywood façade.“As incisive a biography of Redford as there is ever likely to be.” —The New York Times**Among the most widely admired Hollywood stars of his generation, Redford has appeared onstage and on-screen, in front of and behind the camera, earning Academy, Golden Globe, and a multitude of other...

From a Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times bestselling author and poet comes a galvanizing meditation on the power of art and culture to illuminate America's unresolved problem with race.*Named a Most Anticipated Title of 2022 by TIME magazine, New York Times, Bustle, and more*In the midst of civil unrest in the summer of 2020 and following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Ar...

The Untold Story of the 1960s Folk Scene That Launched Bob Dylan and Joan BaezPositively Fourth Street is the captivating story of how four young bohemians - Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Mimi Baez, and Richard Farina - converged in Greenwich Village, fell into love, and invented a sound and style that became one of the most enduring legacies of the 1960s. Author David Hajdu, acclaimed for his biography of jazz composer Billy Strayhorn, vividly captures the emergence of fo...

The story of the nation's largest mass graveyard and the nearly one million people buried there—based on new documents and advances in DNA technology.Once a Civil War prison and training site and later a psychiatric hospital, among other incarnations, Hart Island, just off the coast of the Bronx in the Long Island Sound, eventually became the repository for New York City's unclaimed dead. The island's mass graves are a microcosm of New York history, from the 1822 bu...

No Direction Home took 20 years to complete and has received widespread critical acclaim. Robert Shelton met Bob Dylan when the young singer arrived in New York; he became Dylan's friend, champion, and critic, and his book has been hailed as the definitive unauthorised biography of this moody, passionate genius and his world. Of more than a thousand books published about Bob Dylan, it is the only one that has been written with Dylan's active cooperation.

**From the Winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism ** Now Updated with New Material**"[Lange] might be the most influential design critic writing now." -The Los Angeles Review of BooksFrom building blocks to city blocks, an eye-opening exploration of the ways children's playthings and surroundings affect their development-now featuring the author's Pulitzer Prize-winning essays.Parent...

The essential playlist of great writing about the music that rocked America, with fifty landmark pieces on Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, Lez Zepplin, and other rock n’ roll legendsJonathan Lethem and Kevin Dettmar's Shake It Up invites the reader into the tumult and excitement of the rock revolution through fifty landmark pieces by a supergroup of writers on rock in all its variety, from heavy metal to disco, punk to hip-hop. Stanley Booth describes a record...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Learn how the Statue of Liberty made her way to New York Harbor in this fascinating history for young readers, part of the beloved What Was? series. The perfect way to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary!In 1876, France decided to give the United States a very big and very special present: the Statue of Liberty! Proposed by Edouard de Laboulaye and designed by Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, the gift was to commemorate the country...

Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan's life in music is revisited by his foremost interpreter -- weaving individual moods and moments into a brilliant history of their changing times.The book begins in Berkeley in 1968, and ends with a piece on Dylan's show at the University of Minnesota -- his very first appearance at his alma mater -- on election night 2008. In between are moments of euphoric discovery: From Marcus's liner notes for the 1967 Basement Tapes (pop music's m...