The historical record crowns success. Those enshrined in its annals are men and women whose ideas, accomplishments, or personalities have dominated, endured, and most important of all, found champions. John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, Giorgio Vasari
When Paul Collins's son Morgan was two years old, he could read, spell, and perform multiplication tables in his head...but not answer to his own name. A casual conversation-or any social interaction that the rest of us take for granted-will, for Morgan,
Paul Collins travels the globe piecing together the missing body and soul of one of our most enigmatic founding fathers: Thomas Paine.A typical book about an American founding father doesn't start at a gay piano bar and end in a sewage ditch. But then, To
When Sylvia Tebrick, the 24-year-old wife of Richard Tebrick, suddenly turns into a fox while they are out walking in the woods, Mr. Tebrick sends away all the servants in an attempt to keep Sylvia's new nature a secret. Both then struggle to come to term
Paul Collins and his family abandoned the hills of San Francisco to move to the Welsh countryside—to move, in fact, to the village of Hay-on-Wye, the "Town of Books" that boasts fifteen hundred inhabitants—and forty bookstores. Taking readers into a s
The first popular narrative history of Shakespeare's First Folio, the world's most obsessively pursued book. One book above all others has transfixed connoisseurs for four centuries—a book sold for shillings in the streets of London, whisked to Manhatta
On Long Island, a farmer finds a duck pond turned red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two boys playing at a pier discover a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumble upon neatly severed limbs in an overgro
