In this book, the author of Hitch-22 describes his losing battle with esophageal cancer while writing columns for Vanity Fair on politics and culture and also describing his personal and philosophical view of life and death. On June 8, 2010, while on a book tour, the author was stricken in his New York hotel room with excruciating pain in his chest and thorax. Over the next eighteen months, until his death in Houston, Texas on December 15, 2011, he...

Seventy-five years ago, Henry Wallace, then the sitting Vice President of the United States, mounted a campaign to warn about the persisting "Danger of American Fascism." As fighting in the European and Japanese theaters drew to a close, Wallace warned that the country may win the war and lose the piece; that the fascist threat that the U.S. was battling abroad had a terrifying domestic variant, growing rapidly in power: wealthy corporatists and their...

"Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a leading scholar and proselytizer for physical well-being, elucidates the political and social implications of America's exercise cult(ure). Delving into the paradox of why so many Americans are physically unfit, despite the power of the exercise industry, Petrzela shows fitness to be both a product and a marker of education, social class, wealth, power, and more. Like much in postwar American life, fitness has been privatized,...

"One day Heidi Julavits sees her son silhouetted by the sun and realizes he is at the threshold of what she calls "the end times of childhood." When did this happen, she asks herself. Who is my son becoming, and who am I as a mother? What comes next, Heidi realizes, suddenly starts to feel like uncharted waters. As her son continues to grow up, rape allegations rock the university campus where she teaches. She begins to wonder how she can prepare...