Ben Fulton

From David Bowie’s cousin to his childhood friends, his managers, musical collaborators, girlfriends, writers such as novelist Hanif Kureishi, and extraneous celebrities to the last word of the midwife present at Bowie’s birth, A Life leaves almost no stone unturned, no corner empty, and no speculation left unsaid.

Ghosts is a drama of many themes. At its core, though, is the idea of “sickness” as the inexorable tide we push for, or against. It is the one drama—dare it be said, the only?—wherein “sickness” becomes the widest possible metaphor not just for disease, but inherited social convention, accepted ideology, and the crucible of family without which we cannot survive, but in which we can also decay and die.

“Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric,” said Irish poet W.B. Yeats, “out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.” And it is out of the quarrel of presidential candidates that U.S. voters intuit their way closer toward Election Day.

Why our culture of law enforcement—and tensions between police and communities—is a lot more nuanced and interesting than you might think.

One measure of the extent to which we believe age influences political beliefs is the extent to which we know Churchill’s famous phrase, “If you’re not a socialist before you’re 25, you have no heart; if you are a socialist after 25, you have no head.” Or, at least, whether we believe we know it.

For a decade in which rock music was reaching its zenith as a profitable business, the 1970s, it is staggering to consider the sheer number of risks Bowie took, without any hint or appearance that he was risking anything at all.

In a world where entire stock market indices can be built on castles of sand, where war can break out any moment, or your child’s happiness can turn on a dime into dread despair, stores such as Whole Foods make us small masters of our own destiny.

The short, but dense, Something to Chew On serves up no-nonsense, stimulating fare over a range of food controversies, from GMOs to weight-loss and world hunger. Digest it if you dare.

The majesty, intelligence, pettiness and prowess of the film world’s famous boy genius and might-have-been is revealed—appetite and all—in the tape recorded pages of Henry Jaglom’s My Lunches With Orson.

In The Smartest Kids In The World: And How They Got That Way, Amanda Ripley is that rare scribe deft enough to move from personal anecdote, to policy, case study, and back again.

Rose George drenches the reader in her ocean-wide chronicle of sea-faring commerce, past and present, but her book’s meandering passages warn you in advance to don a lifejacket.