skopia
Two young poets calling themselves visceral realists vanish into the Sonoran desert hunting a woman who published a single poem decades earlier. Forty voices over twenty years piece together where they went.
Rockefeller controlled ninety percent of American oil refining by the time he was forty, tithed to his church weekly, and saw no contradiction. Chernow makes him legible without absolving him.
States can govern only what they can see, so they flatten society into maps and census rows, then plan from the flattening. Scott traces Soviet collectivization and Tanzanian villagization to that one mistake.
The dead man narrates his own murder, and so do a coin and a tree, in the Istanbul of 1591 where painting a face as the eye sees it is treated as blasphemy.
Seven nights on a Caribbean luxury liner, where the pampering drives Wallace to despair. He also traces how television swallowed the irony American novelists invented, and why that irony became a trap.
Forty years of poems that begin with an ordinary question and end somewhere you never agreed to go. In "Cat in an Empty Apartment," a cat waits for the owner who has died.
Beevor follows the German Sixth Army from conquest through encirclement to starvation and surrender in a city ground to rubble, the Soviet defenders alongside. He made military history a bestselling genre.
A Liverpool shipping clerk noticed ships leaving the Congo loaded with rubber and arriving with only guns and chains. Hochschild pulls that thread into Leopold's private slave state and its millions of dead.
Serious photography meant black and white when Singh shot India in color, insisting a country this saturated demanded it. He packs pilgrims, monsoon light, and painted walls into frames borrowed from Indian painting.