The Rose Kennedy Greenway was supposed to be the crowning aesthetic achievement of a twenty year project to bury Boston's Southeast Expressway in tunnels beneath the city. Where a towering, multi-lane concrete monstrosity once stood, politicians planned a parkway extending from the north end of Boston, south to the financial...

In the early part of the last century my great-grandfather would hitch up his horse when the fields froze each winter and head out across upstate New York hawking various goods and sundries, including books. That may explain some part of why my walk to the bookstore Saturday morning was...

Before I opened a bookstore, I had only been to a handful of author readings in my life. Now I host them regularly, but I am always conscious of what an inadequate word "reading" is for what goes on when an author comes to discuss and read from their book...

As public debate begins over Solicitor General Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court, pundits have emerged full-force for the fifth time in a decade to exploit a general feeling of helplessness in the face of an impending lifetime appointment. Yet whether or not Kagan takes the seat of Justice...

A year ago I was sitting upstairs at City Lights Books in San Francisco, paying a visit to a fellow bookseller, when a man came bounding up the precarious old stairwell with a white, hardcover book in hand. He exchanged a few words with my friend and handed him the...

As I sit at the desk of my small independent bookstore a mile from where he lived, and think of Howard Zinn, I cannot cast my eyes in any direction without signs of his presence here. Howard was my indefatigable supporter, as he was of all books and all bookstores....

It's entertaining to watch Barney Frank be a bloviating loudmouth and call a mentally ill constituent a whackjob at a supposed town hall series, but organizing a real one, with positive results, is a whole different story.  Over a four week period, in our 70,000 plus city-suburb of Boston, Back...

For the first time in American history, a single corporation is attempting to gain full ownership of an extraordinary number of books printed during the last century, effectively controlling their dissemination by default without the consent of those who still hold valid copyrights. In early September authors and their representatives...

Throughout the month of August the poker game of Internet business took a vacation as Amazon, Yahoo, and Microsoft lined up in opposition to Google Inc.’s attempt to digitize the world’s entire collection of books.  In an industry where bluffing reigns supreme and overt reaction against competitors is considered a sign of weakness,...

As the owner of an independent bookstore, there is no question that the Internet is crucially important to the survival of my business. It has become a facilitator for books like nothing in the history of humanity. The idea that e-books will replace paper books will simply never come true,...