For a writer of memoirs, Mary Karr has had a charmed life. That is, a lot has happened, almost all of it colorful, much of it painful. And, in each of her three books, she's followed the advice of mentor Tobias Wolff ("Take no care for your dignity") and produced...

Once upon a time in Denmark, there was a good brother and a bad brother.

When we meet them, Jannik, the bad brother, is just getting out of prison -- he's such a screwup he failed even at bank robbery.

Michael, the good brother, has a beautiful...

Of all the towering figures of the twentieth century, both good and evil, Winston Churchill was the most valuable to humanity, and also the most likable. It is a joy to write his life, and to read about it. None holds more lessons, especially for youth: How to use a...

If you read nothing else this month, please read pages 201 to 253 of Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation.

It won't take long.

By the time Nelson Mandela walks into that stadium, your heart will be pounding. When he enters the Springboks...

I first heard about The Help soon after it was published in February.

But it's 444 pages. I put it off.

Very quickly, it became the #3 fiction bestseller.

Twenty-eight weeks later, it's still holding on, a remarkable achievement for a book by a first-time novelist....

I was interviewing George Soros as the Dow rapidly shed 300 points and crashed through the 10,000 level.

"Is this it?" I asked.

Soros shrugged -- a very calm reaction from an investor who might have seen his portfolio shrink by hundreds of millions of dollars in a matter...

Last winter, the HeadButler.com community raised funds for a medical mission to Honduras. Now four students at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and a team of doctors -- a general surgeon, one OB/GYN, one anesthesiologist, and possibly a radiologist -- have committed themselves to another mission, this time to Liberia....

I never watch Meet the Press, but I tuned in to see David Gregory kick off NBC's coverage of "The Shriver Report: A Woman's Nation Changes Everything." Instigated by Maria Shriver, this year-long study is the centerpiece of a week of programming on NBC and a cover story...

I read the new Philip Roth novel the other day -- it's just 140 pages, with fewer words than usual per page, so you can knock it off in a few hours -- and I'm still disturbed.

This in an improvement over my reaction when I finished it.

I...

Success, as Woody Allen observed, only makes you more of what you already are.

If you don't believe that, just consider the case of Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes, the main character in A Face in the Crowd.

When we first see him, he's a drifter doing short time...

"I'm writing too many songs, and then I have to put them out -- I'm sorry," Mark Knopfler said at the start of what seems like our annual phone call.

But if Knopfler is going to make CDs like Get Lucky, he can call...

Depending on where you sit, President Obama's speech about health care was either a long- overdue line in the sand or, as the Congressman from South Carolina would have it, a lie.

From where I sit, it was just the opening salvo in a much larger change in the...

Coco Chanel couldn't be making a star turn in media at a better time.

Start with Anne Fontaine's film Coco Before Chanel, coming to American theaters this fall after dazzling audiences in Europe. It's the right film about Chanel: the early years. And though the facts are as murky...

Dominick Dunne, who died this morning, was Vanity Fair's brightest star for more than two decades. If you don't know the real story, that is how you'll remember him. A success. A winner.

The Vanity Fair pieces and the bestselling novels and the TV show all occur in Act...

One event lures even people who loathe the Hamptons out to Long Island's East End on the last weekend in August -- The Last Song of Summer, a benefit for the Watermill Center. Last summer's concert was a sell-out: Rufus Wainwright and Jessye Norman. This Saturday (August 29), Wainwright...

Some books don't end when you finish reading them. Perfection: A Memoir of Betrayal and Renewal is one of those books: Soon after her 44-year-old husband dies, Julie Metz discovers that he was bedding every woman who would have him. Brokenhearted and baffled, she decides to track his lovers...

"To humiliate a good writer," Norman Mailer said, "is to give him an ax."

Annette de la Renta has just sharpened the blade and offered the weapon to Michael Gross.

Or is she about to hand him his head?

Annette de la Renta is generally regarded as Brooke Astor's successor...

My father once ate -- by mistake -- a bourbon ball and nearly passed out.

My mother has a glass of Manischewitz Cream Red Concord -- "a sweet but balanced wine with a velvety mouth feel" -- once every decade or so.

Me? Two drinks and I get giddy,...

White people under siege --- that's one of the themes of Warren St. John's book about the struggle of mostly African kids and their Jordanian coach to find a soccer field in the small town of Clarkston, Georgia. Like many others, I first heard about the Fugees two years ago,...

If you're in the mood to hear five of the greater piano concertos ever written --- and if my experience is any guide, it's a very easy mood to slip into --- then Richard Goode's your man. Oh, there are other pianists who have climbed this mountain, but of the...