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You don’t need to be creative to break a Guinness world record. Countless record holders have put thought into inventing unlikely categories, and to beat them you just have to do them one better.... Read more

Lincoln writer Louella Bryant remembers when Howard Dean, running for president in 2004, smiled with seeming invincibility on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.

That’s when her husband told her the rest of the story.... Read more

John Elder Robison prefers machines to people. Machines are predictable — governed by rules and logic. People, on the other hand, are unpredictable, and at times illogical.

Robison’s memoir Look Me in the Eye is a personal account of living with Asperger’s — an autism spectrum disorder often characterized by social dysfunction and ineptitude, poor motor skills, and compulsive interests and behaviors. But his story also resonates with anyone who has struggled with being “different.”... Read more

In Reeve Lindbergh’s new book Forward From Here, the youngest child of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh and author and aviatrix Anne Morrow Lindbergh writes of her life spent in the Northeast Kingdom, the “back to the land” movement that led her there, and the consequences — both mundane and thrilling — of turning 60. A collection of 19 chapters that meander from the dangers of vanity to the reassurances of routine to the bittersweet process of children leaving home, the book is a journey through late middle age — or, as Lindbergh puts it, “the youth of old age.”... Read more

In the opening pages of his forthcoming book, David Sirota is reeling on a bathroom floor in Las Vegas’ Riviera Hotel. The setting: the first YearlyKos Convention, an annual gathering of Internet-based activists, citizen journalists and progressive political operatives, collectively known as the Netroots. Drunk and “freshman-year-at-college sick,” Sirota, a political journalist and former aide to then-Rep. Bernie Sanders, is nonetheless raring to go.... Read more

Ah, China. Regrettable financier of U.S. debt. Mass producer of toxic cat food and lead-paint toys. Reviled by human-rights activists for its latest crackdown in Tibet. Criticized by athletes for failing to improve air quality prior to the Olympics.... Read more

Once, every suburban wife struggled alone with “the problem that has no name,” as Betty Friedan wrote in her pathbreaking 1963 book The Feminine Mystique. “As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured them to Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night — she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question: ‘Is this all?’”... Read more

Doug Rose has logged more than a quarter-million miles on America’s highways, yet he’s never driven a car. The Brooklyn native has worked countless jobs in more than a dozen states, but he hasn’t had a permanent address since 1972. Rose has raised tens of thousands of dollars on behalf of orphaned children in Mexico, homeless people in Massachusetts and famine victims in Africa over the last 30 years. Yet the 56-year-old Vermonter has never had a bank account or credit card and, right now, probably has less than $500 to his name.... Read more

Bewigged and in breeches, stiff and stern — this is how we often picture our Founding Fathers. Politicians today, especially on the right, tap into this severe image of moral rectitude. They invoke America’s Christian heritage as a sacred touchstone, bequeathed to us by great men who cribbed from the Bible as they drafted the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.... Read more

No doubt about it: Americans love their pets. But rescuing a puppy gone missing halfway around the world takes a truly global effort. That’s one message of Cambridge resident Christine Sullivan’s self-published book 44 Days Out of Kandahar. The 214-page, professionally designed volume tells the true story of how Sullivan’s brother Mark Feffer, a Navy Reservist, befriended a skinny, reddish pup while serving on an Afghan army base in Kandahar. The soldiers who fed and played with the dog called her “Be-atch,” but Feffer renamed her Cinnamon.... Read more