Malcolm Jones

A Life Of 'The Founding Father Who Winks'

Jon Krakauer did not setout to write about murder. After publishing "Into Thin Air," his best seller about a 1996 Mount Everest expedition that went fatally awry, he began researching a book about faith, focused on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons, America's most successful homegrown religion. "There are more Mormons in this country now than Presbyterians," he notes over breakfast in a New York hotel. "Worldwide, they outnumber Jews." In the course of his reporting...

Everyone hates hype, but it was mighty hard to get mad at the hoopla surrounding the June 21 publication of J. K. Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" (870 pages.

Benjamin Franklin, Walter Isaacson tells us at the beginning of his long (but never tedious) new biography, "is the founding father who winks at us." By that, Isaacson explains, he means Franklin is the most human--and most modern--of the men who forged the American republic.

J.K. Rowling has this thing she does where her head dips down an inch or two into her shoulders and her hands twist the air in front of her, as if she's wringing agony out of the air itself.

In the sunny kitchen of the apartment shared by Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock in Decatur, Ga., lunch has been cleared away. While Peacock prepares banana pudding, a guest has a chance to examine the decor.

When Henri Cartier-Bresson saw me pull out my notebook, he asked in mock horror, "Are you from the police?" I said no, I would make a very poor policeman, and he smiled.

Barbara Hershey, his co-star in "The Stunt Man," put it best. "When you meet Peter O'Toole," she once said, "he does not disappoint." But how can this be true?

When you ask George Pelecanos what he likes about writing scripts for "The Wire," the highly praised HBO crime drama, he talks about studying film in college and how the chance to write scripts for an actual show was just too good to turn down--never mind that he has an increasingly hot career as a crime novelist.

Iraq invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990. That same day, Marine Cpl. Anthony Swofford's platoon of scouts and snipers was put on standby at the Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base in the Mojave Desert.

It's not the whole truth, but a good part of the reason William Henry Fox Talbot became one of the fathers of photography was that he could not draw well.

No one has seen the original two-and-a-half version since 1927, the year it was released. Ufa, the German studio that bankrolled the film, cut a half hour out of the original eight months after it debuted.

If we think of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 at all, it is probably as fodder for some television quiz-show question: what do the Pledge of Allegiance, shredded wheat, the Ferris wheel and historian Frederick Jackson Turner's "closing of the frontier" speech have in common? (Answer: they all made their debuts there.) At the time of its creation, though, the fair was anything but trivial.

"The Spooky Art," Norman Mailer's book about writing, appears on Jan. 31, his 80th birthday. Since his debut novel, "The Naked and the Dead" (1948), Mailer has written 31 more books.

"The Spooky Art," Norman Mailer's book about writing, will appear on Jan. 31, his 80th birthday. Since his debut novel, "The Naked and the Dead" (1948), Mailer has written 31 more books.

As soon as you start reading the new college textbook "Inventing America," you wonder just how far the authors are going to go. They promise to tell the story of America, complete with bewigged Founding Fathers, abolitionists and the Sherman Antitrust Act--all the stuff you dutifully highlighted in yellow when you took American History 101--but with a twist: it will all be seen from the point of view of innovation.

Paul Simon wrote a hit song about it. Utah named a state park after it. But for millions of Americans between the end of World War II and the mid-'60s, Kodachrome was the recording angel of their lives.

The artist Jasper Johns once said that he painted pictures of maps of the United States and American flags because he didn't have to design them. They were, he said, "things the mind already knows." Peter Elliott performs a version of Johns's magic in "Home Front," his collection of photographs taken since September 11, 2001.

The first assignment Jonathan Williams gave his poetry class at Wake Forest University in 1973 took everyone by surprise: he asked us to write an epitaph just big enough to be carved on a tombstone. "Chiseling words into stone is hard work," he said.

Founded in 1863 as part of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the Mutter Museum was created as an educational service for practicing physicians. Its enormous collection of bottled fetuses, skulls, wax replicas of diseased bodies, dissected tissue and Siamese-twin body casts was meant to give doctors a look at what they might face in the examining room and the operating theater.

There are many things to love in Alice McDermott's new novel, "Child of My Heart," and just as many that will drive you nuts. McDermott's first novel since "Charming Billy," her 1998 National Book Award winner, this book returns to her favorite territory--the Irish-American landscape of New York's Queens and Long Island.

At the outset of his very smart, very funny new book, "Uniforms," Paul Fussell asserts that "everyone must wear a uniform, but everyone must deny wearing one, lest one's invaluable personality and unique identity be compromised.

About a month before Mother's Day, I suggested to my 11-year-old son that as a gift for his mother he could learn a song on his guitar. He thought this was a great idea, and together we settled on "Time After Time," the Cyndi Lauper song.

Sometimes you learn, sometimes you laugh, but mostly these new children's picture books teach you what fun it is just to look at cool stuff.Knick-Knack Paddywhack!

I could start with an anecdote, a revealing vignette, say, set in a Japanese teahouse in Manhattan where I met Donna Tartt for an interview (it tickles her that in this teahouse you can get green tea, the beverage at the heart of Japan's ritualistic tea ceremony, in a go cup).

Showing off the Citadel recently, Pat Conroy kept circling his alma mater, looking up at the looming water tower from different angles. "Somebody put my name up there and then painted one of those circles with a slash over it," he said. "I just wanted to see if it was still up there." Conroy ran afoul of the Charleston, S.C., military college in the late '90s when he supported the admission of female cadets.

You almost never hear the word pinup anymore. It has a charming, almost dusty connotation, like hi-fi or soda shop, that conjures up a more innocent time.

Zadie Smith is thinking seriously about hanging it up. Never mind that at 26 she's published two novels in two years, starting with the best-selling "White Teeth," which copped pretty much every first-novel prize in sight, beguiled the critics and then sold more than a million copies.

"The first day a photographer took a picture of her, she was a genius," director Billy Wilder said of Marilyn Monroe. If you don't count the shot of her taken by an Army photographer when she was working on a World War II assembly line, Andre de Dienes was that photographer.

Near the beginning of Marcel Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past," there is the famous scene in which the narrator inhales the aroma of a madeleine, a shell-shaped pastry, dipped in tea.