Carolyn Alessio

I SEE A VOICE By Jonathan Ree Metropolitan Books, 399 pages, $27.50 This comprehensive study traces education of the deaf back to the 16th Century, when a Spanish monk taught...

THE PLEASURE OF FINDING THINGS OUT By Richard P. Feynman Perseus Books, 270 pages, $24 Using a gasket and a cup of ice water, physicist Richard P. Feynman explained the...

JOKES: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters By Ted Cohen University of Chicago, 99 pages, $15 Lawyers, taxi drivers, rabbis and priests crowd the pages of this entertaining treatise on humor--and...

SMOKESTACKS & SKYSCRAPERS Edited by David Starkey and Richard Guzman Wild Onion Books, 538 pages, $19.95 paper Beginning with the address of a Potawatomi chief to the Chicago Council, this...

LEARNING BY HEART Edited by Maggie Anderson and David Hassler University of Iowa Press, 228 pages, $13 paper Mother Goose meets the Beats in this lively collection of contemporary poetry...

RIVONIA'S CHILDREN By Glenn Frankel Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 339 pages, $25 Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Frankel tells the bracing, often overlooked story of Jewish South African activists who allied...

MY DOG TULIP By J.R. Ackerley New York Review Books, 190 pages, $12.95 paper British author and editor J.R. Ackerley had never had a dog before when he became the...

IMANI ALL MINE By Connie Porter Houghton Mifflin, 212 pages, $23 Not many authors are capable of creating full characters based on current events, but novelist Connie Porter defies the...

GROUP By Paul Solotaroff Riverhead Books, 339 pages, $25.95 This chronicle of a year spent in group therapy by six New York City professionals reads like a psychological thriller. Journalist...

THE PEARLY GATES OF CYBERSPACE By Margaret Wertheim Norton, 336 pages, $24.95 Could the Internet be the modern opiate of the masses? In this provocative study, science writer Margaret Wertheim...