Last weekend, I traveled to Little Rock, Arkansas for the first time. One highlight was visiting the place where, in 1957, a group of brave Black teenagers attempted to walk through the doors of the all-white Central High School, surrounded by mobs of enraged segregationists. These students, known as the Little Rock Nine, became enduring symbols of the civil rights movement. Little Rock Central High School, now a national historic site run by the National Park Service, remain

When helping a Manhattan Reader family member weed through her bookshelves recently, I came across an out-of-print hardcover that caught my eye. I knew nothing about it beyond the fact that it was about ballet, but I brought it home on a whim. Fokine: Memoirs of a Ballet Master recounts the life and career of Michel Fokine, a Russian-born dancer and choreographer who was instrumental in transforming classical ballet into a more modern and bold art form. He viewed the grand ba

Beth Macy is a journalist who has written several acclaimed nonfiction books, including Factory Man , the story of a Virginia furniture maker who battled to save his company and prevent hundreds of American manufacturing jobs from being lost to offshoring, and Dopesick , a chronicle of America's opioid epidemic. Her newest book, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America , published in 2025, recounts her upbringing in the 1970s and 1980s in what was once