Edward R. Murrow's CBS Radio program "This I Believe" originally aired amid the alarm and suspicion of the McCarthy era. More than 50 years later it was revived on NPR during the similarly divisive post-9/11 era. The soothing tones of narrators who prompt reflection rather than dogma has buoyed the spirits of many a radio-listener flagging under the language of fear that's become the lexicon of our age. Last month the second compilation of essays from the series was published, named This I Believe II and edited by program producers Jay Allison and Dan Gediman...

Thomas Frank is one of America’s most astute and witty political observers, and his latest best seller, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, exposes the Republican hard-liners’ transformation of the federal government into both a fount of privatized plunder and a nest of truly spectacular incompetence.

The title of Benjamin Mee’s new memoir sums up the gist deftly—it’s called We Bought a Zoo. In the book, British columnist Mee and his family purchase and move into a run-down zoo, with the intentions of fixing it up and opening its gates again. The process is made more difficult by Mee’s inexperience and the tragic death...

In Wisconsin author Isabel Sharpe’s latest novel, As Good As It Got, a cynical woman unlucky in love finds unexpected companionship from two other women she attends a women’s retreat with, a shy woman quiet about her failed romances and a more outgoing woman who has deluded herself into believing that her . . .

Even if mystery fans aren’t familiar with novelist Michael Harvey and his Michael Kelly franchise, knowing that Harvey is the creator of and a writer for TV’s “Cold Case Files” should give readers an idea of what they’re in store for in Harvey’s latest novel, The Fifth Floor—a fast-paced thriller with ample blood and ample . . .

Wisconsin’s annual Chautauqua, Fighting Bob Fest, just completed another record year, attracting over a 10,000 attendees. Tonight, with a 7 p.m. talk at the Brookfield Schwartz Bookshop, author Nancy C. Unger shares a little insight about the man who inspired this popular annual festival, Bob LaFollette . . .

Modern-day cautionary tales about pharmaceuticals are commonplace, but Dirk Wittenborn’s new novel, Pharmakon, sets the clock back to the early ’50s, a less medicated time. The book follows a Yale professor who creates what seems to be a cure for depression and insanity, but instead yields tragic, violent . . .

Spanning the first half of the 19th century, Ellen Baker’s debut novel, Keeping the House, follows an extended Wisconsin family through generations, focusing particularly on a 1950s housewife who, unable to conceive children, makes a point of revitalizing an unkempt house that has been passed . . .

Set in a small, southern town in the 1970s, Mequon author Lesley Kagen’s second novel, Land of a Hundred Wonders, follows a young reporter struggling with her profession as the result of brain damage she suffered after a childhood car accident that killed both of her parents. She figures she’s found her big break . . .

Meg Waite Clayton proudly embraces chick-lit conventions in her latest novel, The Wednesday Sisters, the story of five longtime friends who form a writers circle and relive stories from their decades of experiences. Clayton reads from the book tonight at 7 p.m. at the Brookfield Schwartz Bookshop location.