Reporter, editor, publisher, foreign correspondent, goodwill ambassador, widely syndicated columnist, chronic boozer and political agitator, McGill was the essential newspaperman. From his decades-held desk at the Atlanta Constitution, McGill shunned the often-ineffective role of the "objective journalist." Instead, he was guided by the facts as he saw them and his own sense of right and wrong.

Regarded as an authority on civil rights and Southern affairs, McGill advised Presidents Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson on both domestic and international matters and cemented close alliances with such diverse figures as J. Edgar Hoover and Martin Luther King, Jr. A champion of equal rights for blacks, he was an adamant integrationist in the 1940s and 1950s—a time when respectable society didn't discuss the topic in public.

In an epoch of Klan power, mob rule, lynchings and dynamite, redneck terrorists habitually menaced McGill with threatening phone calls and (misspelled) hate mail, pummeled his house with rubbish and rocks, smashed his mailbox and shattered his windows with buckshot. Old conservative demagogues dubbed him "Red Ralph." Yet, in his old age, this "nigger-loving pinko" woke to find both white and black radicals ridiculing his stubborn support of the Vietnam War and heckling him as a fossil from the Old South.

McGill was a tireless humanist and an immensely prolific workhorse who labored constantly despite illness. He was consulting an educator about the benefits of a bi-racial busing project when he collapsed from heart failure and died hours later.

Leonard Ray Teel, once an Atlanta Constitution reporter himself, examines McGill’s life and career with precision and perspective, noting McGill’s moral drive and physical excesses. Anecdotes abound: McGill drinking with Ernest Hemingway in a Paris bar or sipping goat’s milk and brandy with an elderly Carl Sandburg in North Carolina; how he bad-mouthed Chiang Kai-shek face to face on Chiang’s own turf in Chungking; how he first championed, then abandoned, Mao, Castro, Eisenhower and Bobby Kennedy.

In Ralph Emerson McGill, we see the malice and malevolence of McGill’s many foes, the adoration of his many fans and a chronicling of the maturation of the civil rights movement, which McGill had helped to nurture.—By Andrew Weems

The move of Christian populations to the Southern Hemisphere has induced a variation on the face of Christianity most Westerners are not accustomed to. And who a Christian is will look very different. The Christian of the global South isn’t an old white man—she is a poor, brown-skinned woman. The metamorphosis which brands a Christianity Westerners are unfamiliar with is integral to understanding how religious identification could take precedence over allegiance to secular nation-states. The churches that have grown most rapidly in the global South are far more traditional, morally conservative, evangelical, poverty-stricken and apocalyptic than their Northern counterparts. Mysticism, Puritanism, belief in prophecy, faith healing, exorcism and dream visions—concepts which more liberal Western churches have traded in for progressive political and social concerns—are basic to the newer churches in the South. As Christianity grows in regions where Islam is also expected to increase—as recent conflicts in Indonesia, Nigeria and the Philippines reveal—we may see a return to the religious wars of the past, fought out with renewed intensity and high-tech weaponry.

Hailed as one of the top 100 nonfiction works of the twentieth century, The Strange Career of Jim Crow has sold almost a million copies and remains, in the words of David Herbert Donald, "a landmark in the history of American race relations."

Here are the collaborations and collisions of giants, not only of Watson and Crick themselves but also of countless others, including Linus Pauling (the greatest chemist of the day); Richard Feynman (the bongo-playing cynosure of Caltech); and, especially, George Gamow, the bear-like Russian physicist—and prankster—who, with Watson, founded the legendary RNA-Tie Club.

But Watson, at 25—already the winner of genetic research’s greatest jackpot—is obsessed with another goal as well: to find love, and a wife equal to his unexpected fame. As he and an international cast of roguish young colleagues do important research, they also compare notes and share complaints on the scarcity of eligible mates. And amid the feverish search for the role of the then still mysterious RNA molecule, Watson’s thoughts are seldom far from the supreme object of his desire, an enthralling Swarthmore coed who also happens to be the daughter of Harvard’s most eminent biologist.

Part scientific apprenticeship, part sentimental education, Genes, Girls and Gamow is a penetrating revelation of how great science is accomplished and a candid account of one man’s full range of ambitions.

Exploring the source of artistic inspiration, Hirsch introduces the reader to "duende" or the devil, a concept that Federico Garcia Lorca coined in 1933 which refers to the dark and potent force that fuels the creative spirit. According to Hirsch, duende is a force that Billie Holiday had and was ruled by and that Marlon Brando possessed but squandered. Lawrence Olivier had duende, as did Miles Davis and Ernest Hemingway. In The Demon and the Angel, Hirsch taps into this force himself, explaining the widely different ways artists respond to the power and energy of the creative impulse.

Looking at a range of artistic endeavors—from painting and jazz music to literature and poetry—The Demon and the Angel gives an intriguing tour of the minds of artists and the creative process. Using duende (or the demon) and its opposing angel as guides, Hirsch illuminates the dark space of the imagination where all art is born while creating an inspiring work of art of his own in the process.