Includes bibliographies and index.

Introduction -- Lessons from a dark time -- Students as spies -- Hoover's secret empire -- The father of American surveillance -- Prison madness -- The listening house -- All that glitters -- A showman in the rainforest -- Heart of Darkness : fiction or reportage? -- On the campaign trail with Nelson Mandela -- India's American imports -- Palm trees and paradoxes -- The brick master -- The impossible city -- Our night with its stars askew -- Shortstops in Siberia -- A homage to homage -- On which continent was the Holocaust born? -- Sunday school history -- Pilot on the great river : Mark Twain's nonfiction -- A literary engineer -- A nation of guns -- The continent of words -- You never know what's going to happen yesterday -- Practicing history without a license -- On the road again -- Books and our souls.

"This book collects some two dozen pieces from bestselling author Adam Hochschild, written over the past 25 years. All have been published before, most in the New York Review of Books but also in the New Yorker, Harper's, Mother Jones, and elsewhere. They are a mixture of essays about books, authors, one film, and the writing of history and on-the-ground journalism based on reporting from India, Africa, and elsewhere"--Provided by publisher.

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