Pete Croatto
Content by Pete Croatto
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“Somehow, this time, I would make it work.” That’s the quiet plea of 12-year-old Mikey Walsh, desperate to fit in with his Romany Gypsy family.
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At one point in the riveting Losing Everything, author David Lozell Martin reveals that he "had to write this book to understand how I could have made so little progress in forty-five y
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Starting with its subtitle, “The Man Who Bet on Everything,” Kevin Cook’s biography of legendary gambler Titanic Thompson pulls you in with stories of crafty bets, pretty women an
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Caitlin Shetterly is not coy.
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On top of writing acclaimed biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, former Time managing editor Walter Isaacson has written pieces for seemingly every notable publication in Am
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In the introduction to Hidden America, Jeanne Marie Laskas observes that “we become so familiar with the narrative [of celebrity culture] we forget that there are any others
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When Merriam-Webster announced the new words included in its 2012 Collegiate Dictionary—entries that included “sexting” and “energy drink”—the news was
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According to author Rich Cohen, a corporation “tends to have a life span, tends to age and die.” Remember United Fruit, which at one point controlled 70 percent of America’s banan
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Diamonds—those glittery, magical conclusions of the courtship process, those small, pricey declarations of love—have a less glamorous meaning for 26-year-old Alicia Oltuski.
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The National Football League is such a dominant force in American culture that it’s hard to imagine it ever suffering growing pains.
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With today’s relentless news cycle, it’s easy to forget the genesis of our current media fascinations.
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When a series of anthrax-filled letters appeared in the U.S. right after the unimaginable tragedy of September 11, the powers that be were misinformed and easily swayed.
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Everyone can think of a grim anecdote about Detroit—the highest murder rate in the country, 70,000 abandoned buildings—that they saw in a magazine article or in a news report.
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In 1942, New York Times war correspondent Byron “Barney” Darnton died while covering World War II in the Pacific.
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Some may consider Craig Robinson’s background a little bland to warrant a memoir. He’s relatively young and his resume isn’t rich in scandal or easily recited accomplishments.
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“When did every little girl become a princess?” journalist and “girl expert” Peggy Orenstein (Schoolgirls) asks in Cinderella Ate My Daughter.
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Initially, it doesn’t appear that Merrill Markoe’s latest essay collection, Cool, Calm & Contentious, features a theme.
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The big fear accompanying Judy Dutton’s Science Fair Season is that it’ll be another account of scholastic overachievers driving themselves nuts in pursuing academ
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Gypsy Rose Lee’s performance didn’t end after she stepped off the stage. The famed striptease artist used her brazen, quick-witted public image as a fortress.
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In 1957, nine African-American teenagers integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, which is considered a milestone in American civil rights history.
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Millions of immigrants have found success in America through hard work, pluck and a little ingenuity. Christian Gerhartsreiter took a more duplicitous approach.
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The prospect of middle age, a period with no universally established timeframe, is shrouded in clichéd assumptions. Around age 40, it seems as if Americans are legally required to lose their way.
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Most of us would like to believe that we’re free-thinking, fair-minded folks who treat everyone equally.
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In This Love Is Not For Cowards, Robert Andrew Powell admits that he doesn’t know what he’s looking for in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, the border town defined worldwide by i
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The Internet has given us gifts straight from a sci-fi novel: information at the click of a button; the ability to communicate with anyone anytime; the unbridled joy that comes with watching a ca
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According to author Susan Casey, in response to increased temperatures and “other factors no one’s aware of yet,” the world’s oceans have been producing bigger and bigger wa
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Thanks mostly to movies and television, the Mafia has been romanticized and glamorized. Historian Mike Dash isn’t interested in adding to that.
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The literature of the Vietnam War does not feature much hagiography, just stories of inner torment, senseless deaths and shattered ideologies.
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In America, the car has long been associated with freedom: the open road, the ability to come and go as you please.
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The death of Roger Rosenblatt’s daughter Amy at age 38 was completely unexpected.
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A lot of good came out of the 1979 NCAA championship game between Earvin “Magic” Johnson’s Michigan State Spartans and Larry Bird’s Indiana State Sycamores.
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In the introduction to One and the Same, journalist Abigail Pogrebin admits that writing a book about identical twins was something she was loath to do, equating it to “volun
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When journalist Tracie McMillan covered a cooking class run by a youth services agency in New York City, she got to know one of the teenage students.
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Biography fans will devour Louisa May Alcott, Susan Cheever’s briskly paced examination of the Little Women author, who died at age 55 in 1888.
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In popular culture, when men talk about being men they follow a certain formula.
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A long-lasting trend, and one that hasn’t gotten tiresome, is memoirs about how rock music matters.
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Dinosaurs keep grabbing our attention because they are the closest things in the earth’s history to monsters: flying, fanged, scaly things that speak of a past that is part mythology and part
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