You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it, Tim O Brien writes in The Things They Carried. Widely regarded as the most important novelist to come out of the American war in Viet Nam, O Brien has kept on telling true war stories not only in narratives that cycle through multiple fictional and non-fictional versions of the war s defining experiences, but also by rewriting those stories again and again. Key moments of revision extend from early drafts, to the initial appearance of selected chapters in magazines, across typescripts and page proofs for first editions, and...

Sensations of hunger, thirst, sexual attraction, and love can dominate our thoughts to the exclusion of almost everything else, but until the last 10 years or so, the precise reasons why these passions arise have not been understood very well. We now know that these, and other drives like the urge to sleep, are controlled by a small portion of the brain called the hypothalamus. This book presents the latest information about how the brain controls our most basic drives. In a series of fascinating anecdotes, Young tells the tale of how scientists have discovered the role of the hypothalamus in...