Robert Kanigel

Vintage Reading brings eighty of the world's most unforgettable books out from behind the high castle walls, lowers the drawbridge, and welcomes readers inside. With lively and concise commentary, award-winning author Robert Kanigel throws an arm around the reader and becomes the tour guide to classics, best-sellers, lesser-known greats, and everything in-between.

From St. Augustine's Confessions to Dorothy Parker's Stories, Kanigel presents

...

The first full-scale biography of Jane Jacobs, the irrepressible woman who with her book The Death and Life of American Cities, and others that followed, so profoundly changed the way we think about and live in cities that, to this day, her influence can still be felt in any discussion of urban planning, or in any conversation about what cities mean to us. Jacobs is brought to life here by Robert Kanigel, the writer who introduced us to Indian mathematician...

In this literary detective story, Robert Kanigel gives us a long overdue portrait of an Oakland druggist's son who became known as the "Darwin of Homeric studies." So thoroughly did Milman Parry change our thinking about the origins of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey that scholars today refer to a "before" Parry and an "after." Kanigel describes the "before," when centuries of readers, all the way up until Parry's trailblazing work in the 1930's, assumed...

Growing up poor in Madras, India, Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar earns admittance to Cambridge University suring WWI, where he becomes a pioneer in mathematical theories with the guidance of his professor, G. H. Hardy.