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Henry Clay was a leading 19th century representative, senator, presidential candidate — and slaveholder who condemned slavery. In Henry Clay: The Essential American, David and Jeanne Heidler try to make sense of the statesman's great contradiction.

Frank Falcinelli and Frank Castronovo, who own the Brooklyn restaurant Frankies Spuntino, have recipes for tomatoes from breakfast to dessert in their new cookbook, The Frankies Spuntino Kitchen Companion and Cooking Manual. "We're all about easy, practical, utilitarian," says Castronovo.

Eunice Chapman won the first legal divorce in New York State in 1818. Her scandalous case pitted Mrs. Chapman against her abusive husband, who took their three children and joined the radical Shaker sect. NPR's Guy Raz talks to Ilyon Woo, author of a new book about the case, called The Great Divorce.

During the summer of 1896, a 10-day heat wave killed nearly 1,500 people across New York City — many of them tenement-dwellers. In Hot Time in the Old Town, historian Ed Kohn describes the disaster — and how a little-known police commissioner named Theodore Roosevelt championed the efforts to help New Yorkers survive the heat.

From assassins coming to kill a potential presidential candidate to thieves crashing an auction of costly wines, the stories in Ridley Pearson's crime thrillers may be fiction but their setting of Sun Valley, Idaho, is very real.

Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy has taken U.S. readers by storm. Not since the arrival of Ikea on these shores has Sweden made such an inroad into the American home and imagination. But critic Maureen Corrigan says the impressive "Ice Age" of Nordic mystery writing is well under way.

Jobs have become one of the most important barometers in assessing the president's performance, and the latest report shows that, in some ways, the economy has slipped backward. The anemic economic recovery is taking a political toll on the president, amplifying his other challenges.

In James' Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer is wise enough to understand that if you're not happy without a man, you certainly won't be happy with one. Writer Rhoda Janzen loves the book because it shows what a woman does once she acknowledges her own complicity in the life she has chosen.

Post-modern writer David Mitchell pulls off an old-fashioned yet action-packed tale in his fifth novel, The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob de Zoet. The story follows Jacob, a bookkeeper at an outpost of the Dutch East Indies Company, as he falls for a local midwife in early 19th century Japan.

Author Anthony Horowitz loves nothing more than when a young fan asks him to sign a battered copy of a book in his Alex Rider series — young adult fiction featuring a skateboard-riding teen spy. When it comes to his favorite thriller, he recommends Ian Fleming's "Crime de la Crime" in Goldfinger.