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In his new book, British journalist Ioan Grillo takes a close look at the Mexican drug war, starting with el narco, or the network of drug smugglers who cast a murderous shadow over Mexico.

The term "Rube Goldberg machine" has become shorthand for a convoluted contraption made up of a series of chain reactions. But Goldberg was also a real person, whose ideas for whimsical devices have captivated imaginations for decades.

J. Michael Lennon's mammoth new Norman Mailer: A Double Life draws on 25 years of access to its subject. Reviewer Alan Cheuse — himself a Mailer fan — says the biography is a "satisfying experience" that reads almost as if it came directly from the writer himself.

Rachel Joyce's new novel offers two parallel narratives: the 1972 story of Byron, an anxious schoolboy, and the present-day account of Jim, a supermarket worker who has spent most of his life in institutional care. But critic Ellah Allfrey says that the novel is made up of two distinct and unequal parts.

At the risk of being included among the "Lazy Lay-Over Guys" who try to describe the island nation based on a brief visit, NPR's Philip Reeves offers his impressions of a stunning land on the edge of the Arctic Circle.

Remember Juicy Couture and Pier 1? They went under, but not all the way under. Someone still makes millions of dollars off these names. And the hunt for revivable brands is big business.

The Border Patrol's indicators of success for Operation Streamline don't always add up and neither do the numbers: No one knows just how much the program costs. The Border Patrol makes arrests, but the Justice Department and federal courts provide the logistics of convicting those who cross illegally.

Democrats and Republicans are going to the brink over tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans in a showdown that threatens to send the U.S. over a year-end "fiscal cliff." So what's at the heart of the impasse?

For Black History Month, historian Peniel E. Joseph recommends books that take an unsparing look at slavery and American capitalism, with a focus on the often overlooked work of Stokely Carmichael.

"At our first staff meeting there were no chairs (or tables) but there were eager people with lots of plans sitting on the floor and I was one of them," Wertheimer writes.