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A new book argues that Motown was a step in the evolution of the American popular song, a tradition reaching back to songwriters like Irving Berlin, George Gershwin and Cole Porter.

Eighties absurdo-disco band Was Not Was has a new album. David Was shares some of his thoughts about embarking on a rock and roll odyssey at a time when he should be figuring out how to stretch his Social Security check.

The sound of New Orleans Jazz is unmistakable. If you're in the Crescent City, there's one place you're sure to find it: Preservation Hall. A new, jam-packed box set celebrates the Preservation Hall Jazz Band master tapes that survived Hurricane Katrina.

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew says the government is reviewing a proposal to stop making the penny. It actually costs nearly 2 cents to make a penny, so the government loses money.

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.

Writer Jonathan Hayes was escaping a painfully dull Boxing Day dinner when he was introduced to Dorothy Sayers' The Nine Tailors for the first time. Hayes says Sayers helped nudge the English mystery novel out of the drawing room and into the real world.

David Remnick has a nearly impossible task in his new biography of Barack Obama: writing "the most complete account yet" of the most famous man on the planet. The well-written and well-researched book may be ahead of its time; the events in it are so familiar right now that its scholarship may resonate better in 20 years.

English-Australian singer, songwriter and actress Olivia Newton-John has died at age 73. She was one of the the biggest pop stars in the 1970's and early 1980's.

Sebastian Mallaby's book is an expert primer on hedge funds — the "Ferraris of finance" — and a detailed portrait of Wall Street's daredevils. Reviewer Susan Jane Gilman says More Money Than God is illuminating ... and infuriating.

It's hard to imagine that people used to die from things as small as a scratch on the knee — but that's what life was like before penicillin. Author Lauren Belfer's new novel, A Fierce Radiance, follows the intrigue as pharmaceutical companies race to mass-produce lifesaving drugs during World War II.