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You can never be too thin seems to be the mantra at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Ultra-thin laptops and slender next-generation TVs are being showcased along with thousands of other gadgets and gizmos. The show is so massive that if you walked from booth to booth you would travel more than 15 miles.

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.

When people ask me, "What was it like to grow up on Long Island?" I give them a copy of Alice McDermott's novel That Night. "Read this," I say.

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.

What do Wikipedia and Craigslist have in common with the Tea Party movement? They succeed by being decentralized, says Rod Beckstrom, co-author of the management book The Starfish and the Spider.

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.

Novelist Nicole Krauss artfully weaves disparate stories of love and loss into a devastating examination of the weight of memory on those left behind. Four narrators are connected by an antique desk separated from its original owner during the Holocaust.

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.

Ever wonder why supermarket tomatoes taste like nothing? Food writer Barry Estabrook's new book traces the troubled history of the modern commercial tomato.