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On a road trip through Africa, two English people - Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys; and Linda, a supercilious "compound wife" - are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin's Uganda. And the farther Naipaul's protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims.

This absorbing history by a brilliant scholar and writer deepens our understanding of how censorship works. With his uncanny ability to spark life in the past, Robert Darnton re-creates three historical worlds in which censorship shaped literary expression in distinctive ways. In 18th-century France, censors, authors, and booksellers collaborated in making literature by navigating the intricate culture of royal privilege.

Who built the Empire State Building? Astonishingly, no list of workmen on this historic landmark was ever compiled. While the names of the owners, architects, and contractors are well known, and Lewis Hine's legendary portraits left us indelible images of the workers, their identities—the last generation of workmen still practicing these time-honored trades, have not been identified until author Glenn Kurtz unearthed their individual stories for this book.