Jeff Salamon, executive editor: I was supposed to watch the game at a neighbor’s house, but he called me a few hours before it and said, “I don’t know what I was thinking. We’re getting up at four a.m ...

As the summer heat settles in, beachgoers, porch-swingers and couch potatoes alike are spending their days tearing into the season’s hottest books. Even with an overload of new biographies, young ...