Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC’s Hardball, is the ultimate savvy political insider. He served on the late House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill’s staff. He ran for Congress in Pennsylvania, and he didn’t win. He covered politics and international affairs for The San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner. In short, Chris Matthews inhales and exhales politics and the rest of us just breathe. He’s been attacked by the right, and by the left, and has engaged in battle with both parties. In a bit of a departure, Matthews has undertaken a biography– of President John F. Kennedy. He looks at Kennedy from the lens of a political animal, and concludes that JFK was heroic in many of the choices he made, and human, unsettling and troubled in some of his personal decisions. In his new book, Jack Kennedy, Elusive Hero, Matthews portrays Kennedy as a crusader for peace and civil liberties, and always on the edge.

The best person to really explain Spalding Gray is Spalding Gray. The man who transformed his life experience into art, into revelatory performance and theater, is one of the most difficult writers or artists to sum up on this Writers Bloc website. We can’t possibly.

For years, we have read Jerome Groopman’s Medical Dispatch and Annals of Medicine in The New Yorker. He has shared stories about how he, as a Harvard oncologist, thinks as a doctor when diagnosing a patient. He has shared stories about how he, as a Harvard oncologist, thinks as a doctor when diagnosing a patient. Dr. Groopman studies an issue of public relevance, and in his careful parsing and almost Talmudic discussion, leads us through the complex process of how medical professionals arrive at a medical conclusion. In Your Medical Mind, Dr. Groopman and his physician wife, Dr. Pamela Hartzband, turn the tables a bit, and have written a book that guides patients to arrive at medical decisions that make sense for them.