Nat Brandt: 3 books

On the afternoon of December 30, 1903, during a sold-out matinee performance, a fire broke out in Chicago’ s Iroquois Theatre. In the short span of twenty minutes, more than six hundred people were asphyxiated, burned, or trampled to death in a panicked mob’ s failed attempt to escape. In Chicago...

The eighteen missionaries who traveled to Shansi were dedicated, pious, hard-working clerics. Ernest Atwater; the young minister Francis Ward Davis and his wife Lydia; Charles Wesley Price and his family; and Susan Rowena Bird; to name a few, were all spurred by their strong beliefs, but they were...

A 1959 New Yorker profile captured the inspired risk-taking and raw creative spark of a Budapest String Quartet rehearsal: "Sasha leaped from his chair and with violin held aloft, played the passage with exaggerated schmalz, like a street fiddler in Naples. Kroyt...stopped playing and started...