I really recommend Foer's Eating Animals as the single best recent work -- he provides a balanced, nuanced take on the many topics, eats meat reluctantly himself, but illustrates the sleight-of-hand "sustainable" and "humane" meat-producing ruses for what they mostly are -- marketing and justifications.
Human exploration is NASA's shining past, but some of the agency's best recent work has been done without humans, such as robots on Mars, space telescopes and Earth-observing satellites, said Smithsonian space curator Roger Launius.
Mr. Rubalcaba, the Cuban pianist, has outgrown his early speed-demon tendencies to become one of the more delicate and exotic players in jazz; his best recent work relies on an incredibly still, slow rhythmic feeling, a much better canvas on which he can launch into one of his sudden, virtuosic, chromatic streaks.
Already in their first set, on Tuesday night, there was the push-and-pull tension and the astonishment of discovery that have distinguished all of Mr. Motian's best recent work.
Those two themes have framed Maxwell's best recent work.
Caine's done some of his best recent work in small indie productions such as 2009's "Harry Brown," in which he plays an ex-serviceman out to seek revenge for a friend's murder, and 2008's "Is Anybody There?," in which he played a retired clown at an old folks' home suffering from dementia.
The two best recent works on the program were "Compline," by Christopher Rouse (1996) and "Canconiero Sefardí," a 1999 song cycle by Roberto Sierra.
This is among his best recent works: the title alludes to the trains the composer took across the United States in the 1940's, as well as those that took European Jews to concentration camps at the same time.
Carey's often beautiful novel, one of his best recent works, has the bruising tang of all his fiction, in which crooked colloquialism (frequently Australian vernacular), and poetic formality combine.
