Book Reviews
The World All Before Them
Sudip Bose
Setting off on footpaths both well-trod and forgotten
The Old Ways
Smarty Ants
Sy Montgomery
Intelligence isn't just for humans
Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures
Wing Men
Constance Casey
Lepidopterists on the loose
Butterfly People: An American Encounter with the Beauty of the World
Totalitarianism in Practice
Gary Saul Morson
Terror as a way of life in East Germany, Poland, and Hungary
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956
Confounding Father
T. H. Breen
Thomas Jefferson and the economics of slavery
Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves
Questions of Being
Jay Tolson
What if our minds are the ultimate reality?
Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story
Kerouac in His Own Words
Deborah Baker
An old friend explores his search for a new approach to the novel
The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac
A Monster at Large
James Fallows
Crime, politics, and the vagaries of Japanese justice
People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished From the Streets of Tokyo — And the Evil That Swallowed Her Up
Golden Rules
Sarah Ruden
Wealth and culture in early Christian times
Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD
Risky Journeys
George O’Brien
A cautionary tale of quixotic ambition and heroic achievement
James Joyce: A New Biography
Coming of Age
Rachel Morris
Three bright young American women in the City of Light
Dreaming In French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis
Cradle to Grave
Sissela Bok
The games we play and the arguments we have
The Mansion Of Happiness: A History of Life and Death
Con Man
Brenda Wineapple
A writer catalogs his great-grandfather’s infamous crimes
A Disposition To Be Rich: How a Small-Town Pastor’s Son Ruined an American President, Brought on a Wall Street Crash, and Made Himself the Best-Hated Man in the United States
Artful Lies
Graeme Wood
A deception signals a new age
Solar Dance: Van Gogh, Forgery, and the Eclipse of Certainty
All for One and One for All?
Francisco J. Ayala
An eminent scientist reconsiders natural selection
The Social Conquest of Earth
Heavenly Body
Ingrid D. Rowland
An artist’s pursuit of symmetry
Da Vinci’s Ghost: Genius, Obsession, and How Leonardo Created the World in His Own Image
End Times
Sarah Ruden
The Bible’s failed prophecy
Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation
Dirty Books
John McIntyre
A publisher’s lifelong battle against censorship
The Tender Hour of Twilight: Paris in the ’50s, New York in the ’60s: A Memoir of Publishing’s Golden Age
Big Thinker
James Gibney
The diplomat who argued for “containment”—and lived to regret it
George F. Kennan: An American Life
Irregular Guy
William Howarth
The sage of Baker Street
On Conan Doyle: Or, the Whole Art of Storytelling
Getting Better All the Time
Michael Shermer
Although you wouldn't know it by watching the local news, humankind is becoming ever more civilized
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
A Chesterton With No Flab
Garry Wills
A new anthology often obscures the writer’s best work
The Everyman Chesterton
The Worst of Times
Gary Saul Morson
A Soviet city barely survives
Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941–1944
John Brown’s Folly
Brenda Wineapple
The mythology of a madman
Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War
Power Crazy
George Vaillant
Do lunatics make better leaders?
A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness
The Inside Track
Mark Hertsgaard
How those dim-witted robber barons built the railroads
Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America
Full Bloom
Michael Dirda
A critic offers his final thoughts
The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life
Frozen Assets
Hampton Sides
A gritty tale of a grim landscape
The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle
Deep Trouble
Emily Bernard
How a natural disaster barreled into a historical one
Camille, 1969: Histories of a Hurricane
Deep Trouble
Richard Ellis
We should be more afraid for sharks than of them
Demon Fish: Travels Through the Hidden World of Sharks
Scholar-Activist
James Gibney
Is the search for truth compatible with the fight for justice?
Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir
A Survey and an Assertion
Carlin Romano
Twelve potted philosophers and a theory of human values
Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche
Beyond Nerves
Laure Murat
Three women who helped engender modern psychiatry
Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris
Terrorist in Chief
Paul Salopek
Can anything keep Zimbabwe from slipping back into despotism?
The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe
Patriot Games
Elbert Ventura
Hollywood's Red Scare
An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War
Harlem Notes
Thomas Chatterton Williams
A writer goes uptown
Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America
Bard Justice
Jacob A. Stein
Shakespeare and the law
A Thousand Times More Fair What Shakespeare’s Plays Teach Us About Justice
Math & Magic
Sam Kean
The roots of Western science
The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society & the Birth of the Modern World
Tangled Up in Dylan
Louis P. Masur
The enduring appeal of a legendary American songwriter
Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968–2010 · By Greil Marcus
Tour de Horse
Andrew Graybill
A masterly retelling of a death on the Plains
The Killing of Crazy Horse
Big Muddy
Bruce Falconer
The river before Mark Twain
Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild
Our Madness for War
Michael Sherry
Must we persist in using the military option when it so rarely works?
Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq
Human Kind
Sissela Bok
Is selflessness in our nature?
The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness
Abe's Evolution
Philip Dray
How Lincoln went from frontier lawyer to Great Emancipator
The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
Where Creeds Collide
Graeme Wood
Enmity at the intersections of religious radicalism
The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam
James Baldwin's America
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Truths both hard and timeless
The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings
Next of Kin
Eugene Linden
What we don't know about what chimps know
Almost Chimpanzee: Searching for What Makes Us Human, in Rainforests, Labs, Sanctuaries, and Zoos
Reducing Science and Religion
Ingrid Rowland
The world remains infinitely more complex than contemporary attempts to account for it
Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self
Maker of Magazines
Stanley Cloud
Henry Luce had a restless mind and a preternatural feel for the national pulse
The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century
Growing Up in a Troubled Neighborhood
James Gibney
Kai Bird’s Middle East Memories and Meditations
Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis
An Assassin's Tale
Sridhar Pappu
In the footsteps of the murderer of Martin Luther King Jr.
Hellhound On His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin
Do Head Meds Make Us Sicker?
Gary Greenberg
The argument that says they do has problems of its own
Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America
Mayhem Across the Border
Paul Salopek
A Mexican city where homicide is the new normal
Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields
A Joyless Noise
Jon Zobenica
Two pleas for making life a whole lot quieter
The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book About Noise
Truth and Consequences
Lincoln Caplan
In the Whitewater investigation, the biggest loser was the legal profession
The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr
The Imbalance of Power
Paul Boyer
How the Manhattan Project gave birth to the imperial presidency
Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State
The Lovable Leviathan
Sy Montgomery
Whales hold a special place in our imagination, but their situation is dire
The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea
A Long, Cold Road to Paris
Paul C. Nagel
The 2,000-mile, 40-day journey of future first lady Louisa Catherine Adams
Mrs. Adams in Winter: A Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon
The Debacle Before the Disaster
Charles Trueheart
At Dien Bien Phu, the French got a lesson the U.S. would take two decades to learn
Valley of Death: The Tragedy of Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War
In the Shadow of Genocide
Graeme Wood
Impressions of a Turkish town that was once in Armenia
Rebel Land: Unravelling the Riddle of History in a Turkish Town
Science Doubters
Natalie Angier
When healthy skepticism turns into unhealthy antagonism
Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms The Planet, and Threatens Our Lives
Laissez-Faire Run Amok
Ethan Fishman
The extremist, and enduring, philosophy of Ayn Rand
Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right
Riffs and Raptures
Sarah L. Courteau
Zadie Smith’s essays offer crisp prose and hard-won insights
Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays
Wrestling the Moose
Miranda Weiss
Jefferson debunked a French theory of natural history, launching American exceptionalism
Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early America
The Tales Buildings Tell
Stanley Abercrombie
Architects can overwhelm their creations; time can make a hash of great visions
The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories
Through Fire and Flood
Jay Parini
Faulkner’s best fiction emerged from his willingness to face crises
Becoming Faulkner: The Art and Life of William Faulkner
A Day in the Life
Sudip Bose
Reading Joyce’s Ulysses as a guide to urban living
Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece
Art in the Time of War
Susannah Rutherglen
A prescient and courageous few safeguarded Italy’s patrimony
The Venus Fixers: The Remarkable Story of the Allied Soldiers Who Saved Italy's Art During World War II
The Common Good
Richard D. Kahlenberg
The case for a standardized curriculum for all American children
The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools
Film Release
Shirley Streshinsky
A woman’s burdened life and transcendent photographs
Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits
Relativity and All That
Apurva Narechania
Big Science bears down on Einstein’s equation
Why Does E=mc2? (And Why Should We Care?)
Watchers of the Skies
Robert Wilson
Heroes of British science, and the Romantic poets they inspired
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
Barbarian Virtues
Patricia O’Toole
When Americans first yearned to transform themselves and save the world
Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920
Jungle Bungle
Wayne Curtis
As a rubber baron, Henry Ford was no Firestone
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City
Gross Anatomy
Richard McCann
A physician's inside stories about the human body
Carrying the Heart: Exploring the Worlds Within Us
The Lost Village
Nathalie Handal
A Palestinian poet remembers the people and places he has lived without
My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century
Pilgrim of Eternity
William Giraldi
The loves and legends of Lord Byron
Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life
The Peacock Problem
Priscilla Long
Does sexual selection really explain enough?
The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness
The Peacock Problem
Alexander Nehamas
What does evolution say about why we make art?
The Art Instinct
Founding Portraitists
Fergus M. Bordewich
The Painter’s Chair: George Washington and the Making of American Art
At Liberty to Divulge
John Rolfe Gardiner
The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University
Cal & Liz & Ted & Sylvia
Sudip Bose
The corresponding prose of midcentury poets
Letters of Ted Hughes · selected and edited by Christopher Reid, Farrar, Straus and Giroux /
A Passion for Architecture
Stanley Abercrombie
Nuggets from a critical gold mine
On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change
Let Me Count the Ways
Richard Restak
Are we getting more obsessive or more compulsive about diagnosing?
Obsession: A History
Lucid Madness
William Howarth
A massacre of Apache women and children, and the difficulties of telling their story
Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History
Of Time and the Camera
Andy Grundberg
An art critic and historian turns his attention to contemporary photography
Why Photography Matters Now as Art as Never Before
Immortality Gained
Jay Parini
John Milton was not only a great poet, but also a great defender of liberty
Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot
Copyright Wrongs
Paul K. Saint-Amour
When technology makes an illegal act easy, should the law make that act legal?
Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy
How Special a Relationship?
Joshua Hawley
Whether T.R. needed Edward VII to establish the United States as a world power
The King and the Cowboy: Theodore Roosevelt and Edward the Seventh, Secret Partners
Potted History
Scott Reynolds Nelson
Learning more about slave life in South Carolina from a legendary potter-poet
Carolina Clay: The Life and Legend of the Slave Potter Dave
Shaking Habit's House
Sarah L. Courteau
Critic James Wood preaches a return to the realism of Flaubert
How Fiction Works
The Preparation of a Lifetime
Sanford J. Ungar
Racing Odysseus: A College President Becomes a Freshman Again
Over There
Jean Bethke Elshtain
A pugnacious public intellectual looks to Europe for his ideal
Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century
Democracy in Three Dimensions?
Heather Ewing
How the nation’s capital rose from a fetid forest on the backs of slaves
Washington: The Making of the American Capital
Ireland Revised
George O’Brien
Where the Celtic Tiger came from, and where it has gone
Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change 1970–2000
Repatriating Art
Susannah Rutherglen
A museum director examines the controversy over whether nations own their cultural artifacts
Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage
A Dangerous Weapon
Andy Grundberg
The fault is not in the camera, but in ourselves
The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph that Shocked America
Drought and Famine
Dan Bouk
What the past teaches us to fear most about global climate change
The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations
The Case of the Defective Detective
Britt Peterson
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective
The Work of Death
Ernest B. Furgurson
How the Civil War changed forever Americans’ relationship with mortality
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
Subjectivity Is All
Robert Campbell
Using a lifetime of colorful examples to define the undefinable
Modernism: The Lure of Heresy from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond
The Casserole Inquisition
Sandra M. Gilbert
Chronicles from America’s culinary transformation
The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food
Wry Eye on the Bard
John F. Andrews
Sorting through the little we know about the best we’ve got
Shakespeare: The World as Stage
Latin’s Eminent Career
A. E. Stallings
Is the language of empire, the church, scholarship, and Europe nearing retirement?
Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin
A Long Walk in the New World
Robert Wilson
Of 300 Spaniards sent to settle Florida, only four survived
A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca
The Genius and Her Sanctuary
Catharine R. Stimpson
Pivotal moments in the pairing of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas
Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice
Atonality and Beyond
Sudip Bose
The century when composers and audiences parted company
The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
The Early End of Consensus
Jill Ogline
Bitter partisanship began soon after George Washington left the scene
A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign
Swept Away
Anthony Brandt
When Géricault painted The Raft of the Medusa, he immersed himself in his subject’s horrors
The Wreck of the Medusa
Nurtural Intelligence
Richard Restak
The discoverer of the Flynn effect claims that genes control IQ less than you’d expect
What Is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect
Words and Music
Jennifer Michael Hecht
Two ways of thinking about what our brains can do
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature · By Steven Pinker /
The Whirling Princess
Sandra M. Gilbert
How a little rich girl known as Pussy Jones became Edith Wharton, writing her way into the aristocracy of American letters
Edith Wharton
The Heroic and the Crass
Gary Hart
Case studies in American presidential backbone
Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789-1989
Wide World
Sarah Fay
An essayist and activist who makes eloquent connections
Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics
Dismantling the Dream
Sandra Beasley
The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America
Happy Talk
Wayne Curtis
What did we know about joy, and when did we know it?
The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong · By Jennifer Michael Hecht /
Hearsay
Richard Restak
From the divinely inspired to the pathological, a history of auditory hallucination
Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science, and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination
An Epic in Flux
Sudip Bose
Gilgamesh, the world's first great literary work, is still being pieced together
The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh
Design Problem
Mary Beth Saffo
Does the internal physiology of animals imply a harmony of structure and function?
The Tinkerer’s Accomplice: How Design Emerges from Life Itself
The Historical Present
A. E. Stallings
Robert Fagle's bold solutions to the problem of Virgil
The Aeneid
Pleasure out of Desperation
Brenda Wineapple
Thomas Eakins, yearning for the ideal in a materialistic age
Portrait: The Life of Thomas Eakins
Organized Violence
Charles Trueheart
In the last century, where did warfare end and genocide begin?
The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West
What if Nature Had Been Thrifty?
Daniel Reid
The Best of All Possible Worlds: Mathematics and Destiny
Environmentalism for Outsiders
Donald Worster
The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism
Domestic Insurrection
Adam Goodheart
Rough Crossings: Britain, Slaves, and the American Revolution · By Simon Schama /
The Mind-Brain Problem
Jay Tolson
Psychologist Jerome Kagan has always known that biology is only a partial solution
An Argument for Mind
Worked Well with Others
Priscilla Long
Discovering the structure of DNA was not Francis Crick's only important collaboration
Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code
Half-Brother to the World
Eugen Weber
The United States has been more like other nations than we like to think
A Nation Among Nations: America's Place in World History
African Renaissance?
David Chanoff
Finding hope on a continent where many people see only despair
New News Out of Africa: Uncovering Africa's Renaissance
In Search of a Great Modernist
Susan Rubin Suleiman
Do Proust's final days illuminate his novel?
Proust at the Majestic: The Last Days of the Author Whose Book Changed Paris
