Book Reviews
Getting Better All the Time
Michael Shermer
Although you wouldn't know it by watching the local news, humankind is becoming ever more civilized
From Eternity to Here
Ingrid D. Rowland
Our Madness for War
Michael Sherry
Must we persist in using the military option when it so rarely works?
Reducing Science and Religion
Ingrid Rowland
The world remains infinitely more complex than contemporary attempts to account for it
Maker of Magazines
Stanley Cloud
Henry Luce had a restless mind and a preternatural feel for the national pulse
Truth and Consequences
Lincoln Caplan
In the Whitewater investigation, the biggest loser was the legal profession
The Lovable Leviathan
Sy Montgomery
Whales hold a special place in our imagination, but their situation is dire
A Long, Cold Road to Paris
Paul C. Nagel
The 2,000-mile, 40-day journey of future first lady Louisa Catherine Adams
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
Wrestling the Moose
Miranda Weiss
Jefferson debunked a French theory of natural history, launching American exceptionalism
The Tales Buildings Tell
Stanley Abercrombie
Architects can overwhelm their creations; time can make a hash of great visions
Through Fire and Flood
Jay Parini
Faulkner’s best fiction emerged from his willingness to face crises
Art in the Time of War
Susannah Rutherglen
A prescient and courageous few safeguarded Italy’s patrimony
The Common Good
Richard D. Kahlenberg
The case for a standardized curriculum for all American children
Barbarian Virtues
Patricia O’Toole
When Americans first yearned to transform themselves and save the world
The Lost Village
Nathalie Handal
A Palestinian poet remembers the people and places he has lived without
Founding Portraitists
Fergus M. Bordewich
Dark Mysteries
Angeline Goreau
At Liberty to Divulge
John Rolfe Gardiner
Circular Bread Line
Sandra M. Gilbert
Let Me Count the Ways
Richard Restak
Are we getting more obsessive or more compulsive about diagnosing?
Lucid Madness
William Howarth
A massacre of Apache women and children, and the difficulties of telling their story
Of Time and the Camera
Andy Grundberg
An art critic and historian turns his attention to contemporary photography
Immortality Gained
Jay Parini
John Milton was not only a great poet, but also a great defender of liberty
Copyright Wrongs
Paul K. Saint-Amour
When technology makes an illegal act easy, should the law make that act legal?
How Special a Relationship?
Joshua Hawley
Whether T.R. needed Edward VII to establish the United States as a world power
Potted History
Scott Reynolds Nelson
Learning more about slave life in South Carolina from a legendary potter-poet
Shaking Habit's House
Sarah L. Courteau
Critic James Wood preaches a return to the realism of Flaubert
The Preparation of a Lifetime
Sanford J. Ungar
Democracy in Three Dimensions?
Heather Ewing
How the nation’s capital rose from a fetid forest on the backs of slaves
Repatriating Art
Susannah Rutherglen
A museum director examines the controversy over whether nations own their cultural artifacts
A Look Beyond the Tragic Mystique
Matthew Ladd
The Case of the Defective Detective
Britt Peterson
Enlightenment Lite
Sudip Bose
The Work of Death
Ernest B. Furgurson
How the Civil War changed forever Americans’ relationship with mortality
Latin’s Eminent Career
A. E. Stallings
Is the language of empire, the church, scholarship, and Europe nearing retirement?
A Long Walk in the New World
Robert Wilson
Of 300 Spaniards sent to settle Florida, only four survived
The Genius and Her Sanctuary
Catharine R. Stimpson
Pivotal moments in the pairing of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas
The Early End of Consensus
Jill Ogline
Bitter partisanship began soon after George Washington left the scene
Swept Away
Anthony Brandt
When Géricault painted The Raft of the Medusa, he immersed himself in his subject’s horrors
Nurtural Intelligence
Richard Restak
The discoverer of the Flynn effect claims that genes control IQ less than you’d expect
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
The Meandering Naturalist
William Howarth
Dismantling the Dream
Sandra Beasley
Hearsay
Richard Restak
From the divinely inspired to the pathological, a history of auditory hallucination
An Epic in Flux
Sudip Bose
Gilgamesh, the world's first great literary work, is still being pieced together
Design Problem
Mary Beth Saffo
Does the internal physiology of animals imply a harmony of structure and function?
Pleasure out of Desperation
Brenda Wineapple
Thomas Eakins, yearning for the ideal in a materialistic age
Poised Between the Ancient and the New
Benjamin Balint
What if Nature Had Been Thrifty?
Daniel Reid
Birthday Suit
Natalie Angier
Environmentalism for Outsiders
Donald Worster
Peaceable Kingdom
Ingrid D. Rowland
Domestic Insurrection
Adam Goodheart
Eclogues
Robert Wilson
The Mind-Brain Problem
Jay Tolson
Psychologist Jerome Kagan has always known that biology is only a partial solution
Worked Well with Others
Priscilla Long
Discovering the structure of DNA was not Francis Crick's only important collaboration
Half-Brother to the World
Eugen Weber
The United States has been more like other nations than we like to think
