Book Reviews
It’s Complicated
Michael Shermer
Unraveling the mystery of why people act as they do
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst ·
Waking From the Dream
Nancy Isenberg
Most Americans assume society is more egalitarian than it is
The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die ·
Not by Taste Alone
Tim Carman
The flavor of food is produced by all of the senses
Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating ·
England, My England
Jan Morris
The poet whose bucolic lyrics defined a generation
Housman Country: Into the Heart of England ·
Back From Oblivion
Dana Gioia
A writer who refused to live in a world robbed of meaning
The Poetry of Weldon Kees: Vanishing as Presence ·
Broken Bodies, Broken Forms
Roy Scranton
What relation does art bear to suffering?
Draw Your Weapons ·
“I Will Die a Russian”
Sarah Mansfield Taber
A marriage of convenience that yielded an intelligence bonanza
Spies in the Family ·
Orator-in-Chief
James Santel
President Obama’s public remarks revealed his unshakable faith in the unity of the American people
We Are the Change We Seek: The Speeches of Barack Obama ·
More Than Human
Michael Shermer
The dawn of a technologically enhanced super-species is upon us
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
Robocops and Robbers
Jill Leovy
Criminal justice in the age of digital spying and surveillance
Unwarranted: Policing Without Permission
One Nation Under God
Dennis Covington
The contentious role of Christianity in politics
The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America
“Time to Plant Tears”
Dana Gioia
An intimate biography of one of the 20th century’s great poets
Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast
Taking Old Abe to Task
David S. Reynolds
A historian’s uncommonly grim view of the Great Emancipator
Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and Its Demons ·
Travels in Literary Time
Jay Parini
A writer’s excursions beyond mere archives
This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer
Selective Memory
Christoph Irmscher
Ideas do not always catch on right away
The Book That Changed America: How Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation
Controlled Experiments
Aileen M. Kelly
The Soviet Union’s ideological and inefficient view of science
Stalin and the Scientists: A History of Triumph and Tragedy, 1905–1953
Too Much Poetic License
Andrew Motion
An attempt to identify the object of the Bard’s affections
Naming Thy Name: Cross Talk in Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Sisters of the Night Sky
Sam Kean
The pioneering female scientists who first charted the universe
The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars
Feeling No Pain
Nathalie Lagerfeld
A philosopher argues we should not be misled by our hearts
Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion
Second Thoughts
George Musser
To manipulate time, we must first understand how it works
Time Travel: A History · By James Gleick /
Darkness Illuminated
Susan Cheever
A horror writer whose real demons were off the page
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life ·
Territories of Conquest
Andrew Graybill
A new history of the bloodletting that opened the frontier
The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West ·
Before the Rebellion
Meryle Secrest
A colonial American artist’s portraits of an age
A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley ·
The Old Urbanist
Edward Glaeser
Jane Jacobs saw cities as places for people
Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs ·
Healing the Masses
T. M. Luhrmann
The evolution of care at the nation’s oldest public hospital
Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital ·
A Rare Intelligence
Bruce Falconer
How a spy novelist’s travels reinvigorated his work
The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life ·
Manifest Poverty
Dennis Covington
Poor southern whites have long been a people without a country
White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
Courting All Voters
Lincoln Caplan
The judicial effects of American civic engagement
Engines of Liberty: The Power of Citizen Activists to Make Constitutional Law
With Noses Held High
Becca Rothfeld
Personal aspiration need not always lead to snobbery
Pretentiousness: Why It Matters
Annals of Human Oddity
Andy Grundberg
Casting an eye on “freaks” with sensitivity and compassion
Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer
The Great Summing Up
James Gibney
The volumes that compiled the knowledge and spirit of an age
Everything Explained That Is Explainable
The Lives Aquatic
Eugene Linden
There is much more to gilled creatures than meets the eye
What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins
Bohemian Rhapsody
Sridhar Pappu
The troubled homeless historian who beguiled and bedeviled
Joe Gould’s Teeth
Lives of the Philosophers
Amanda Vaill
The postwar thinkers who stripped the world of preconceptions
At the Existentialist Café
Taking It to the Street
Jill Leovy
What it’s like to be down and out in America
Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea · By Mitchell Duneier
The Pursuit of Middle Heaven
George O’Brien
Missives about sex, love, and the value of really good talk
Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch, 1934–1995
I Think, Therefore ...
Kathryn Tabb
How much can we really know about the mystery of ourselves?
The Tides of the Mind · by David Gelernter
As the Bard Turns
Wendy Smith
The international appeal of the man from Stratford-upon-Avon
Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare’s Globe
The Spirit of May 35th
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
A tale of dissidence, exile, astrophysics, and puckish wit
The Most Wanted Man in China
Speaking in Form and Color
Lincoln Perry
The extraordinary paintings of an ordinary man
Mark Rothko: From the Inside Out
A Model Marriage
Mary Beth Norton
An intimate portrait of a couple who helped forge a nation
The Washingtons
Son of Gonzo
Scott Stossel
Living in the aftermath of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll
Growing Up with Hunter S. Thompson
Riddles for the Afterlife
Sarah Ruden
Decoding the hieroglyphs that accompanied the dead pharaohs
The Dawning Moon of the Mind: Unlocking the Pyramid Texts
Hail to the Chiefs
Michael Sherry
Leaders of the last century
The American President: From Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton
Taken to the Leader
Bruce Cumings
Why did Pyongyang kidnap several dozen Japanese?
The Invitation-Only Zone: The True Story of North Korea’s Abduction Project
Hot Rocks
Sarah Zielinski
A scientist’s love of lava
The Last Volcano: A Man, a Romance, and the Quest to Understand Nature’s Most Magnificent Fury
Speaking in Tongues
Michael Upchurch
The ancient, tangled roots of modern language
Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages · By Gaston Dorren /
A Lifetime Spent Bearing Witness
Louis Begley
The literary giant who rose from the ashes of a people
The Complete Works of Primo Levi
Cosmic Art
Verlyn Klinkenborg
An inquiry into the scientific significance of elegance
A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design
Anyone Home?
T. M. Luhrmann
The centuries-long debate over what resides between our ears
Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind
We Need to Chat
Jessica Love
How technology has changed the way we relate to one another
Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age
Living Like White People
Thomas Chatterton Williams
The disorientation of growing up privileged and black
Negroland: A Memoir
The Wisdom of the Ages
Andrew J. Bacevich
Looking to the classics to steel yourself against life’s cruelties
The Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today
It Takes a Laboratory
Sam Kean
Science is no longer the domain of solitary experimenters
Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention That Launched the Military-Industrial Complex
Boldly Going No More
Nathalie Lagerfeld
The space shuttle program’s unheralded demise
Leaving Orbit: Notes From the Last Days of American Spaceflight
Eyewitness
S. C. Gwynne
A spy’s exploits in the heart of the Confederacy
Our Man in Charleston: Britain’s Secret Agent in the Civil War South
Big Shoulders
Louise Fabiani
How curiosity and cognition have driven our species forward
The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos
The Paper Chase
Werner Gundersheimer
Years of tireless collecting led to one of the world’s great libraries
The Millionaire and the Bard: Henry Folger’s Obsessive Hunt for Shakespeare’s First Folio
Fantastic Four
Jan Morris
The enduring influence of a quartet of Oxford dons
The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings
Hearts With One Purpose
George O’Brien
A revealing group portrait of Ireland’s motley crew of rebels
Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890–1923
A Taste for Higher Math
Natalie Angier
The numbers that count
How to Bake π: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics
Two Dutch Visionaries
Graeme Wood
How the optical revolution revealed worlds large and small
Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing
“You Cannot Refine It”
John Nagl
From victory to annihilation, the evolving nature of combat
Sherman’s Ghosts: Soldiers, Civilians, and the American Way of War
Proust Imperfect
Anka Muhlstein
The Englishman who interpreted France’s greatest novel
Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C. K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy, and Translator
Meeting the Test of Time
Stanley Plumly
Why some wordsmiths stay and others fade away
Those Who Write for Immortality: Romantic Reputations and the Dream of Lasting Fame
Persecution Complex
Gary Saul Morson
A young Bolshevik revolutionary's unlikely and bloody rise to power
Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928
The Crisis Up Close
Natalie Angier
Wandering our warming world
Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made
Cruel Spring
Charles Trueheart
A dark time in the city of light
Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune
To Flee or Not to Flee
Jennifer Michael Hecht
The stigma of failed courage
Cowardice: A Brief History
Champion of Modernism
John Tytell
A literary life on the edge
“Literchoor Is My Beat”: A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions
Breaking the Bonds
Louis P. Masur
How runaway slaves got North
Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad
Sound and Fury
Matthew Guerrieri
The flawed, tragic hero whose music defined an age
Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph
Frozen Hell
John Vaillant
An expedition gone wrong
In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette
The Deciders
William S. McFeely
Two presidents and their war
Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief · By James M. McPherson
Man of the World
Annette Gordon-Reed
Well-traveled and erudite, John Quincy Adams sometimes had trouble appealing to his countrymen
John Quincy Adams: American Visionary
Numbers Game
Owen Gingerich
The problems of solutions
Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World
Dangerous Liaison
Steven Simon
A CIA officer’s many faces
The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames
Beyond the Colonies
Andrew Graybill
What else happened during the year of independence?
West of the Revolution
Matters of Perception
William Nichols
Sometimes the truth lies more in what we perceive than what we think
Coming to Our Senses: Perceiving Complexity to Avoid Catastrophes
The Bard of Suburbia
Robert Wilson
John Updike’s obsession with ordinary life made him the writer by whom we came to know ourselves
Updike
19th Nervous Breakdown
Gary Greenberg
The struggle to keep it together
My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind
A Danger to Ourselves
Mary Beth Saffo
Tough on other species, too
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Whores de Combat
Charles Trueheart
In search of adventure and engagement
Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War
Ready to Be Free
Louis P. Masur
The end of the peculiar institution
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation
The Best Course
Michael Dirda
A beloved professor’s long shadow
Splendor of Heart: Walter Jackson Bate and the Teaching of Literature
Abolition Gone Wrong
Fergus M. Bordewich
Despite good intentions, some opponents of the Atlantic slave trade caused more harm
Ship of Death · By Billy G. Smith /
Soaring Ambitions
Toby Lester
Early hot-air balloonists ascended to previously unimaginable heights, stirring humanity’s sense of perspective and possibility
Falling Upwards
Upward Bound
Sarah Ruden
Abraham’s merciful stay of hand
But Where Is the Lamb?: Imagining the Story of Abraham and Isaac
Priestly Powers
George O’Brien
A comic writer’s critical eye
Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963
On the Brink
Scott D. Sagan
How safe are our nukes?
Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety
Lives of the Ancients
A. E. Stallings
Animating the Greeks and Romans
Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures, and Innovations
Two of a Kind
David Brown
A postwar friendship
Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize
The Bombmaker’s Burden
Shirley Streshinsky
Winning the atomic race failed to bring him peace of mind
A Life Inside the Center
Bad Medicine
Alison Bass
Psychiatry’s mistaken manual
The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry · By Gary Greenberg /
True North
Fergus M. Bordewich
Yankees and their slaves
For Adam's Sake: A Family Saga in Colonial New England
Out of Africa
Graeme Wood
A writer says goodbye to all that
The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari
Science, Right and Wrong
Sam Kean
The evolution of knowledge
Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything · By Philip Ball /
The World All Before Them
Sudip Bose
Setting off on footpaths both well-trod and forgotten
The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot · By Robert Macfarlane /
Life Story
Carl Elliott
A bioethicist and his creation
In Search of the Good: A Life in Bioethics · By Daniel Callahan /
Smarty Ants
Sy Montgomery
Intelligence isn’t just for humans
Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures
Found Fictions
Elaine Showalter
A scholar broadens the canon
Truth’s Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel
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
Paint Fight
Ingrid D. Rowland
Two titans of art go head to head
The Lost Battles: Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the Artistic Duel that Defined the Renaissance · By Jonathan Jones /
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
Founder of Our Freedoms
Ted Widmer
Rhode Island's religious tolerance
Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul
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 · By Garret Keizer /
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 /
The Impulse to Exclude
Phyllis Rose
Ralph Ellison wrote one great novel and then lived a life that is hard to admire
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
A Man in It
Garry Wills
Lincoln’s Lieutenants
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
What Is It Good For?
James Webb
How the American military went from defense to offense
The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War
Battle of Anacostia
Robert S. McElvaine
The bonus army and its unexpected legacy
The Bonus Army: An American Epic
Thoreau’s Landscape Within
Kent C. Ryden
How he came to know nature, and through it came to know himself
Natural Life: Thoreau’s Worldly Transcendentalism
Rocket Men
Michael Upchurch
A daughter explores the male-dominated universe of her father
Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science
The Peculiar Intellectual
Richard E. Nicholls
In the antebellum South, scholars made serious contributions to their fields, at least until they turned to defending slavery
Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South
What Einstein Knew
Tony Rothman
One year and five papers that changed physics forever
Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness · By John S. Rigden /
One Bad Husband
Alison Lurie
What the “Bluebeard” story tells us about marriage
Secrets Behind the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives
E-newsletter
THIS WEEK’S ARCHIVE PICK
Joyas Voladoras
By By Brian Doyle
Brian Doyle, who died on May 27, once wrote that “the biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale.” After reading years of his writing, including almost 200 of his “Epiphanies,” we’re not so sure. Rest in peace, Brian. Your heart held so much in this lifetime.
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Editors’ Picks
Best-of lists from bad romances to Shakespearean verse
The Guest List
We ask our favorite writers about their favorite titles
The Daily Scholar Archives
The complete collection of our blogs, including Zinsser on Friday and our weekly Writing Lessons
Online Essays
Works you won’t find in print, from the likes of Harold Holzer, Wendy Smith, and Neil Shea
Red: The History of a Color
By Michel Pastoureau
This week, read an excerpt from a new book about the shade of love and rage
