Book Reviews

A bleak account of the West's slide toward tyranny

Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism · Anne Applebaum

One writer’s journey into the labyrinth of political and bureaucratic obfuscation

Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act · by Nicholson Baker

America purchased its sense of itself at a high price

Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood · by Colin Woodard

Exploring a fundamentally ambiguous attribute

Character: The History of a Cultural Obsession · by Marjorie Garber

They aren’t the intellectual lightweights we take them for

The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think · by Jennifer Ackerman

A collection that is the brightest light in a city full of them

The Louvre: The Many Lives of the World’s Most Famous Museum · by James Gardner

A new biography of the founder of population genetics

A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J. B. S. Haldane · by Samanth Subramanian

The very different women of the Radcliffe Institute’s inaugural class

The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s · Maggie Doherty

How the future became fashionable

Jet Age Aesthetic: The Glamour of Media in Motion · by Vanessa R. Schwartz

How a now-forgotten writer changed American agriculture

The Planter of Modern Life: Louis Bromfield and the Seeds of a Food Revolution · by Stephen Heyman