Have Trowel, Will Travel

A new biography of 20th-century America’s greatest landscape architect

I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise: A Life of Bunny Mellon by Mac Griswold

Our Founding Contradiction

The entrenched dichotomy at the center of the national story

American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765–1795 by Edward J. Larson

Head of the State

How the FBI’s founding director ruled from the shadows

G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage

Structural Foundations

The buildings that defined the Western world

The Story of Architecture by Witold Rybczynski

Quark of Habit

Scientists keep pushing for larger particle colliders—but is this really wise?

The Matter of Everything: How Curiosity, Physics, and Improbable Experiments Changed the World by Suzie Sheehy

Beauty Born of Ashes

The story of a lyrical masterpiece that almost wasn’t

The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem by Matthew Hollis

To Hell and Back

An Italian master’s unlikely depictions of Dante’s dark vision

Botticelli’s Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance by Joseph Luzzi

Of Dharma and Doom

A fresh translation revives the ending of an ancient Indian epic

After the War: The Last Books of the Mahabharata Wendy Doniger

Power of the Peoples

American history was shaped as much by Native Americans as by their colonizers

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America by Pekka Hämäläinen

Building Up and Breaking Down

What happens when the structures we erect plunge us into despair?

Bold Ventures: Thirteen Tales of Architectural Tragedy by Charlotte Van den Broeck (trans. from the Dutch by David McKay)

Old Christ Church in Alexandria. Virginia, attended by General Robert E. Lee in his youth and pictured here in 1911 (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign/Wikimedia Commons)

Divided Providence

Faith’s pivotal role in the outcome of the Civil War

Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Unionby Richard Carwardine

Aging Out

Many of us do not go gentle into that good night

Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Ageby James Chappel

Ideology as Anatomy

How shifting ideas about women’s bodies have affected their lives

Immaculate Forms: A History of the Female Body in Four Partsby Helen King

Island Royalty

A new biography of a Caribbean revolutionary

The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christopheby Marlene L. Daut

The Creator’s Code

Are humans alone in their ability to make art?

The Uncanny Muse: Music, Art, and Machines From Automata to AIby David Hajdu

All Talk

Ease of communication will not save us

Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apartby Nicholas Carr

Barbarity at the Bataclan

A chilling account of darkness in the City of Light

V13: Chronicle of a Trial by Emmanuel Carrère, translated from the Frenchby John Lambert

Heart of Semi-Darkness

A writer’s delectable quest for rare flavors

Masters of Horror and Magic

The German folklorists who helped build a nation

For Want of Touch

The astonishing breadth of our passions

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