“The Purse-Seine” by Robinson Jeffers

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Island Royalty

A new biography of a Caribbean revolutionary

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

The Writer in the Family

The fiction of E. L. Doctorow gave a young man hope of connecting his father and his literary hero

Birthday Boy

“The Horses” by Ted Hughes

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Amy Wetsch

Life, magnified

The Weight of a Stone

Searching for stability in an erratic world led Oliver Sacks and other writers to the realms of geology

New Year, Old Year

“The Horses” by Edwin Muir

Poems read aloud, beautifully

The Snow Maiden

Our final episode of 2018 is a send-off to the solstice

No Degrees of Separation

Getting Better All the Time

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 By Steven Pinker

Dubya and Me

Over the course of a quarter-century, a journalist witnessed the transformation of George W. Bush

A Chesterton With No Flab

A new anthology often obscures the writer’s best work

The Everyman Chesterton By G. K. Chesterton

LBJ’s Wild Ride

Hanging on for dear life during the 1960 campaign

Secret Sharers

In an age of leaks, forgeries, and Internet hoaxes, archivists must guard our information while keeping hackers at bay

Leningraders, summer 1942

The Worst of Times

A Soviet city barely survives

Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941–1944 By Anna Reid

John Brown’s Folly

The mythology of a madman

Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War By Tony Horwitz

The Psychologist

Vladimir Nabokov’s understanding of human nature anticipated the advances in psychology since his day

John Koethe’s Red Shoes

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