The Crisis Up Close

Wandering our warming world

Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made By Gaia Vince

Cruel Spring

A dark time in the city of light

Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune By John Merriman

To Flee or Not to Flee

The stigma of failed courage

Cowardice: A Brief History By Chris Walsh

Champion of Modernism

A literary life on the edge

“Literchoor Is My Beat”: A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions By Ian S. MacNiven

Breaking the Bonds

How runaway slaves got North

Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad By Eric Foner

Hell and Back

No Man’s Land: Preparing for War and Peace in Post-9/11 America By Elizabeth D. Samet

All Wrapped Up

Wat Wreck

Shots in the Dark

Lincoln and the Fourth Estate

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 Writer in the Family

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

The Weight of a Stone

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

Double Exposure

On our first memories

Verde

Learning a foreign language isn’t just about improving cognitive function—it can teach us to sense the world anew

Magic Men

Aging Out

Many of us do not go gentle into that good night

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

Under a Spell Everlasting

Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, published a century ago, tells of a world unable to free itself from the cataclysm of war

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

The Fair Fields
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Only rarely did the outside world intrude on an idyllic Connecticut childhood, but in the tumultuous 1960s, that intrusion included an encounter with evil

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