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

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 Age by 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 Union by 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

The Blue Birds Come Today

Burritoville

My Brain on My Mind

The ABCs of the thrumming, plastic mystery that allows us to think, feel, and remember

The Stolen Election

An expatriate Iranian writer travels her troubled homeland in the weeks after a disputed presidential vote

Seventy Years Later

The Second World War destroyed Adolf Hitler, but his legacy is showing disturbing signs of life

Strange Matter

The physics and poetics of the search for the God particle

Wrestling with Two Behemoths

A longtime New Yorker, and New Yorker writer, gets the cold shoulder from powerful New York cultural institutions

The Doctor Is IN

At 88, Aaron Beck is now revered for an approach to psychotherapy that pushed Freudian analysis aside

The End of Things

Openings into an Open Mind

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