Bungle in the Jungle

A new biography considers what might have been in Indochina

The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam by Max Boot

The Colonial Melting Pot

Six very different people in a war of liberation

Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom by Russell Shorto

Paranoia Strikes Deep

What are we hiding from in our policed and gated communities?

Fortress America: How We Embraced Fear and Abandoned Democracy by Elaine Tyler May

A Palate for the Finer Things

Pondering a father’s thirst for respectability

The Wine Lover’s Daughter: A Memoir by Anne Fadiman

A Poet of Glamour and Chaos

Lady Lazarus rises again

The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume I: 1940­–1956 edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil

Triumph of the Underdog

A new biography offers a sympathetic portrait of Lincoln’s greatest general

Grant by Ron Chernow

Wave of Anguish

Could disobedience have saved a group of Japanese students?

Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone by Richard Lloyd Parry

Metropolis Rising

How the Big Apple took its place among the world’s great cities

Greater Gotham: A History of New York City From 1898 to 1919 by Mike Wallace

Antiquarian Dreams

Sometimes it’s okay to judge history by its cover

Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts: Twelve Journeys into the Medieval World by Christopher de Hamel

Running With the Pack

On one of the most successful ecological experiments of all time

American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West by Nate Blakeslee

Aging Out

Many of us do not go gentle into that good night

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

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

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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