Literary Life on the Rocks

A writer’s own ordeal highlights the banal sameness of addiction

The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath by Leslie Jamison

A Planet in Peril

Can humanity engineer its way out of trouble?

The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann

A Window on Europe

How a tsar turned a fetid bog into an imperial capital

St. Petersburg: Madness, Murder, and Art on the Banks of the Neva by Jonathan Miles

A Fallen Angel of Mercy

Did her good works expiate the sins of her dark past?

In Full Flight: A Story of Africa and Atonement by John Heminway

Foes of Judgment

Numbers don’t always reveal the true nature of things

The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z. Muller

An Even Greater Beyond

Will technology bring us eternal life?

Heavens on Earth by Michael Shermer

Why We Need Art

Can evolutionary biology explain the human impulse to create?

The Origins of Creativity by Edward O. Wilson

The Wanderer 

How a Victorian novelist’s life and times inform our own

The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World by Maya Jasanoff

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

Who Would I Be Off My Meds

Can weaning oneself off pharmaceuticals ease the cycle of perpetual suffering?

Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistanceby Laura Delano

Who’s to Say?
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A bewildering take from a noted scholar of Christianity

Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesusby Elaine Pagels

Chapters and Verse

Looking for the poet between the lines

Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetryby Adam Plunkett

Once More, Without Feeling

Can a memoir be effective when it lacks any warmth?

Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritanceby Joe Dunthorne

Electrons That Bind

The molecule at the center of everything

Carbon: The Book of Lifeby Paul Hawken

Food for Thought

A pragmatic approach to one of humanity’s gravest threats

How to Feed the World: The History and Future of Foodby Vaclav Smil

Splitting Our Sides

A new biography of a comedy pioneer

Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Liveby Susan Morrison

In the Lions’ Studio

A new dual biography turns the lens on the towering architects of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg: The Whole Equationby Kenneth Turan

All Talk

Ease of communication will not save us

Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apartby Nicholas Carr

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

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