A Whale of a Story

The parallel lives of   Moby-Dick’s creator and the historian who rescued him from obscurity

Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times by Aaron Sachs

California Scheming

Has one of the 20th century’s greatest unsolved crimes finally been cracked?

Who Killed Jane Stanford? A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits, and the Birth of a University by Richard White

Subatomic Inspiration

The enigmatic thinker behind the Large Hadron Collider

Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass by Frank Close

From Counterculture to Culture

How a teenage rebel rose to the summit of British literary life

A Name Not Writ in Water

Revisiting an immortal 19th-century English poet

Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph by Lucasta Miller

Arctic Fantasies

The region has long been an object of dreams, desire, and misunderstanding

Extreme North: A Cultural History by Bernd Brunne

Gene Therapy

A writer’s search for herself in the branches of her family tree

Making the List

Finding the right page required centuries of experiment

Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age by Dennis Duncan

From Cold War to Y2K

Looking back on a decade that was often dumb but never dull

The Nineties: A Book by Chuck Klosterman

Found in Translation

An Iranian emigrant finds solace in Western literature

Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times by Azar Nafisi

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

Imperiled Planet

The ecological havoc we’ve wrought

The Burning Earth: A Historyby Sunil Amrith

Ground Truth

A story of dirt, dollars, and death

The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippiby Wright Thompson

Insisting on the Positive

A popular historian’s philosophical musings

On Freedomby Timothy Snyder

A Stranger in the Seven Hills

A refugee’s experience in the Eternal City

Roman Year: A Memoirby André Aciman

Mortal Coils

We aren’t alone in facing the inevitable

Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Deathby Susana Monsó

Silent Partner

The union that may have made possible a writer’s late flourishing

A Wilder Shore: The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevensonby Camille Peri

Schmaltz of Significance

How the first talkie treated the myth of the melting pot

Only in America: Al Jolson and The Jazz Singerby Richard Bernstein

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