Bending Toward Justice

Rejecting the “race riot” myth means facing the ugly truth

They Stole a City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live With Its Legacy by Lauren Collins

Verse From the Abyss

How a Jewish poet rebuilt his mother tongue in the wake of the Holocaust

Paul Celan: A Life by Anna Arno, translated by Soren Gauger

Where Are We?

Finding our bearings has never been so risky

Little Blue Dot: How GPS Shaped the Modern World By Katherine Dunn

Blood—and Beauty—at the Root

Fifty years ago, Alex Haley’s landmark novel changed the way many Americans thought about race

Remembering Roots: How an American Classic Transformed the World by Lucas L. Johnson II

In Defense of Difficult Reading

The tomes of the past cultivate the lost art of sustained attention

What’s So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You) Naomi Kanakia

Inside Man

A young reporter’s devastating exposé of the amoral elite

How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University By Theo Baker

Things Fall Apart

A meditation on entropy, obsolescence, and death

How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information By Thomas S. Mullaney

Into the Wilds

The tangled terrain of untrammeled lands

The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness By Cal Flyn

The Painter Time Forgot

An overdue reckoning of an artist’s volcanic genius

Glorious Country: How the Artist Frederic Church Brought the World to America and America to the World By Victoria Johnson

Canonical Contempt

Even in the 18th century, Edward Gibbon’s misogyny set him apart

The Conversions of Edward Gibbon: A Modern Biography By Martha Saxton

Robocops and Robbers

Criminal justice in the age of digital spying and surveillance

Unwarranted: Policing Without Permission by Barry Friedman

One Nation Under God

The contentious role of Christianity in politics

The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America by Frances FitzGerald; Simon &amp

“Time to Plant Tears”

An intimate biography of one of the 20th century’s great poets

Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall

Taking Old Abe to Task

A historian’s uncommonly grim view of the Great Emancipator

Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and Its Demons by Elizabeth Brown Pryor

Travels in Literary Time

A writer’s excursions beyond mere archives

This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic BiographerRichard Holmes

Selective Memory

Ideas do not always catch on right away

The Book That Changed America: How Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation By Randall Fuller

Controlled Experiments

The Soviet Union’s ideological and inefficient view of science

Stalin and the Scientists: A History of Triumph and Tragedy, 1905–1953 By Simon Ings

Too Much Poetic License

An attempt to identify the object of the Bard’s affections

Naming Thy Name: Cross Talk in Shakespeare’s Sonnets By Elaine Scarry

Sisters of the Night Sky

The pioneering female scientists who first charted the universe

The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars By Dava Sobel

Feeling No Pain

A philosopher argues we should not be misled by our hearts

Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion Paul Bloom

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