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

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

Ideology as Anatomy

How shifting ideas about women’s bodies have affected their lives

Immaculate Forms: A History of the Female Body in Four Parts by Helen King

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 Creator’s Code

Are humans alone in their ability to make art?

The Uncanny Muse: Music, Art, and Machines From Automata to AI by David Hajdu

All Talk

Ease of communication will not save us

Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart by 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 French by 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

Getting Better All the Time

Although you wouldn’t know it by watching the local news, humankind is becoming ever more civilized

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined By Steven Pinker

A Chesterton With No Flab

A new anthology often obscures the writer’s best work

The Everyman Chesterton By G. K. Chesterton

Leningraders, summer 1942

The Worst of Times

A Soviet city barely survives

Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941–1944 By Anna Reid

John Brown’s Folly

The mythology of a madman

Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War By Tony Horwitz

Power Crazy

Do lunatics make better leaders?

A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness By Nassir Ghaemi

From Eternity to Here

Dante in Love By A. N. Wilson

The Inside Track

How those dim-witted robber barons built the railroads

Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America By Richard White

Full Bloom

A critic offers his final thoughts

The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life By Harold Bloom

Frozen Assets

A gritty tale of a grim landscape

The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle By Sara Wheeler

Deep Trouble

How a natural disaster barreled into a historical one

Camille, 1969: Histories of a Hurricane By Mark M. Smith

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