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

James Baldwin’s America

Truths both hard and timeless

The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings By James Baldwin

Next of Kin

What we don’t know about what chimps know

Almost Chimpanzee: Searching for What Makes Us Human, in Rainforests, Labs, Sanctuaries, and Zoos By Jon Cohen

Reducing Science and Religion

The world remains infinitely more complex than contemporary attempts to account for it

Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self By Marilynne Robinson

Maker of Magazines

Henry Luce had a restless mind and a preternatural feel for the national pulse

The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century By Alan Brinkley

Growing Up in a Troubled Neighborhood

Kai Bird’s Middle East Memories and Meditations

Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis By Kai Bird

An Assassin’s Tale

In the footsteps of the murderer of Martin Luther King Jr.

Hellhound On His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin By Hampton Sides

Do Head Meds Make Us Sicker?

The argument that says they do has problems of its own

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America By Robert Whitaker

Mayhem Across the Border

A Mexican city where homicide is the new normal

Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields By Charles Bowden

A Joyless Noise

Two pleas for making life a whole lot quieter

The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book About NoiseBy Garret Keizer /Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute Silence By George Michelsen

Truth and Consequences

In the Whitewater investigation, the biggest loser was the legal profession

The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr By Ken Gormley

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