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

Through Fire and Flood

Faulkner’s best fiction emerged from his willingness to face crises

Becoming Faulkner: The Art and Life of William Faulkner By Philip Weinstein

A Day in the Life

Reading Joyce’s Ulysses as a guide to urban living

Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece By Declan Kiberd

Art in the Time of War

A prescient and courageous few safeguarded Italy’s patrimony

The Venus Fixers: The Remarkable Story of the Allied Soldiers Who Saved Italy's Art During World War II By Ilaria Dagnini Brey, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The Common Good

The case for a standardized curriculum for all American children

The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools By E.D. Hirsch Jr.

Film Release

A woman’s burdened life and transcendent photographs

Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits By Linda Gordon

Relativity and All That

Big Science bears down on Einstein’s equation

Why Does E=mc2? (And Why Should We Care?) By Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw

Watchers of the Skies

Heroes of British science, and the Romantic poets they inspired

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science By Richard Holmes

Barbarian Virtues

When Americans first yearned to transform themselves and save the world

Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 By Jackson Lears

Jungle Bungle

As a rubber baron, Henry Ford was no Firestone

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City By Greg Grandin

Gross Anatomy

A physician’s inside stories about the human body

Carrying the Heart: Exploring the Worlds Within Us By F. González-Crussi

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