The Lion Saves His Pride
/Winston Churchill has become such an icon of wartime tenacity that many people tend to forget he had a postwar political career. Barbara Leaming's 2010 biography examines the last act of a famous man's career.
Read More…then we are “jingoes”
/A new book argues that Theodore Roosevelt and William Randolph Hearst stampeded the United States into the Spanish-American War to feed imperial ambition and sell some newspapers. Are the roots of modern America rotten?
Read More"Perception at the Pitch of Passion"
/A catch-all collection of James Baldwin's essays, letters, and speeches reveals a social commenter whose observations retain their relevance and universality to this day
Read MoreThe Curious Disposition
/Some of the greatest works of English literature grapple with the dark, knotted roots of anti-Semitism, and the audience is always complicit. A new book studies the tangle of art and atrocity in writers Chaucer to Marlowe to Shakespeare
Read MoreNo Heaven for Suckers
/He has become synonymous with amoral, cold-hearted political machination, but there was more to Machiavelli than that. A new biography attempts to look at the whole man.
Read MoreThe Mutilated World
/The attacks of 9/11 evoked reactions from writers around the world, and journalist Scott Malcolmson finds fault with a great many of them - but does he do any better a job himself?
Read MoreThe Western Star
/More than any other figure in American history (including his hated rival Andrew Jackson), Henry Clay towered over the political landscape in the decades before the Civil War; two new books look at his legacy.
Read MoreUneasy Witness
/Vegetarians choose to be vegetarians and meat-eaters choose to be "normal." Melanie Joy cuts into the language we use to describe our food and the mindset behind it.
Read MoreSounds Simple, Nearly Impossible
/The documentary Restrepo, set in the deepest and most violent American outpost in Afganastan, ushers us "through a door most Americans don't know about and don't want to know about"
Read MoreThe Thin, Clear, Happy Call
/The sunlit aesthetics of the Edwardian era have been given a new look in this essay collection, and the consensus leans decidedly toward the darker meanings belying those lovely surfaces
Read MoreAn Anvil Unto Sorrow
/What we know about Edward II came from the brilliant mind of Christopher Marlowe. A new biography seeks to separate the real man from the dramatist’s fertile imagination.
Read MoreCity of Sorrow
/In 2009, Ciudad Juarez reported 2,700 homicides. As Charles Bowden’s new book Murder City shows, the bloody drug-war just south of the border shows no signs of abating
Read MoreHow, Not If
/The so-called Tea Party would like to dump President Obama in Boston Harbor - but even ordinary politicians often misunderstand him. The reasons are simpler than you think.
Read MoreSmiling, and Back to Work
/In 2007-2008, the world's financial markets experienced ample "creative destruction." Now in paperback is this rich (no pun intended) life of the man who coined the term.
Read MoreA Fire Bell in the Night
/President Polk isn't exactly a household name, and a new book seeks to change that. Will the facilitator of genocide and the originator of civil war get a fair shake? Read on!
Read MorePay Attention, Cynewulf
/The warrior tribes who chipped away at Rome's Western empire were pretty rough on each other, too. A new book examines the fight for fledgling Europe.
Read MoreStrategikon
/The glory that was Rome lived on - in a strange new form - for a thousand years in the East, despite being beset by enemies on all sides. A new study illuminates how they managed it.
Read MoreThe Man and the Monument
/The Glorious Revolution of 1688 was peaceful, orderly, and above all sensible, or so says towering Victorian historian Thomas Babington Macaulay. Two new books look at the man and the Revolution he so indelibly described.
Read MorePlaying the Shadow Game
/Since the days of T.E. Lawrence, reporters have been providing the West with carefully-wrought (or overwrought) tales of the Middle East. A new book comments on the excesses--and maybe commits a few too.
Read MoreComing Out of the Room
/Stuart Weisberg's biography of Barney Frank may be scattered and incomplete, but it's got one huge saving grace: Frank's own witticisms on nearly every page.
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