In her important new book, Miriam Pawel chronicles how a movement to unionize farmworkers failed to realize its charismatic founder’s vision as his relatives turned a union into a family business.
“The Opposite Field,” a memoir by Jesse Katz, is a moving meditation about baseball, politics, and the unease of negotiating a new kind of American place.
Kevin Starr’s newest volume in his magisterial series on California examines the dream of endless prosperity that was, for a time, synonymous with the American dream.
A rare combination of bravura storytelling and social history, “L.A. Noir” will delight fans of hard-boiled film and fiction even as it challenges the myths of 20th century Los Angeles.
Whatever one thinks of his politics, Elia Kazan was inarguably one of the 20th century’s greatest Broadway and Hollywood directors. A new book reveals the master at work.
Are we entering an age in which the electronic image, endowed with the ability to manufacture its own reality, is hurling us into a state of collective self-delusion? Welcome to a brave new post-literate world where we confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge.
Now 90 years old, America’s exemplary troubadour continues his lifelong project to agitate and organize through song, fulfilling his father’s dictum that “Music, as any art, is not an end in itself, but is a means for achieving larger ends.”
Was Socrates an atheist, a guru to a strange sect and an elitist corrupting the youth of a democratic Athens defeated in the Peloponnesian War, as his accusers successfully charged? A new book by Robin Waterfield seeks to dispel the myths about “Why Socrates Died.”
Why are New Orleanians—along with people from all over the world who continue to flock there—so devoted to a place that was, even before the storm, the most corrupt, impoverished and violent corner of America? “Nine Lives” by Dan Baum helps provide an answer.
The daunting problems Bush’s successor has inherited may prove all but insurmountable as he makes his way through a thicket of difficulties—the nuclear ambitions of authoritarian regimes, the quagmire of Mesopotamia and the persistent bloodletting in Pakistan and Afghanistan, to name only the most prominent. A recent book by David E. Sanger, a longtime foreign affairs correspondent for The New York Times, offers a close-up look at the world Obama confronts.
Is the pastoral arcadia of the country life far from derivatives and emissions and the other excreta of our modern cities all that it’s cracked up to be? Two new memoirs give readers who don’t want to stir from their armchairs to take up farming an insider’s look.
Just how important is a baseball team’s manager to how well a team performs? A new book by one of baseball’s giants attempts an answer. You be the judge.
Is there a social consequence to the increasing numbers of consumers who expect to get information and entertainment for nothing? Can there be too much of a good thing? “Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age” by Steve Knopper provides a useful autopsy.
Can Robert Wright, the acclaimed author of “The Moral Animal,” square the circle in his new book on the persistent and vexing issue of what role religion plays in how human societies seek to comport themselves? Just how crucial to our modern ethical ideas like universal rights and equality among all persons is the notion of a single, all-powerful god?
Two memoirs—Eve Pell’s “We Used to Own the Bronx” and Christopher Buckley’s “Losing Mum and Pup”—demonstrate, each in its own way, that all that glitters is not gold and that the price exacted by extreme social anxiety is very high indeed. A feast of the higher gossip and raw meat for social anthropologists.
A provocative new book, “One State, Two States,” by revisionist Israeli historian Benny Morris breaks a taboo by asking whether anti-Zionism has become the anti-imperialism of fools. Can his polemic act as the ax that helps break up the frozen and brittle nature of a debate over the seemingly intractable war between Palestinians and Jews?
Critic and crusader, the late I.F. Stone was an American original. Neither changing times nor his failing eyesight blunted his radical edge or dimmed his acerbic wit. A new biography by D.D. Guttenplan gives us the man behind the legendary muckraker.
A new and outrageously entertaining biography of America’s first tycoon by T.J. Stiles, one of our best younger historians, sheds new light on the monumental life of what Stiles rightly calls “an instinctive predator” and his mixed and enduring legacy.
Why does the U.S. government maintain over 190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian employees in 909 military facilities in 46 countries and territories? How long can the American taxpayer support this far-flung force given the severely weakened economy? And why has there been no public discussion by the Obama administration over scaling back our imperial presence abroad?
Obama’s Thankless Thanksgiving
