Ian Buruma, Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945 (Penguin Press, 2026) At 10:00 pm on September 1, 1939, Adolph Hitler delivered a fiery speech in Berlin’s Kroll Opera House to members of the Reichstag, Germany’s rubber stamp parliament, that was broadcast … Continue reading →
Steven J. Zipperstein, Philip Roth, Stung by Life (Yale University Press, 2025) Up until his death in 2018 at age 85, American novelist Philip Roth entertained a prodigious capacity to maintain and nurture grudges. At or near the top of … Continue reading →
Laura K. Field, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right (Princeton University Press, 2025) If you think the term “MAGA intellectual” is an oxymoron, you should read Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right. In this … Continue reading →
Philippe Sands, 38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2025) In October 1998, former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet traveled to London with his wife Lucia for medical treatment, along with some … Continue reading →
Mark Lilla, Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux) I am confident that most if not all readers of this blog would characterize themselves as naturally curious. But many of us, perhaps … Continue reading →
Peter Hayes, Profits and Persecution: German Big Business in the Nazi Economy and the Holocaust (Cambridge University Press, 2025) What level of responsibility can fairly be attributed to German big business for the crimes of Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich? … Continue reading →
Michelle Adams, The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2025) The United States Supreme Court’s decision in the 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education … Continue reading →
Robert B. Reich, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America (Alfred A. Knopf 2025) Over the past half century, Robert Reich has been a towering intellect on the left side of the American political spectrum, eloquently and … Continue reading →
Tom Harper, Nick Dykes, Magdalena Peszko, Secret Maps: Maps You Were Never Meant to See, from the Middle Ages to Today (Univ. Chicago Press, 2025) Any cartographer will tell you that even the most conventional maps are likely to contain … Continue reading →
Richard Bell, The American Revolution and the Fate of The World (Riverhead Books, 2025) The 4th of July in the fast-approaching new year 2026 has been billed as America’s 250th birthday. That day will mark the 250th anniversary … Continue reading →