Caribbean
The Birth of American Finance
The Founders and Finance: How Hamilton, Gallatin, and Other Immigrants Forged a New Economy By Thomas K. McCraw (Harvard University Press, 485 pp., $35) READ MORE >>
Weatherblogging: Tropical Storm Isaac Threatens To Disrupt RNC
Four years ago, Hurricane Gustav’s landfall along the Louisiana coast delayed the start of the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis. Four years later, Republicans decided to convene the RNC in Florida during the heart of hurricane season. So naturally, there's a tropical cyclone heading in the general direction of the RNC. READ MORE >>
The Known Unknowns
The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century HistoryBy Emma Rothschild (Princeton University Press, 483 pp., $35) READ MORE >>
There is a passage in Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby in which David Huxley (Cary Grant) and Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) are lost at night in the forest of Connecticut searching for a leopard called Baby and a fox terrier named George. If you don’t know the picture, don’t bother to ask, “Why a leopard?” Your every instinct is correct—there are (and should be) no leopards in Connecticut. READ MORE >>
If X, Then Why?
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention By Manning Marable (Viking Press, 594 pp., $30) I. READ MORE >>
Where Do We Come From?
Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750-1790 By Jonathan I. Israel (Oxford University Press, 1,066 pp., $45) I. READ MORE >>
The Blooming Foreigner
“Something Urgent I Have to Say to You”: The Life and Works of William Carlos WilliamsBy Herbert Leibowitz (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 496 pp., $40) READ MORE >>
