History
June 20, 2011
The Smallest Victims
Throughout World War II and after it, Europeans were completely obsessed with the fate of children. Everything—the health of society, the prospects fo
June 15, 2011
The First Time
This book is an exquisite history of the excruciatingly difficult, perhaps pointless, often disastrous British invasion and occupation of Mesopotamia
June 07, 2011
Rough Trade
In his new book, Douglas A. Irwin tells the fascinating story of how Congress stubbornly passed Smoot-Hawley, a bill that, as opponents noted at the t
June 01, 2011
Journeymen
The bizarre story of a group of British intellectuals’ 1954 trip to China forms the centrepiece of Patrick Wright’s eccentric, occasionally infuriatin
May 15, 2011
Nostalgia at Bat
Today the thrill which African-Americans once received from—and gave back to—the game of baseball at every level is all but gone. They make up less th
May 10, 2011
The Horror, Footnoted
Even while the fighting was ongoing in Sierra Leone, another battle was breaking out elsewhere: the war over the meaning of the war. Krijn Peters’s bo
May 04, 2011
The Morning After
This landscape of Central Europe’s economic transition and disruption has been so well traveled and picked over (particularly during the twentieth ann
April 25, 2011
The First Celebrity
An argument could be made that the first modern master of exposure-driven fame was Adah Isaacs Menken, who reigned as “America’s Original Superstar” (
April 21, 2011
The Visitor
Max Weber in America? The idea seems almost preposterous. We often think of Weber as the quintessential European thinker: abstract, worldly, brooding,
April 20, 2011
The Spanish Model
“A Unique History,” this book’s subtitle, describes the subject more than the ambitions of this slim volume. Stanley Payne offers a series of thoughtf
