History
The Invention of Our Music
Dateline Hitler
The Power Lover
<i>La Même Chose</i>
The Secret Agent
The Beltway Healing
IN THE EARLY HOURS of March 10, 1824, Ann Mattingly, the sister of the mayor of Washington, D.C., lay on her sick bed, consumed with cancer. Her back was ulcerated. She had an incessant cough that sometimes gave way to fits so violent that they were “followed by puking large quantities of corrupted blood.” The smell her body gave off was so horrible that her family members found it “extremely unpleasant and offensive to the smell to pass by her door.” READ MORE >>
Reviving Them
ON OCTOBER 13, 1991, in a suburb of Copenhagen, a dignified elderly couple followed a simple to-do list: 6 p.m., weak tea and toast; 7 p.m., anti-emetic, normal dose; 7.30 p.m., sleeping tablets. Two days later their bodies were discovered by the police. They were found in bed, holding hands. A note on the door read, “Please do not try to revive us.” READ MORE >>
The Smallest Victims
NO SOONER HAD I finished this fascinating book than I remembered the shattering scene in Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française when the teenage orphans whom a fatherly priest has been shepherding to the safety of a secluded chateau suddenly turn on him like a pack of wolves and stone him to death. It is an unforgettable moment that seems to sum up all the madness of France’s panic in the summer of 1940. But in its almost Jacobin ghoulishness, the event is also mysteriously implausible. READ MORE >>
The First Time
Rough Trade
IF YOU think Congress is worse than ever, you weren’t around in 1930. It was then Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff—a piece of protectionist folly that raised the levies on nearly nine hundred categories of imports. Britain, Canada, and various nations in Europe retaliated—that is, they erected barriers to American goods and foreign goods in general. World trade collapsed, and the ongoing economic slump turned into the Great Depression. READ MORE >>
