Rome
The Rumors of the Euro’s Demise Are Greatly Exaggerated
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 >>
Early Enlightenment
The Abacus and the Cross: The Story of the Pope Who Brought the Light of Science to the Dark Ages By Nancy Marie Brown (Basic Books, 310 pp., $27.95) READ MORE >>
Humanism As Revolution
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern By Stephen Greenblatt (W.W. Norton, 356 pp., $26.95) READ MORE >>
Why Won’t Obama List Israelis Among the Victims of Terrorism?
I wish it would be historically possible—that is, historically honest—for Israel to be omitted from the long list of target countries that have been the victims of terrorism. Alas, it is not. But President Obama has a habit of making such lists, and he always fails to include Israel (or anyplace within its borders) as a target of this distinctive and most vicious form of warfare. READ MORE >>
What Remains
Holy Bones, Holy Dust: How Relics Shaped the History of Medieval Europe By Charles Freeman (Yale University Press, 306 pp., $35) Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe By Caroline Walker Bynum (Zone Books, 408 pp., $32.95) READ MORE >>
The Narniad
C.S. Lewis’s Lost Aeneid: Arms and the Exile Edited by A.T. Reyes (Yale University Press, 208 pp., $27.50) READ MORE >>
Strong Opinions
Ostia Antica
Down the Decumanus Maximus till the rutted cobbles give way, just as so many lives have gone before this, past the stubs of the insulae, while each Airbus at Fiumicino heaves itself aloft over the beach umbrellas in row on row where the Tyrrhenian Sea laps, soft; and I, too, have felt Rome drop astern of that imperative bound west, have settled back and been home by afternoon. But this time I smell the dust READ MORE >>
The Freedom to Bumble
The Free World By David Bezmozgis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 356 pp., $26) READ MORE >>
