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Fascist Italy believed sex education ‘sapped the virility’ of the nation. Postwar Sweden encouraged it to limit the size of families.
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The U.S. government is the most open in the history of the world—but it still keeps far too many things secret.
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Everyone should know the name of Genet Girma, who wore a placard on her wedding reading: ‘I am not circumcised, learn from me.’
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At the Oxfordshire house owned by British aesthete and composer Lord Berners, Salvador Dalí and Wallis Simpson—were amused by the freakish and the kitsch.
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The past half century has seen the creation of the modern welfare state, Medicare and Medicaid. It’s not enough for Joseph Stiglitz.
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Ranchers and farmers saw the L.A. aqueduct as tantamount to theft. Yet someone had to give up water so that Angelenos might drink.
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Jordan Johnson surely would have been expelled had he not been a football hero in a football-crazed town.
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April is Poetry Month—and a good time to celebrate one of our finest exponents of strict form, elegant diction and clear thought.
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After Alderson became Mets GM, the owners started slashing payroll. They had lost more to Bernie Madoff than anyone knew.
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‘Apollo 13’ grew out of conversations with the mission’s commander. Chats with hip-hop stars led Brian Grazer to produce ‘Empire.’
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There was no more improbable duo than Odierno, the hulking general with a shaved head, and his petite English adviser.
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One patient nearly died after being prescribed 38½ tablets of an antibiotic. Neither doctor nor pharmacist detected the computer error.
Being beautiful was a mixed blessing for the actress: She got parts she didn’t deserve and men who didn’t deserve her.
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Dancing on Jimmy Fallon isn’t the source of the first lady’s popularity. It’s her upbringing in a one-bedroom apartment in Chicago.
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Google spends twice as much on recruiting than the average company, even though it gets two million applicants a year.
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It’s Opening Day—and the most significant figure in modern baseball history is still being kept out of the Hall of Fame.
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Toward the end of Washington’s first term, Jefferson told him Hamilton was a dangerous man whose policies corrupted the government.
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Presenting himself as Tobi the German, the author hears praise of Nazis in the West Bank and talk of Jews’ ‘racist’ DNA in Tel Aviv.
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If we can replicate the gene’s targeted killing of malign cells, there is the potential to prevent cancer and find new therapies.
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The Bronx, now synonymous with poverty and crime, has also produced the likes of Al Pacino, Colin Powell and Daniel Libeskind.
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A study of how the Federalist Society helped to revive and spread the originalist view of the Constitution.
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One in four American women takes psychiatric medication. Are we ill, or are we treating emotions like a disease?
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‘Between a Communist and a traitor there can be no relations of any kind,’ Carrillo told his father, a Socialist party member, in 1939.
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Imagine a future in which a competitor assassinates you via a robotic spider. That’s one way to see new technology’s potential.
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Historians played down the Nazi genocide and exalted ‘German’ resistance to Hitler—it was part of a national survival strategy.
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A normal diet provides most of the nutrients the body requires. We don’t need health supplements yet knock them back with gusto.
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No Kum Sok pretended to love the Great Leader and got into flight school. Then he flew his MiG to South Korea and defected.
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A mature democracy needs to carefully balance individual privacy, national security and business efficiency.
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The Energizer battery was a close descendant of a rechargeable lead-acid one invented in 1859. The science had barely changed.
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By the time they start kindergarten, children from professional families hear 19 million more words than working-class kids.
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Germany, rather than using its power to impose a political vision on the rest of Europe, has been content to free ride on its allies.
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Once, psychiatrists relied on Freud. Now, they rely on pharmaceuticals. It’s always easier to see the follies of the past than our own.
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A philosophy professor’s belief in colorblind law led him to oppose the university’s use of affirmative action in admissions decisions.
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Taken for slave labor from the lines that led to the ovens at Auschwitz, he travels through the infernal archipelago of the work camps.
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Nucor, one of the world’s most profitable steel companies, hasn’t laid off an employee in 42 years in the business. What’s its secret?
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Like T.H. White before him, Ishiguro sees the central theme of the Arthurian myths as the search for an antidote for war.
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After the French Revolution, European rulers adopted brutal policies that often triggered the uprisings they were intended to prevent.
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For years, Pillsbury’s view fit the Washington consensus: China, with the help of the U.S., would become a peaceful power. No longer.
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So intoxicated in 1968 by the counterculture’s energies, Dickstein suggests adding ‘The Story of O’ to Columbia’s core curriculum.
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Risky loans made by Fannie and Freddie were the biggest factor that led to the financial crisis—and the direct result of federal policy.
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The brain is organized as modules and circuits for specialized actions. The scientist who figured that out reflects on his discovery.
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Even the smartphone-toting, text-messaging generation prefers to study using real books. It makes things easier to remember.
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If you’re reading this book (or this review), the correct answer to that most awkward of questions—‘Are we rich?’—is ‘yes.’
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Fearful of losing Southern votes, JFK was cool to the civil-rights movement until Bull Connor’s hoses and dogs forced him to act.
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A colorful range of everyday entrepreneurs disprove the notion that India is simply a ‘socialist country in which the state is the key.’
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To understand Putin’s power, it is essential to consider the millions of Russians who have molded him ‘into a sort of sacred king.’
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Since the Cold War, championship of international law—not opposition to it—is the novel departure.
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Barbra Streisand tells Axelrod that the president needs to talk to people in simpler terms: ‘I hate to say it, but people are stupid.’
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A billionaire argues that the rich should pay more in taxes, but their wealth may do more for the country than government spending.
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In 1905, a magazine called Horseless Age warned that the fuel supply was limited and ‘farseeing men’ should look for alternatives.
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How did Ronald Reagan, a conciliatory and often passive person, achieve such heights? One insider says the answer was Nancy.
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Corporations are paying record fines for breaking ever more complex laws. Critics, though, want to see executives in the dock.
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For years, Bill Browder was a winner in Russia’s markets. Then he was expelled from the country and his lawyer was murdered.
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In 1909, a best-seller argued that financial interdependence made war self-defeating. A century of global conflict followed.
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In 1992, Nazila Fathi was working as a fixer for Western journalists when she was approached about keeping an eye on ‘suspicious’ reporters.
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The elderly Tolstoy fell under the sway of an unscrupulous acolyte intent on fully controlling the man he claimed to be serving.
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Part of being a writer is the constant effort to find talented confederates within an unstable, commercially driven industry.
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Many of King Charles I’s killers were captured by former allies who needed to prove their own conveniently rediscovered royalism.
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For Andrew Jackson and many other early Americans, debt was not just a fiscal danger, but a path to corruption and national decline.
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Pension and benefit obligations weigh down our cities. Trash disposal in Chicago costs $231 per ton, versus $74 in non-union Dallas.
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Frank Scotton’s curiosity about all things Vietnamese got him into risky situations—including shootouts with local Viet Cong.
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In the 1920s, electrification spurred a faith in rising productivity, fooling regulators. The same thing happened with the Web.
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In the same way that Luther challenged the Catholic Church, smartphones are poised to upend the medical profession.
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Chemists all over the planet send their recipes to Chinese factories that make the drugs and ship them by airfreight to avoid detection.
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Will Durant’s books made clear that history was our story: Caesar’s heart thrilled to ambitions and adventures that move us today.
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Mud was ubiquitous on London’s streets during Victoria’s reign, and the battle against pollution was never-ending.
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As a motorcycle-loving young doctor, Oliver Sacks descended into loneliness and drug addiction. The wild energies were tamed by swimming and book-writing.
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Orson Welles struggled to make a film about a filmmaker who is struggling to make a film.
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Wordsworth and Coleridge have nothing on the native son of the Lake District who tends sheep and also writes like a dream.
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With the Northern public eager to ‘bring the boys home,’ the federal forces occupying the South were reduced from 200,000 in 1865 to a mere 28,000 at the end of 1866.
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Who needs a state, once we have perfectly sorted social networks?
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Is it wrong to be captivated by a great thinker’s personality, rather than the drier stuff of résumés?
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In 1947 Erwin Schrödinger boasted of a big new result that would beat his sometime collaborator Albert Einstein. They were both wrong.
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A novel unorthodox in structure but extremely traditional in its admiration for the ‘greatest generation.’
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The author of ‘Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life’ recommends biographies of notable first ladies.
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The grammar in too many children’s books is surprisingly careless.
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By 1934, with all of the Nazis’ enemies defeated or intimidated, concentration had lost its original purpose. But Himmler was ready with a new rationale: The camps could serve as a tool to improve the German race.
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These days a president’s true beliefs and convictions are obscured by anodyne, ecumenical rhetoric.
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For Mohammed Ali Jinnah. partition was a triumph. For his longtime rival, Gandhi, it was a ‘spiritual tragedy.’
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The narrator admires the way that rock musicians live on the edge; it’s the way he wants to live too.
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‘The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them,’ the painter said.
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Musicians, black or white, needed to be versatile. Getting a gig often trumped personal attitudes.
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Holding a great gray owl is ‘similar to holding a big down pillow with a fresh sweet potato in the middle.’
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About 70% of the 120,000 Japanese-Americans held were citizens. Some 2,300 would fight for their country.
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The author of “Ministers at War: Winston Churchill and His War Cabinet” recommends books about the men who helped win World War II.
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Readers ‘are just going to have to get used to the frank language of bodily functions,’ Kramer warns.
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Meghan Cox Gurdon reviews Joohee Yoon’s “Beastly Verse”; Kenneth Kraegel’s “The Song of Delphine”; Eve Bunting’s “Yard Sale” and Bimba Landmann’s “Just for Today.”
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Hank Paulson uses careful language that will not bother the Chinese censors unduly when they prepare the mainland edition of this book.
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As the 1960s gave way to the ’70s, American radicals turned into violent revolutionaries.
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The best travel writing offers unexpected twists and rewarding epiphanies, not just a march down a checklist of peak experiences.
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When their bombers reached Tokyo, Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle and his men found that the Japanese were a lot weaker than they appeared.
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What Hannibal could not overcome was the Roman willingness to sustain mass casualties and raise new legions.
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A little over a month after Jesse Pomeroy was released from reformatory, 10-year-old Katie Curran disappeared.
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The Ogallala Aquifer, which irrigates 40% of the grain for America’s grain-fed beef, may run dry within decades.
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Seeds are one of the vegetal kingdom’s most wondrous inventions. A 2,000-year-old date found in the ruins of Masada in Israel sprouted into a 10-foot-tall palm tree.
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As Japanese invaders swept across China in 1938, a wealthy scholar and landowner secretly buried a cache of precious porcelain.
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Parents unwittingly pass hatred to their children, thereby ‘reproducing the enemy who has humiliated them over and over.’
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Poetic forms can describe particular things—a hat, a moment in time—or epic stories like Noah’s Flood.
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The author of “Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth” recommends books about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
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A former police officer solves mysteries by ‘knitting backwards’ and unraveling the strands of a crime.
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In the 1840s, amassing plants, birds and insects was both a scientific and
a commercial adventure.
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After the war, only children rode bikes, so bikes became a symbol of childhood.
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Among White House staff’s daunting tasks: increasing LBJ’s water pressure, dusting Nancy Reagan’s Limoges boxes, searching for Caroline Kennedy’s lost hamsters.
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Darwin’s radical ideas were accepted surprisingly quickly by an English public already steeped in science.
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In 2065, will we be mining asteroids and the moon? Not if we are still using rocket technology from 1965.
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‘No one will be happy if tormented by the thought of someone else who is happier,’ Seneca said.
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One prominent cure kept patients in bed for months, force-fed a high-calorie diet and denied any occupation.
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The author was wearing lizard-skin boots when Schwarzenegger, dressed in a powder blue cowboy suit, hit on her.
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Did a life-changing love affair with a ‘Dark Lady’ help Shakespeare create Juliet, Portia and Viola?
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A 2,600-year-old sage remains the most important source of ideas about government in East Asia.
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Every generation of scholars brings its own priorities and politics to the puzzle of the Third Reich. The best historians permit readers to make their own moral judgments.
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The endless intrigues of the former king and his new wife, Wallis Simpson, tormented George VI. But was it treason?
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In the 1950s, Los Angeles had fewer museums, galleries and collectors, but it also lacked any of the ‘existential angst that was de rigueur among New York intellectuals.’
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Writers fawn over athletes far more than they ought to. Stars like Ted Williams rarely returned the favor.
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Early color films gave viewers headaches. It took decades to develop a process that didn’t simply look odd.
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Proceeds from the city’s brothels, gambling parlors and jazz dens helped to fund civil-rights pioneers.
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Jewish peddlers in the New World sold everything from eyeglasses and soup ladles to buttons and bathtubs.
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Children who are the victims of their parents’ misplaced faith.
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The Mormon Tabernacle Choir has performed at Mount Rushmore and in five presidential inaugurations. Jimmy Stewart, Snoopy and Donald Duck have all wielded the conductor’s baton.
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Restaurant Nora was the noshing spot for D.C.’s elite. It served ‘hippie food,’ but never made a big deal of it.
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A memoir by a darkly funny New Yorker cartoonist whose principal struggle in childhood was being a child.
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The murderous devotees of the goddess Kali known as Thugs have inspired many novels set in the Raj.
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A left-handed penmanship competition in 1866 drew hundreds of veterans who had lost their right arms.
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Saul Bellow loved to juxtapose the highbrow and the lowbrow. But the low
was his natural register.
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A gnomic prophecy suggests that Ikenna will die at his brothers’ hands. This vision is the family’s undoing.
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Charming introductions to math, language and the great wide world: Pedagogy matched with beauty.
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The author of ‘The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me’ recommends books about memorable aristocrats.
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A physicist realizes that the universe is a quantum computer and discovers that some of it is sentient.
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Billy Martin got drunk, insulted the Yankees’ owner, kicked dirt at umpires, flaunted his mistress at the ballpark, failed to pay his taxes and got into dugout and barroom brawls.
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Nicolas Nabokov recognized that communism’s attraction for intellectuals and artists grew out of discontent with their own culture.
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Within two short years of the telescope’s invention, Galileo had forever altered our place in the cosmos.
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T.S. Eliot was a ‘shy, sometimes naïve and vulnerable’ young man whose poetry—particularly ‘The Waste Land’—was shaped by the suffering of his early adult years.
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“I Refuse”—the follow-up to the best-selling “Out Stealing Horses”—takes us back into his world of obstinate man-boy heroes who refuse to accept the identities that society imposes on them.
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Since Columbus’s time, roughly 4,000 to 5,000 hurricanes have roared through the Caribbean.
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At issue was Belgian pride, Cold War politics and the hubris of the United Nations—and vast mineral wealth.
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Can we dissociate Billie Holiday the performer from the turbulence that we know of her life?
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Does human rationality separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom? Or is it our love of getting high?
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When two Yosemite hardmen stumble across a Russian climber, barely alive, they debate whether or not they have to save him.
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The author of, most recently, “Mr. Mac and Me” recommends novels about artists.
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Vietnam ‘was the first war where the losers would write the history instead of the victors.’
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A little girl at an agricultural fair tries to locate the mischievous and amiable companion that keeps bounding ahead of her.
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Though he violently hated abolitionists, Booth had a reverence for John Brown, who he judged as ‘inspired.’
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Humans who carry a Y chromosome are more likely to break the law, more likely to die in accidents, more likely to commit acts of violence. Who needs them?
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Drawing a line from Sherman’s scorched-earth March to the Sea to World War II air raids on Germany.
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Make a bad joke at a party and risk an awkward silence. Make it on Twitter and ruin your reputation forever.
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The supposed ‘tolerance’ of Muslim Spain was in fact shrewd governance of a turbulent populace.
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Maurice Druon’s “Accursed Kings” series traces the fortunes of the doomed Capet dynasty.
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Antoni van Leeuwenhoek and Johannes Vermeer were neighbors in Delft. Still, no one knows if they ever met.
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Some Roosevelts saw FDR as an upstart. ‘When I think of Frank and Eleanor in the White House,’ Alice said. ‘I could grind my teeth to powder and blow them out my nose.’
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Richard John Neuhaus felt the causes that drew him to the left were overwhelmed by an agenda of cultural revolution.
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The author of “The Third Reich in History and Memory” recommends books on the Third Reich remembered.
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Penelope discovers a gap in her schedule so big that she falls into it and enters the Realm of Possibility.
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For recovery to begin in Pakistan, war must first come to an end.
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Neanderthals had bigger brains, sharper vision and were better adapted to the environment than homo sapiens. How did we replace them as Eurasia’s apex predator?
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Blacks in America have been sold out by the very liberals who ardently claim to wish them the most good.
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It is possible to have a good life—even a great one—without attending the college of your choice. Who knew?
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Thomas Cromwell engineered Henry VIII’s divorce—and, in turn, Anne Boleyn’s execution.
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After scandals in France, Curie was embraced by American women as an intellectual icon.
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A memoir in which the author’s cosmopolitan adventures fade in the reader’s mind like so many Polaroids left in the sun.
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