Niall Ferguson’s Empire is a revisionist account of the British Empire that takes seriously a question most historians have been reluctant to ask directly: on balance, was the British Empire a force for good or ill in the world? Ferguson’s answer — cautious, conditional, and certain to irritate — is that the Empire spread institutions…
The Looming Tower is an account of how the United States failed to prevent the September 11 attacks — not because intelligence was absent, but because the institutions responsible for acting on it were competing rather than cooperating. Lawrence Wright reconstructs the decade-long rise of al-Qaeda through meticulous reporting, following FBI counterterrorism agent John O’Neill,…
Salt is one of those substances so ordinary we no longer see it — the white crystals on every table, the invisible ingredient in almost every food. Mark Kurlansky’s project in this book is to make it visible again: to trace the way salt shaped human history from the earliest settlements through the modern industrial…
In 1893, Chicago hosted the World’s Columbian Exposition, a world’s fair that drew 27 million visitors and introduced the United States to, among other things, the Ferris wheel, Cracker Jack, and a vision of what a city could become. Erik Larson tells two stories in parallel: the construction of the fair, which was an engineering…
Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in South African prisons — 18 of them on Robben Island, a former leper colony off the coast of Cape Town where political prisoners broke rock in a limestone quarry and were denied sunglasses despite the glare that damaged their eyes. He became president of South Africa in 1994. Long…
Elie Wiesel was fifteen years old when the Hungarian gendarmerie rounded up the Jews of Sighet, his Transylvanian hometown, and loaded them onto cattle cars. He arrived at Birkenau in the spring of 1944. He survived Auschwitz and Buna. He arrived at Buchenwald after the death march from Buna in January 1945. He was liberated…
Mary Karr grew up in a small Texas oil town called Leechfield in the 1960s, in a family that was chaotic, sometimes violent, and held together by bonds that didn’t quite resemble anything a social worker would recognize. Her father was a roughneck who drank and told stories; her mother was brilliant, volatile, and periodically…
Patti Smith published Just Kids in January 2010, fulfilling a promise she had made at a deathbed sixteen years earlier. As Robert Mapplethorpe lay dying of AIDS in 1989, she promised him she would tell their story. What she produced is a memoir about two young artists arriving in New York City with almost nothing,…
Hope Jahren has spent her career studying plants — their chemistry, their growth, their extraordinary persistence in environments that should make survival impossible. Lab Girl is her memoir, but it is more accurately a book about two things running in parallel: the scientific life she has built and the biology she studies. The chapters about…
In the South Pacific, 1,000 feet below the ocean surface, a United States Navy investigation team discovers a spaceship. It is approximately three hundred years old. It is of American manufacture. And it contains, inside its enormous hull, a perfectly smooth golden sphere that none of them can explain. Dr. Norman Johnson, a psychologist who…
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