Books

Not too long ago, I predicted that a solid recent history of the 2008 election (Richard Wolffe's "Renegade") was likely to be the final word until President Obama wrote his own version of those storied events. A few months later, it appears that the conveyor belt is just getting started and that we will be reading about 2008 for a while to come. My bad!

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita wants you to buy his book. He wants royalties and he wants fame. He wants the book to promote his consulting business. The text may well be full of self-promotional tall tales and calumny -- unless the author calculated that the costs of dishonesty (potential intellectual disrepute) outweighed the benefits (more fame, royalties and consulting). When he walks into bookstores, he probably moves his book from the back shelves to the front. If he knew I… more

I have a confession: I love my huge television. A couple of years ago, thanks to a very large Amazon.com gift certificate and a very poor grasp of measurements, I adopted a 50-inch plasma. It utterly dominated my tiny living room until I finally moved, yet even then I loved it. The vivid colors and enormous crystal-clear picture were a worthy substitute for the cinema. Video games were even better -- and "Blade Runner" on Blu-ray was sublime. It ended up being a very costly purchase,… more

Nicholas Thompson says he was often taken aback by what he learned about his grandfather.

After all, Mr. Thompson is Nitze's grandson, and he had access to all of his grandfather's personal papers and letters, as well as to his family, his closest friends, even to his opponents, the old Soviet warriors who sat opposite him at the negotiating table.

W. Ralph Eubanks's family memoir tells a double story, one about the past and the other about the author's efforts to uncover it. ...

STEVE COLL: I suggest The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS, by Helen Epstein. My premise is that the new president is a serious reader, is passionate about the big issues of his presidency, and hungers for reliable explication and detail, yet has limited time and therefore needs a single volume that is both easy to read and transformational in its effects. This at least was my experience as an accidental reader of The Invisible Cure.

How did we manage to have it all in the years after the Second World War--car, house, health care, affordable education, Social Security, rising wages, leisure--and where did it go? If anyone knows, please tell California. Things seemed to be going so well here a half century ago: unemployment rates just above 3 percent, swimming pools in every backyard, baseball teams poached from Brooklyn, matchless public schools and universities, and swift new highways. Good jobs were available to nearly anyone who came, and nearly everyone did.

It… more

In 1914, in defiance of his middle-class landowning family, a young white man named James Morgan Richardson married a light-skinned black woman named Edna Howell. Over more than twenty years of marriage, they formed a strong family and built a house at the end of a winding sandy road in South Alabama, a place where their safety from the hostile world around them was assured, and where they developed a unique racial and cultural identity. Jim and Edna Richardson were… more

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Please join the New America Foundation for a conversation with Gordon Silverstein on his book Law's Allure: How Law Shapes, Constrains, Saves, and Kills Politics.