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Assets are hidden and taxes dodged in an offshore world that creates ‘zones of lawlessness’ and acts as a ‘parasitic twin’ on nation-states. Aifric Campbell reviews ‘Capital Without Borders’ by Brooke Harrington.
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In 1974, Jeremy Thorpe nearly became the No. 2 figure in the government. By 1979, he had lost his parliamentary seat, reputation and honor. Richard Aldous reviews “A Very English Scandal” by John Preston.
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Contra conventional wisdom, occupations can change political cultures. But it may be that it can’t be done without deeply coercive measures. Nicholas M. Gallagher reviews “The Good Occupation” by Susan L. Carruthers.
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Faith in self and faith in God became so intermixed in Norman Vincent Peale’s philosophy as to be almost the same thing. Barton Swaim reviews “Surge of Piety” by Christopher Lane
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Robert Harris’s ‘Conclave’ tells the story of the most secretive election in the world. And all 118 electors are listening, or believe they are listening, to the voice of God.
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One company banned bobs, so female employees would arrive early to ‘array’ themselves for the day—by pulling wigs out of their lockers. Nancy Weiss Malkiel reviews “Big Bosses: A Working Girl’s Memoir of Jazz Age America” by Althea McDowell Altemus.
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They didn’t see 9/11 coming.They also missed the 2008 crash, the Arab Spring, Brexit and the victory of Donald Trump. Daniel Johnson reviews “Public Intellectuals in the Global Arena” edited by Michael C. Desch.
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As ‘calamitous’ as civil war would be, Adams wrote in 1820, ‘so glorious would be its final issue, that . . . I dare not say that it is not to be desired.’ Robert K. Landers reviews ‘John Quincy Adams and the Politics
of Slavery.’
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After World War I ended, Maj. Harry D. Parkin was haunted by the deaths of so many under his command. And he blamed a U.S. general. Walter R. Borneman reviews “Betrayal at Little Gibraltar” by William Walker.
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The largest moon of Saturn has lakes, clouds, an atmosphere and just enough gravity. Settlers could don wings and fly around in the heavy air. Homer Hickam reviews “Beyond Earth” by Charles Wohlforth and Amanda R. Hendrix.
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A burglar has to break and enter. An executive sitting in Manhattan can pull off a tax fiddle with a keystroke and never know his victim. Philip Delves Broughton reviews “Why They Do It” by Eugene Soltes.
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D.G. Hart is smart to stuff his book, ‘Damning Words: The Life and Religious Times of H.L. Mencken’ with generous quotes from his hero. Read them and you’ll see why even an orthodox believer can’t stay mad at Mencken for long.
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At the start of the 20th century, average life expectancy globally was just 31 years. Today it is 71. Will this progress continue? Matthew Rees reviews two books about the future of progress and innovation.
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Pro-slavery policy makers were obsessed with Cuba, where slavery was firmly established. Diplomats tried for years to purchase the island. Fergus M. Bordewich reviews “This Vast Southern Empire” by Matthew Karp.
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The acclaimed author was gassed at Auschwitz at 39 years old. She also wrote novels that were rife with anti-Semitic slurs and stereotypes. Diane Cole reviews “The Némirovsky Question” by Susan Rubin Suleiman.
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Big Pharma, the author argues, has inflated the number of Americans with chronic pain to 100 million when 25 million would be more realistic. Sally Satel reviews “Drug Dealer, MD” by Anna Lembke.
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Williamina Fleming, who had originally been hired by the head of the Harvard Observatory as a maid, devised a classification system of 10,000 stars. Laura J. Snyder reviews “The Glass Universe” by Dava Sobel.
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‘The Undoing Project,’ focuses on the lifelong collaboration of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two Israeli-American psychologists who are our age’s apostles of doubt about human reason. William Easterly reviews.
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Ellen Wilkinson didn’t fit the stereotype of the austere feminist. She had passionate affairs, owned her own car and cherished a fur coat. Martin Rubin reviews “Red Ellen” by Laura Beers.
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When Capone faced difficulties, he whined about a ‘rigged’ system. Half the country thought he was a champion of the common man. Bryan Burrough reviews “Capone: His Life, Legacy, and Legend” by Deirdre Bair.
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A Czech legionnaire who had fought the Bolsheviks in Siberia remembered slicing ‘their necks as if they were baby geese.’ Brendan Simms reviews “The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End” by Robert Gerwarth.
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America’s civil religion—the belief in our nation’s special purpose and blessing from God—has led to folly after folly abroad. D.G. Hart reviews “The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy” by Walter A. McDougall.
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What if those Eisenhower boom times were a one-off phenomenon? What if we should get used to modest long-term growth? Paul Kennedy reviews “An Extraordinary Time” by Marc Levinson.
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Democracy’s great success in securing liberty invariably threatens to erode the sense of the common good upon which it depends. Darrin McMahon reviews “Toward Democracy” by James T. Kloppenberg.
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For a man so closely associated with rural England, Hardy spent considerable time enjoying the delights of the Victorian metropolis. D.J. Taylor reviews “Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner” by Mark Ford.
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Stewart was brought up like the man-child in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Kim.’ His father was a D-Day veteran whose greatest insult was ‘boring.’ Andrew Lownie reviews “The Marches: A Borderland Journey Between England and Scotland” by Rory Stewart.
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Rapid change creates discomfort and provokes backlash—witness Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. What can we do to cope? Laura Vanderkam reviews “Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations” by Thomas L. Friedman.
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‘What is this nonsense about admitting women to Princeton? A good old-fashioned whore-house would be considerably more efficient.’ Leonore Tiefer reviews “Keep the Damned Women Out” by Nancy Weiss Malkiel.
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We are living in the Anthropocene: an era when human beings have changed the planet in ways that will be obvious in the geological record. Matt Ridley reviews “The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth’s Newest Age” by David Biello.
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Joan Kroc gave $225 million to National Public Radio at her death even though she hadn’t been a devoted listener or regular donor. Marc Levinson reviews “Ray & Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald’s Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away” by Lisa Napoli.
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Thanks to sophisticated data about their potential customers, online sellers engage in ‘almost perfect’ behavioral price discrimination. Burton G. Malkiel reviews “Virtual Competition” by Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice E. Stucke.
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While the idea of a caliphate is used and twisted by Islamists for sinister and brutal ends, the concept is not in itself threatening or dangerous. Ebrahim Moosa reviews “Caliphate: The History of an Idea” by Hugh Kennedy.
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What brought about the Great Enrichment? And why did it start in England? It had a culture that embraced change and scientific inquiry. Richard Vedder reviews “A Culture of Growth” by Joel Mokyr.
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The battle over microaggressions going on at our universities is both a symptom and a cause of malaise and strife in society at large. Daniel Shuchman reviews “What’s Happened to the University?” by Frank Furedi.
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One of the most eminent historians of the Nazi war of extermination shares his struggles to understand how it determined his own life. Michael S. Roth reviews “When Memory Comes” and “Where Memory Leads.”
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Pete Carroll gave his team a book about Stoicism last year. Can we expect more virtuous, resilient and self-aware Seahawks on the gridiron? James Romm reviews “The Daily Stoic” by Ryan Holiday.
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Venezuela imports two-thirds of its sugar. The shortage of toilet paper is blithely reported as a sign that people are eating more. Roger Lowenstein reviews "Crude Nation: How Oil Riches Ruined Venezuela” by Raúl Gallegos.
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When Sherman’s army marched across Georgia to Savannah, Meigs was waiting at the coast with a complete refit for all the troops. Allen Guelzo reviews “The Quartermaster: Montgomery C. Meigs, Lincoln’s General, Master Builder of the Union Army” by Robert O’Harrow Jr.
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In 2012, veteran counterterrorist officials concluded that the White House was suppressing intelligence on Islamic extremist threats to justify pulling out of the Middle East. Mark Moyar reviews “Twilight Warriors” by James Kitfield.
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It was said of Dylan that he didn’t need a Nobel, that he is yet another old white guy, that he is arrogant, that he composes songs not poems. David Lehman reviews “The Lyrics: 1961-2012” by Bob Dylan.
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The Shockoe Bottom neighborhood was once the epicenter of the American slave trade. So why are its spirits ‘overwhelmingly white’?
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Is Cody Wilson peddling ‘open source terrorism’ by publishing designs for a
3D-printed gun? Or is he a free-speech hero? Ronald Bailey reviews “Come and Take It: The Gun Printer’s Guide to Thinking Free” by Cody Wilson.
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Yan Lianke’s burlesque of a nation driven insane by money is equally a satire of some of the excesses of the Chinese Revolution.
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You may think you’re in the information business, but you’re actually in the far more lucrative business of connecting people. Joshua Gans “The Content Trap” by Bharat Anand.
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So what if Burt Bacharach was a narcissist? What was that failing next to his bright blue eyes, salt-and-pepper hair and sexy voice? Joanne Kaufman reviews “They’re Playing Our Song” by Carole Bayer Sager.
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Early Zionists had an arch distrust of traditions and hierarchy. Their emphasis on self-reliance shaped an ethos that remains alive and well. Neil Rogachevsky reviews “Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn” by Daniel Gordis.
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In ‘The Attention Merchants,’ Tim Wu argues that we are victims of a slow-motion crime, a hijacking of our inner lives by commercial interests that began in 1833.
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Amnesty or a wall are radical policies to deal with the country’s millions of illegal immigrants. In ‘We Wanted Workers,’ economist George J. Borjas offers a saner solution: Do nothing.
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Roderick John Macrae murders a constable—and the man’s son and daughter. He tells his grisly tale in the shadow of the hangman’s noose. Tom Nolan reviews “His Bloody Project,” a novel by Graeme Macrae Burnet.
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Is our culture of wealth, led by the likes of Gates and Buffett, replacing a society of citizens with a new social order of patrons and supplicants?
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Stalin starved the Ukranian people. Hitler occupied them. Now Kremlin propagandists call Ukraine, independent since 1991, a fake nation. Sohrab Ahmari reviews “In Wartime: Stories From Ukraine” by Tim Judah.
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The highest default rate is not among borrowers with large debts but among those who left school owing less than $5,000.
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The hard work and enterprise of China’s people—not Communist Party policies—have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Howard W. French reviews “The Perfect Dictatorship” by Stein Ringen.
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People ‘hire’ companies to do a job. That’s why the names of some of the most successful ones—such as Google and Xerox—become verbs. Philip Delves Broughton reviews “Competing Against Luck” by Clayton M. Christensen et al.
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The Nobel for economics, first given in 1969, has been instrumental in recognizing and popularizing the work of laissez-faire economists. Edward Glaeser reviews “The Nobel Factor” by Avner Offer and Gabriel Söderberg.
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John Kaag doubts his profession—and then finds the answers to the profoundest questions in “American Philosophy: A Love Story.”
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In a former Pennsylvania steel town, a football team remains the single source of pride. It’s a microcosm for a whole region of America. David M. Shribman reviews “Playing Through the Whistle: Steel, Football, and an American Town” by S.L. Price.
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To ‘win’ Japan to our side in the Cold War, we offered the most generous occupation—aid, reduced reparations and guaranteed security. Richard Bernstein reviews “Powerplay: The Origins of the American Alliance System in Asia” by Victor D. Cha.
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Copper-riveted jeans, the first oil rig, running shoes, dry cleaning and the 23-story-high clipper ship—as American as apple pie.
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Young Americans today don’t have teachers or pastors to shape their belief. They think of religions as a solo quest for an authentic self.
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Putin was against hosting the Olympics until his minions, egged on by contract-driven oligarchs, organized a PR campaign for one “customer.” Karen Dawisha reviews “All the Kremlin’s Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin” by Mikhail Zygar.
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Although cognizant of the stones and bones, Robin Dunbar’s “Human Evolution” is concerned with something more consequential: how and why Homo sapiens became what we are.
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Did food companies deliberately set out to manipulate research on American health in their favor? Gary Taubes’s powerful new history, “The Case Against Sugar,” will convince you that they did.
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The comedienne began performing in an age where she couldn’t say the word “pregnant” on late night TV. Bari Weiss reviews “Last Girl Before Freeway” by Leslie Bennetts.
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In “France: A Modern History From the Revolution to the War on Terror,” Jonathan Fenby argues that for more than two centuries, the Fifth Republic has been stuck in the mud of an outdated self-confidence reinforced by political instability. Can it find a way forward?
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The Earth could easily not exist. And that should make us feel lucky, even in dark times. Gino Segrè reviews “A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos” by Geraint F. Lewis and Luke A. Barnes.
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The pillars of the Raj—righteous conquest, the rule of law, enlightened reform and modern development—are sized up and demolished in Jon Wilson’s revisionist history “The Chaos of Empire.”
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How did Provence, once nowheresville, come to capture the American imagination? Eric Felten reviews “A Taste for Provence” by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz.
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No British novelist of the past half-century so consistently defied the expectations that pundits had of him as Sillitoe. D.J. Taylor reviews the late writer’s “Moggerhanger.”
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The literary altercations of 2016 have highlighted the dilemma of publishers, illustrators and writers in a neo-Jacobin era of hair-trigger racial, sexual and ethnic sensitivities.
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Michael Chabon’s “Moonglow.” It’s fitting that the best novel of the year was a moving work of escapism.
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The author of “The Word Detective: Searching for the Meaning of It All at the Oxford English Dictionary” on leaving home.
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In “Everything You Want Me to Be” a precocious teenager is infatuated with her English teacher and is set to play Lady Macbeth in her school’s production. What could go wrong?
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Both countries saw the American Revolution as a way to distract Britain and keep her out of Europe. William Anthony Hay reviews “Brother at Arms: American Independence and the Men of France and Spain Who Saved it” by Larrie D. Ferreiro.
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The problem of the void goes back more than 2,000 years. In “Void: The Strange Physics of Nothing,” James Owen Weatherall gives a wide-ranging account of this remarkable story.
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It’s hard, looking at photographs of the ravaged city, to remember its teeming outdoor markets. Marlene Matar’s ‘The Aleppo Cookbook’ is a crucial means of safeguarding the city’s culinary heritage for generations to come.
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Picasso suggested that if the poet and artist could sell his talent, “we could spend our whole lives going to the pharmacy to buy some Cocteau pills.” Yet the inexhaustibly gifted Cocteau was also vain, drug-addicted and thwarted in love. James Campbell reviews “Jean Cocteau: A Life” by Claude Arnaud.
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Howard Schneider reviews “The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell: A Dyslexic Traitor, an Unbreakable Code, and the FBI’s Hunt for America’s Stolen Secrets” by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee.
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The Latin American novel from Bernal Díaz to Carlos Fuentes.
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Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, Isamu Noguchi and Peggy Guggenheim all sat for Abbott in the 1920s. Robert L. Pincus reviews “Paris Portraits 1925-1930” edited by Ron Kurtz and Hank O’Neal.
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In the Lotus Sutra, he reveals that there is not a threefold path to liberation, but one way. Chandrahas Choudhury reviews “The Lotus Sutra” by Donald S. Lopez Jr.
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America’s free press was born 40 years before the nation. The man who carried out the task was John Peter Zenger. His name is now forgotten—and deserves to be remembered.
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Meghan Cox Gurdon on books about Montreal, Manhattan, Fez and more.
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“Christmas Magic,” edited by the brilliant David G. Hartwell, is a story collection that promises not to warm your heart.
The author, most recently, of “‘The Man with the Poison Gun: A Cold War Spy Story” on Soviet espionage.
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The wise-ass peckerwood from the ’Bama sticks shook up country and foreshadowed rock ’n’ roll. “Hank” by Mark Ribowsky offers a feast of juicy anecdotes that should satisfy devotees and attract newcomers to the fold.
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America’s greatest novelist and its greatest critic fell out over a translation of Pushkin. Dominic Green reviews “The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship” by Alex Beam.
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If ever a year called for a double, it’s this one. Thankfully, publishers have our backs. Wayne Curtis reviews new books about the spritz, the joys of amaro and some hip, new gins.
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The early U.S. was more an empire than a nation, held together by the prospects of expansion. Steven Hahn’s impressive “A Nation Without Borders” tells the story of America’s quest to expand its territory and influence from 1830 to 1910.
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James L. Haley’s “The Shores of Tripoli” will do for the U.S. Marines what Patrick O’Brian did for the Royal Navy. It is that good.
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Peter Fritzsche’s “An Iron Wind” shows just how swiftly Europeans were prepared to abandon their commitment to a normative morality and to ignore, justify or endorse Nazi persecutions.
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Kathleen Collins’s posthumous collection of short stories from the 1960s remains relevant today.
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Leonardo Lucarelli’s “Mincemeat” places itself squarely in a tradition personified by Anthony Bourdain, but adds a hilarious dash of Italian sprezzatura.
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Without the 1%, we’d have no Metropolitan Museum of Art, no Metropolitan Opera and no New York Public Library. William L. Hamilton reviews “In Pursuit of Privilege” by Clifton Hood.
The author of “Inside the Clinton White House: An Oral History” on presidential oral histories.
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The first international flight by hot-air balloon, a Navajo platoon and a giant squid. Meghan Cox Gurdon on new nonfiction for kids.
What Anderson Cooper, Abby Wambach, Jojo Moyes, Steph Curry and 46 others read—and loved—this year.
Brilliant birds, Code Warriors, Abigail Adams, Colson Whitehead, Michael Chabon: The WSJ’s names the top fiction and nonfiction of the year.
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Peter Cowie reviews Brian Jay Jones’s new biography of the man who created Luke Skywalker, Indiana Jones and Pixar.
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In “Morning, Paramin,” a renowned painter and a Nobel-winning poet meditate on the difficult beauty of the Caribbean.
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From Carthage and Rome through Iran and Afghanistan to Xianyang and the Ganges basin. Peter Thonemann reviews “Ancient Worlds: A Global History of Antiquity” by Michael Scott.
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The author, most recently, of “Rasputin: Faith, Power and the Twilight of the Romanovs” on revolutions.
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Tom Nolan on dark gymnastic prodigies, haunted farm houses and killing sprees. This year’s top titles.
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Steven Poole’s enlightening “Rethink” shows that most of today’s new ideas are actually old ones that have been rediscovered, upgraded or rethought.
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Cats, exploding cheesecake, child saints and the King of France. Meghan Cox Gurdon picks her favorites.
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The cryptographers who broke the ciphers used by the Germans and the Japanese during World War II were defeated by the Voynich Manuscript.
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Two new cookbooks by Katie Buton and Matt Goulding sing the praise of pulpo a la gallega, braised oxtail and proper paella.
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The transformation of well over 100,000 human beings from legal property into armed agents of the government remains the single most revolutionary episode in American history. Matthew Karp reviews “Thunder at the Gates” by Douglas R. Egerton.
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If Donald Trump wants to get a sense of America’s troubles with the Middle Kingdom, there are few better places to start than John Pomfret’s “The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom.”
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Victims were reduced to walking corpses, their ligaments cracking and bones turning black. But the disease’s highly unusual symptoms also included intense cravings and unbearable nostalgia. Mike Jay reviews Jonathan Lamb’s book about this “disease of discovery.”
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The octopus is curious, adaptable, playful, mischievous, friendly and expressive—just like us. Peter Godfrey-Smith’s book, “Other Minds,” explores the brilliance of these creatures and the deep origins of consciousness.
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George Herriman, the creator of “Krazy Kat,” hid his race in real life. But on paper, the truth was all there. Sarah Boxer reviews “Krazy” by Michael Tisserand.
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Was Toussaint Louverture a prefiguration of black power, a “Black Spartacus,” a nationalist visionary, a covert agent of slavery or a reactionary lackey of white masters? Felipe Fernández-Armesto reviews Philippe Girard’s new biography.
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Our greatest playwright was happiest when he retreated into alcohol or the fellowship of a flophouse or dockside bar. Gordon Bowker reviews “By Women Possessed” by Arthur Gelb and Barbara Gelb.
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A sweeping history of Europe, from the fall of Napoleon to the outbreak of World War I. Stephen A. Schuker reviews “The Pursuit of Power” by Richard J. Evans.
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In “The Wood for the Trees,” paleontologist Richard Fortey leaves behind the museum for the woods.
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Stéphane Mallarmé’s 20-page work pointed the way toward “Demoiselles d’Avignon” and Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” Micah Mattix reviews “One Toss of the Dice: The Incredible Story of How a Poem Made Us Modern” by R. Howard Bloch.
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In “Just Getting Started,” the 90-year-old singer gives thanks for his mother, Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Chaplin, Lena Horne, Abraham Lincoln, Amy Winehouse and many others.
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The England we visit in this sophisticated compilation for children has no afternoon tea or jolly rounds of cricket, but blood, superstition and magic. Meghan Cox Gurdon reviews “The Book of English Folk Tales” and four other new children.
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In Emma Newman’s latest, nations have become “gov-corps” and people are fed by the output from 3-D printers.
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Vladimir Mayakovsky, who roared his poems in literary salons, was terrified of his mortality. In Robert Littell’s new novel about the bare-knuckle poet, “The Mayakovsky Tapes,” four of his lovers say that sex staved off his fears.
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The curator and art historian on American art.
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“Moonglow” is an ancestor’s tale transmuted into a bewitching work of Greatest Generation mythology. The novel is a celebration not only of one character’s remarkable life but of the country where it was possible.
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To defeat Japan, the U.S. turned the Navy into a technologically advanced seaborne civilization. Richard Snow reviews “The Fleet at Flood Tide: America at Total War in the Pacific, 1944-1945” by James D. Hornfischer.
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A taxonomy of dumplings, buns, meats, sweets and other specialties of the Chinese teahouse. Adrian Ho reviews “The Dim Sum Field Guide” by Carolyn Phillips.
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Two new books tackle the most notorious mental hospitals in the Western world: Bedlam and Bellevue. Andrew Scull reviews “This Way Madness Lies” by Mike Jay and “Bellevue” by David Oshinsky.
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How did the son of a barber become the first popular artist of the modern age? Mark Archer reviews “The Extraordinary Life and Momentous Times of J.M.W. Turner” by Franny Moyle.
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In 1901, Buffalo was a thriving, spirited metropolis of 370,000, bursting with civic pride. Margaret Creighton’s “The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City” explains how the city and the exposition it hosted became the victims of wretched luck.
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The celebrated nature writer was skeptical of the space program: He found enough objects of inquiry on Earth to last him several lifetimes. Danny Heitman reviews Eiseley’s “Collected Essays.”
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In “Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine,” Sophie Pinkham gives us portraits of bohemians, nudists, activists and other outliers. Alexandra Popoff reviews.
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He was illiterate, filthy, a fraud, a money-grubber, a traitor, a warmonger, a demonic miracle-worker. None of these claims were wholly true; most were wholly invented. Edward Lucas on Douglas Smith’s definitive biography.
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Meghan Cox Gurdon on six beautiful books for Christmas and Hanukkah.
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Hughes’s films taught generations of the uncool that things would
turn out all right. Brian P. Kelly reviews “Searching for John Hughes” by Jason Diamond.
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The author of “Les Parisiennes: How the women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died under Nazi Occupation” on women in wartime Paris.
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The author of “Irena’s Children: The Extraordinary Story of the Woman Who Saved 2,500 Children from the Warsaw Ghetto” on rescuers.
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