An Empire of Blood: How the Nazis Ruled Europe
In the summer of 1942, Albert Speer visited Adolf Hitler at the Führer's field headquarters in the Ukraine. "One quiet evening," Mark Mazower writes in "Hitler's Empire" (Penguin Press, 726 pages,...
View ArticleThe Magic Mountain: Adalbert Stifter's 'Rock Crystal'
Last year, Stanford University Press published a selection of Hannah Arendt's essays on the arts under the title "Reflections on Literature and Culture." One of the pieces in the volume was Arendt's...
View ArticleA Peculiar Association: Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings
In 1795 Thomas Jefferson was in the middle of a four-year vacation from public office. Having stepped down as secretary of state at the end of George Washington's first term, and not yet elected as...
View ArticleAgainst Oblivion: 'The Terezin Album of Marianka Zadikow'
When Hannah Arendt wrote "The Origins of Totalitarianism" in the years just after the Holocaust, she struggled to explain what made the Nazi genocide so unprecedentedly evil. What separated this...
View ArticleThe God That Failed: 'Left in Dark Times' by Bernard-Henri Lévy
It is now approaching 20 years since the left the classic, revolutionary, Marx- and Lenin-inspired left received its death blow. Since 1989, not even those who look back lovingly at 1917, the year...
View ArticleTaking On Fukuyama
If ever a writer was the victim of his own success, it is Francis Fukuyama. In 1989, with Soviet power on the retreat in Eastern Europe and democratic activists filling Tiananmen Square, Mr. Fukuyama...
View ArticleHow Jacob Riis Lived: Tom Buk-Swienty's 'The Other Half'
If you stand at the corner of Bayard and Mulberry streets in lower Manhattan and look south, you will be greeted with a vibrant street scene you could find nowhere but in New York. The streets are...
View ArticleFreedom's Gift to Religion
Eleven years ago, a little-known writer named Anita Diamant published her first novel, "The Red Tent." For inspiration, she turned to one of the most disturbing episodes in the Bible: the rape of...
View ArticleAdjusting the Theory of Just War: Gary Bass's 'Freedom's Battle'
From the Vietnam War until the end of the Cold War, it was almost axiomatic that liberals would oppose every use of American military power. Defecting from that position was what qualified a former...
View ArticleLifting the Veil: J.M.W. Turner and John Ruskin
If the spirit of Joseph Mallord William Turner is looking down on New York these days possibly from somewhere in the vicinity of the sun, which in his dying days he declared to be God he must have...
View ArticleIn Georgia, Shades of Earlier History
The crisis in Georgia proves once again that the world's future depends on the lessons it learns from the past. The problem is that there are always too many lessons, and they never exactly fit the...
View ArticleHarvesting the Waste Land: An Anthology of New Criticism
Looking back on the 1930s from the perspective of middle age, Robert Lowell described it as a time "when criticism looked like winning." The years of Lowell's apprenticeship were the golden age of the...
View ArticleA Different Canon
This summer, the American Foreign Service Association put out a recommended reading list for its members. Because AFSA is the professional association for all American diplomats and because the reading...
View ArticleNeocon Resurgence
History books, as the saying goes, are written by the winners. But when it comes to American history, it is often the losers of old debates whose interpretations are enshrined in the textbooks. The...
View ArticleDemons Inner and Outer
Almost seven years after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, readers still display a surprising hunger for the definitive "9/11 novel." The acclaim that greeted Joseph O'Neill's "Netherland"...
View ArticleTilting at Spanish History: 'A Manuscript of Ashes' by Antonio Muñoz Molina
Five years ago, Antonio Muñoz Molina's novel "Sepharad" was published in English to rapturous reviews. Not since W.G. Sebald's "The Emigrants" had a new European writer so powerfully seized the...
View ArticleHugh Trevor-Roper's 'The Invention of Scotland'
Every April, New York's proud Scottish-Americans celebrate their heritage with the Tartan Day Parade, processing up Sixth Avenue in a sea of kilts, to the noble blare of the bagpipes. If you are...
View ArticleKay Ryan, a Laureate Worth Lauding
Yesterday's announcement from the Library of Congress that Kay Ryan will be the country's next poet laureate is a cause for celebration. In part, this is because Ms. Ryan is an excellent poet, and in...
View ArticleThe Ruined City of Smyrna: Giles Milton's 'Paradise Lost'
It is a measure of the sheer darkness of history in the last century that one of its darkest episodes the 1922 destruction of the Ottoman city of Smyrna, in present-day Turkey is practically...
View ArticleA Man for All Seasons: 'John Stuart Mill, Victorian Firebrand'
If history, as Edward Gibbon said, is "little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind," it makes sense that the greatest criminals tend to receive the most attention...
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