World History

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Beyond belief

Three literary fantasies for summer — including a true one
One of the purposes of escapist reading is to feed our daydreams.
By CHARLES TAYLOR | June 16, 2010

Load up your Goodman, Gordimer, Franzen, Moody, and more
Planning to be lazy and let it all go this summer? Sorry, there are too many good books to read. From Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector to Richard Rhodes's The Twilight of the Bombs and Jean Valentine's Break the Glass , you'll find tomes galore to keep you occupied through Labor Day.
By BARBARA HOFFERT | June 16, 2010

A Rhode Island filmmaker’s tribute to the Good War

Heroes
Amid the moral ambiguity of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — the handwringing over weapons of mass destruction, drone attacks, and the rights of detainees — there is something startling about the raw patriotism of the documentary Navy Heroes of Normandy .
By DAVID SCHARFENBERG | June 02, 2010

Cowardly new world

Diverse-City
I know that the ancient Mayan calendar indicated the world may end in 2012, but I doubt it. Instead, let me illustrate how bad it might get, starting in that year.
By SHAY STEWART-BOULEY | May 26, 2010

Photos: 'The Kennedys' at Peabody Essex Museum

Photos of JFK, Jackie Onassis and family at the PEM through July 18
"The Kennedys” exhibit at Peabody Essex Museum, through July 18
By RICHARD AVEDON | May 19, 2010

Hearing voices

Dave Tompkins chases the Vocoder in his book How To Wreck a Nice Beach
Don’t be fooled by its textbook appearance — How To Wreck a Nice Beach (Melville House/Stop Smiling) is hardly a dry anthropological study of “The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop,” as the subtitle suggests.
By CHRIS FARAONE | May 14, 2010

Meet Evan Thomas

The parallel careers of Newsweek's premier wordsmith
Narrative is the throughline in the professional life of Evan Thomas.
By PETER KADZIS | May 13, 2010

Slideshow: Photos from the War Lovers

Photos of Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, William Randolph Hearst, and more from Evan Thomas' book.
Photos from Evan Thomas' book The War Lovers.
By EVAN THOMAS | May 14, 2010

Jewishfilm.2010

Love is stronger than death at Jewishfilm.2010
They aren’t the most auspicious of couplings: an Arab and Jewish girl in Nazi-occupied Tunis in 1942; a butcher and his apprentice in Haredi Jerusalem; the survivor of a terrorist bombing and a stranger who might be a guardian angel.
By PETER KEOUGH | March 31, 2010

Hallelujah!

Health-care reform is a new high-water mark
The Democrats won and the Republicans lost. That, in a nutshell, is the bottom line.
By EDITORIAL | March 24, 2010

A black leadership silent on abortion fabrications

Choice
Last month, controversial anti-abortion-rights billboards appeared in Georgia hinting that abortion is a tool of black genocide.
By MARY ANN SORRENTINO | March 24, 2010

Titus Andronicus | The Monitor

XL (2010)
As if to allay any fears of a starchy Civil War concept album, Titus Andronicus frontman Patrick Stickles spends the first minute of The Monitor shouting out a series of cultural artifacts that postdate that conflict by, oh, about a hundred years: the Garden State Parkway, the Newark Bears, even the Fung Wah bus.
By MIKAEL WOOD | March 16, 2010

Nudity throughout history

By ALEXIS HAUK | March 17, 2010

Interview: Max Raabe

Killer cabaret: bringing Berlin to Boston
"It was so crazy in the '20s, in the Weimar Republic. Everything was so open-minded and wide, and that is why I love that period so much."
By JEFFREY GANTZ | March 02, 2010

Review: Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief

Freaks and Greeks
That must've been one rockin' party the gods of Ancient Greece had with the hotties of America back in the early '90s, since they left a string of demigods with absentee-daddy issues behind.
By BRETT MICHEL | February 17, 2010

Review: The Most Dangerous Man in America

Hail to Daniel Ellsberg
At age 79, Daniel Ellsberg is getting the last guffaw.
By GERALD PEARY | February 16, 2010

Interview: Daniel Ellsberg

"The Most Dangerous Man in America" talks on the documentary about him and his time at the Pentagon
"By ordinary standards of presidents, Obama is a decent man. But those standards aren't good enough."
By CHRIS FARAONE | February 16, 2010

How to Celebrate Presidents' Day 2010

Big Fat Whale
Pin the mustache on Teddy Roosevelt, and more
By BRIAN MCFADDEN | February 10, 2010

Creating a legend

How Little Round Top made Chamberlain a hero
The soldiers of the 20th Maine Regiment marched quickly into the night, moving west from Hanover toward Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on July 1, 1863.
By DONALD G. FULTON | January 06, 2010

Lincoln Yule log

The Huntington celebrates A Civil War Christmas
Abraham Lincoln, as he said in his second inaugural address, yearned to "bind up the nation's wounds." Since the great man was assassinated little more than a month later, he didn't quite get around to it. No worry, Paula Vogel has taken over the job with A Civil War Christmas: An American Musical Celebration.
By CAROLYN CLAY | November 24, 2009

The South's opt-out program

Idiot Box
During the Civil War
By MATT BORS | November 11, 2009

Sarah and the shipmates

Vowell on the Puritans and the founding of Rhode Island
Humorist, historian, superhero. Sarah Vowell is a woman of letters and voices.
By MICHAEL ATCHISON | October 22, 2009

Review: Earth Days

Did you know Nixon once signed progressive eco-legislation?
Those who worry that the eco-movement seems incapable of getting beyond its white upper-middle-class base will be disturbed anew by Robert Stone’s Earth Days , where every talking head is a well-bred Caucasian.
By GERALD PEARY | October 07, 2009

Classical inheritance

Two fixtures hand over the reins to a younger generation
A teacher told me years ago that someday "you young people will inherit classical music. Then you can do with it what you want." And so I've been waiting.
By EMILY PARKHURST | September 30, 2009

Review: Darkest of Days

Time travel's last stand?
In Darkest of Days you play as Alexander Morris, a soldier fresh from Little Big Horn. Right after you get nailed with some feather-tipped arrows, KronoteK rushes in to “save” you. There's a catch, though: you then go to work for KronoteK.
By MADDY MYERS | September 22, 2009

Interview: Ken Burns

On his latest PBS documentary, The National Parks
After watching The National Parks: America's Best Idea , it would be easy to conclude that it all could have been said a lot faster. Ken Burns disagrees — but he's not just being defensive.
By CLIF GARBODEN | September 25, 2009

The whole truth

Tomes from the 'fact' department
It's the economy, stupid. Or maybe politics or literature. Fall non-fiction goes wide and deep, so plan for some marathon reading.
By BARBARA HOFFERT | September 14, 2009

Beat Circus | Boy From Black Mountain

Cuneiform (2009)
The subjects of the stories sung on this second installment of Beat Circus's "Weird American Gothic" trilogy attain greater awareness of family, culture, and the world by voyaging across schisms in perception.
By BARRY THOMPSON | September 02, 2009

Hot Nazi beach reads

The new wave of Reich books: pop genres, good Germans
Nazis aren't blitzing just the movie screens this year, though — they're also invading the bookstores, with battalions of novels and non-fiction tomes published or upcoming.
By PETER KEOUGH | August 18, 2009

The Wat Misaka story

Making a rebound
He only played three games and scored seven points in the 1947-48 season, but Wataru Misaka's story is netted, slammed, and sealed in NBA history. The 5'7" Japanese-American was the New York Knicks' first-round draft pick and the first non-white basketball player in the NBA.
By ABIGAIL CROCKER | August 05, 2009