Edward Tenner reviews a biography of Buckminster Fuller, "preppy nerd and buttoned-down bohemian, green guru and globe-trotting jet fuel consumer, a college expellee who relished honorary degrees [who] proclaimed a new cosmos of structural lightness and left a personal archive of 45 tons about it."
T. R. Reid reviews a "warts-and-all history of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, one of the darkest moments in the 180-year history of the Mormon Church."
Aaron Mesh on Hollywood's controversial attempts to portray the last days of Jesus Christ on film.
G. Pascal Zachary on Rwandan president Paul Kagame, whose rule "provides the clearest test case in Africa of whether an enlightened authoritarianism can produce better results than liberal democracy."
Kate Christensen looks at the wives of three famous French artists, and how their lives, "no matter how difficult, painful, or uncertain, were never boring."
James McGrath Morris reviews a chronicle of Jacob Riis's rise from poor immigrant to famous muckraker.
Lynn Berry on Boris Yeltsin, the complicated figure who "gave Russians a personal independence that they will not easily relinquish."
Karl E. Scheibe looks at the social meaning behind the Nazi salute.
Edith Gelles looks at the muse of the American Revolution, Mercy Otis Warren.