In Essence
THE SOURCE: “What Do Experts Know?” by Wilfred M. McClay, in National Affairs, Fall 2009.
THE SOURCE: “Decoding the Flag” by Cheryl Dietrich, in The Gettysburg Review, Autumn 2009.
THE SOURCE: “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?” by Paul Krugman, in The New York Times Magazine, Sept. 6, 2009.
THE SOURCE: “The Economic Impacts of the September 11, 2001, Terrorist Attacks” edited by S. Brock Blomberg and Adam Z. Rose, in Peace Economics, Peace Science, and Public Policy, Vol. 15, No. 2, 2009.
THE SOURCES: “Environmental Security Heats Up,” in Environmental Change and Security Program Report, Issue 13, 2008–09, “Avoid Hyperbole, Oversimplification When Climate and Security Meet,” in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Aug. 24, 2009, and “Planning for Climate Change: The Security Community’s Precautionary Principle,” in Climatic Change, Sept. 2009, all by Geoffrey D. Dabelko.
THE SOURCE: “Occupying Iraq: A Short History of the CPA” by James Dobbins, in Survival, June–July 2009.
THE SOURCE: “Cities in Today’s Global Age” by Saskia Sassen, in The SAIS Review, Winter–Spring 2009.
THE SOURCE: “Immigration and the American Obesity Epidemic” by Lingxin Hao and Julie J. H. Kim, in International Migration Review, Summer 2009.
THE SOURCE: “Want to Lose Friends? Make Tough Choices” by Tom Jacobs, in Miller-McCune News Blog, July 23, 2009.
THE SOURCE: “What Makes Us Happy” by Joshua Wolf Shenk, in The Atlantic, June 2009.
THE SOURCE: “‘The Greatest Liar’” by Nicholson Baker, in Columbia Journalism Review, July–Aug. 2009.
THE SOURCE: “The Marshall Plan and Oil” by David S. Painter, in Cold War History, May 2009.
THE SOURCE: “Alexander Hamilton, Central Banker: Crisis Management During the U.S. Financial Panic of 1792” by Richard Sylla, Robert E. Wright, and David J. Cowen, in Business History Review, Spring 2009.
THE SOURCE: “Orthodox Resurgence” by John P. Burgess, in Christian Century, June 16, 2009.
THE SOURCE: “Saved by the Saint: Refusing and Reversing Partition in Muslim North India” by Anna Bigelow, in The Journal of Asian Studies, May 2009.
THE SOURCE: “On the Origin of Sexual Reproduction” by Carl Zimmer, in Science, June 5, 2009.
THE SOURCE: “The Possibility of Impossible Cultures” by Marc D. Hauser, in Nature, July 9, 2009.
THE SOURCE: “Diminishing Returns in Humanities Research” by Mark Bauerlein, in The Chronicle Review, July 24, 2009.
THE SOURCE: “The Culture Crash” by James Panero, in City Journal, special issue on New York’s Tomorrow, 2009.
THE SOURCE: “Adaptation: On Literary Darwinism” by William Deresiewicz, in The Nation, May 20, 2009.
THE SOURCE: “The Hidden Economy in East-Central Europe: Lessons From a Ten-Nation Survey” by Colin C. Williams, in Problems of Post-Communism, July–Aug. 2009.
THE SOURCE: “Fixing Futures: Educated Unemployment Through a North Indian Lens” by Craig Jeffrey, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Jan. 2009.
THE SOURCE: “Can the West Save Africa?” by William Easterly, in Journal of Economic Literature, June 2009.
THE SOURCE: “Evidence for Food Storage and Predomestication Granaries 11,000 Years Ago in the Jordan Valley” by Ian Kuijt and Bill Finlayson, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 7, 2009.
Book Reviews
KNUT HAMSUN:
Dreamer and Dissenter.
By Ingar Sletten Kolloen.
Translated by Deborah Dawkin and Erik Skuggevik.
Yale Univ. Press. 378 pp. $40
A QUESTION OF COMMAND:
Counterinsurgency From the Civil War to Iraq.
By Mark Moyar.
Yale Univ. Press. 347 pp. $30
AYN RAND AND THE WORLD SHE MADE.
By Anne C. Heller.
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. 567 pp. $35
GODDESS OF THE MARKET:
Ayn Rand and the American Right.
By Jennifer Burns.
Oxford Univ. Press. 369 pp. $27.95
CIVIL WAR WIVES:
The Lives and Times of Angelina Grimké Weld, Varina Howell Davis, and Julia Dent Grant.
By Carol Berkin.
Knopf. 361 pp. $28.95
LOUIS D. BRANDEIS:
A Life.
By Melvin I. Urofsky.
Pantheon. 955 pp. $40
HOLLOWING OUT THE MIDDLE:
The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America.
By Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas.
Beacon. 239 pp. $26.95
METHLAND:The Death and Life of an American Small Town.
By Nick Reding.
Bloomsbury. 255 pp. $25
A PARADISE BUILT IN HELL:
The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster.
By Rebecca Solnit.
Viking. 353 pp. $27.95
WHAT AMERICA READ:
Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920–1960.
By Gordon Hutner.
Univ. of N.C. Press. 450 pp. $39.95
THE AGE OF COMFORT:
When Paris Discovered Casual—and the Modern Home Began.
By Joan DeJean.
Bloomsbury. 295 pp. $28
NAMING NATURE:
The Clash Between Instinct and Science.
By Carol Kaesuk Yoon.
Norton. 344 pp. $27.95
THE AGE OF WONDER:
How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science.
By Richard Holmes.
Pantheon. 552 pp. $40
THE EVOLUTION OF OBESITY.
By Michael L. Power and Jay Schulkin.
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. 392 pp. $40
CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN JUDAISM:
Transformation and Renewal.
By Dana Evan Kaplan.
Columbia Univ. Press. 446 pp. $34.50
Essays
When Michael Barone began his career as a political observer, Los Angeles was like Des Moines by the sea and America was transfixed by the Vietnam war and the counterculture. Nobody saw the deeper forces that were beginning to transform the nation.
The search is on for graceful strategies for exiting Iraq and Afghanistan. Apart from victory, history suggests, there are none.
The fall of the Berlin Wall was a dramatic moment in time. In the minds of many East Germans, it was years in the making.
The Obama administration has revived the dream of building high-speed rail lines to rival those of Japan and Europe, but the tracks are littered with political and financial obstacles.
The book, that fusty old technology, seems rigid and passé as we daily consume a diet of information bytes and digital images. The fault, dear reader, lies not in our books but in ourselves.
In the long history of the book, the mass-produced volumes of our time constitute only a single chapter. More remain to be written.
Welcome the new world with open arms—and browsers.