Too Much Gilbert
The author of ‘Eat Pray Love’ has returned with a new memoir, which features all the usual problems with her writing writ large.
Charlotte Allen
· 22 min read
Review
A collection of 151 posts
Red Sheep
An impressive new biography of Jessica Mitford emphasises her sceptical and anti-authoritarian personality. But this was only half of the picture.
Ron Capshaw
· 10 min read
Power and Its Malcontents
Shadi Hamid has an uneasy conscience, and he doesn’t yet know what to do with it.
Brian Stewart
· 25 min read
I Will Find a City
Jonathan Gould’s new Talking Heads biography recalls a once-thriving and now disintegrating independent media network that could elevate eccentrics with potential.
Matt Hanson
· 7 min read
A Self-Created Tyrant
In a new biography of Stalin, William Nester does his best to locate a human being within the monster, but those efforts eventually run aground.
Ron Capshaw
· 6 min read
Terror’s Intelligence Apparatus
Netanel Flamer’s book about Hamas’s intelligence war on Israel could be read with equal interest by members of Western security forces, and by members of the very groups against which they struggle.
Daniel Allington
· 7 min read
Ballad of a Song and Dance Man
An unorthodox new book by one of America’s finest nonfiction authors tries to make sense of Bob Dylan.
Ronald Radosh
· 19 min read
The Honour and the Duty
Yossi Cohen has written a bracing and lively memoir about his time as head of Mossad.
Michael M. Rosen
· 6 min read
Rewarding Rejectionism
A new book by two former peace processors makes clear that statehood was never the goal of the Palestinian cause.
Shany Mor
· 12 min read
Out of the Past
A new book looks back on the making of Billy Wilder’s American classic.
Graham Daseler
· 11 min read
The Good War No More
Jon Lee Anderson’s powerful new book on Afghanistan reminds us that the justness of a cause is no guarantee of its success.
Brian Stewart
· 6 min read
Lifting Weights
Jordan Castro’s new novel ‘Muscle Man’ offers a wry and meme-literate vision of blokey intellectualism.
Brad Strotten
· 5 min read
The Multipolarity Mirage
What realists like Emma Ashford deride as America’s “reactionary defence of the status quo” is in fact a prudent effort to preserve a world order of unparalleled value.
Brian Stewart
· 27 min read
The Deformist Tendency
A new book presents a cogent diagnosis of the ills plaguing American society, but also reactionary prescriptions for ameliorating them.
Brian Stewart
· 8 min read
Detonation Days
Garrett Graff’s new book provides the story of America’s quest for the bomb with a valuable human quality without sacrificing the epic sweep.
Ron Capshaw
· 10 min read