The Saturday Essay

From Review

Book Reviews

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    Boardroom Brawlers

    James Grant reviews “Dear Chairman: Boardroom Battles and the Rise of Shareholder Activism” by Jeff Gramm.

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    How an Indian Ocean Paradise Was Lost

    A brief flowering of democracy on the Muslim-majority archipelago prefigured the Arab Spring.

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    Where There’s Cannibalism, There’s Culture

    J.R. McNeill reviews “A Foot in the River: Why Our Lives Change—and the Limits of Evolution” by Felipe Fernández-Armesto.

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    Making Philosophy Out of a Cocktail

    Ruth Scurr reviews “At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails” by Sarah Bakewell.

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    The Progressive History of Eugenics

    Amity Shlaes reviews “Imbeciles” by Adam Cohen and “Illiberal Reformers” by Thomas C. Leonard.

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    How Augustine and Muhammad Ali Found God

    D.G. Hart reviews “Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion” by Susan Jacoby.

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    Meagher of the Sword

    Harold Holzer reviews “The Immortal Irishman” by Timothy Egan, an irresistible story of an Irish exile who won fame in the U.S. Civil War.

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    Teddy Roosevelt Regrets

    Roger Lowenstein reviews “The Golden Lad: The Haunting Story of Quentin and Theodore Roosevelt” by Eric Burns.

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    Why You Love Bacon

    Rien Fertel reviews “Meathooked: The History and Science of Our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession with Meat” by Marta Zaraska.

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    Tom Nolan on the Best New Mysteries

    A review of “The King of Fear,” by Drew Chapman.

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    Meghan Cox Gurdon on the Best New Children’s Books

    Reviews of “The Dead Bird” by Margaret Wise Brown and other picture books.

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    Why English Weather Is So Inspiring

    Alexandra Mullen reviews “Weatherland: Writers & Artists Under English Skies” by Alexandra Harris.

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    The Man Who Invented the Novel

    David Wootton reviews “The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World” by William Egginton.

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    Sam Sacks on the Best New Fiction

    Reviews of “The Castle Cross of the Magnet Carter” by Kia Corthron and “I Met Someone” by Bruce Wagner.

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    Five Best: Sheila Fitzpatrick

    The author, most recently, of “On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics” on Soviet women.

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    Waging War in Zeros and Ones

    The U.S. dominates the fields of hardware and software. But it remains uniquely vulnerable because its so connected to the Internet.

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    Who ‘The ’Hood Is Good’ For

    The owner of a seedy trailer park earns roughly $447,000 a year. But if the profit were less, would those accommodations remain available?

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    Lives of the Selfie-Centered

    What do teenagers use their phones for? Bonding, backbiting, bullying—and texting naked pictures. Lots and lots of naked pictures.

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    In Defense of Government Snooping

    Critics charged that Stellarwind was nearly worthless as an intelligence tool. Hayden has no doubts about the program’s effectiveness.

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    How Culture Beat Religion

    Evangelicals reject the feminist label, yet they support feminist principles like equal pay for equal work and political equality.

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    The Men and Women Who Ended Slavery

    A revelatory history of American abolitionism.

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    Long Before There Was Wikipedia

    From the ‘Catholic Encyclopedia’ to a 1761 guide to the prostitutes of London’s Covent Garden.

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    The ‘Stalk of Asparagus’ That Transformed D.C.

    A reporter in 1884 judged the Washington Monument ‘absurdly unworthy of its subject.’

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    The Most Defiant Woman

    Eleanor Roosevelt became friends with a young black woman who refused to curtsy to her.

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    Visionaries of the Urban Grid

    Frank Lloyd Wright pitched his Broadacre City design as a cure for the ‘economic, aesthetic and moral chaos’ of the 1930s.

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    The Invention of the Jump Shot

    The jump shot was invented by a 13-year-old seeking an edge against his older brother.

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    Sam Sacks on the Best New Fiction

    A Brazilian novelist climbs up an almond tree with a suitcase in hand and disappears.

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    Good Riddance to Tipping

    Tipped waiters receive the same federal minimum wage they have for two decades: $2.13 an hour.

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    Supermodels Walk Like Chimpanzees

    The odd walking style that fashion models affect on the catwalk is also employed by chimpanzees to stay upright.

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    How Life Began

    Darwin was fascinated by the question of the origin of life, but it did not bear on his theory of evolution.

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    Meghan Cox Gurdon on the Best New Young-Adult Books

    Two brothers toiling on the cacao plantations of the Ivory Coast must fight together to survive.

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    Five Best: Daphne Merkin

    The author of ‘The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontes, and the Importance of Handbags’ on novels of despair.

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    What Language Does God Speak?

    Christianity’s move from Aramaic and Greek into Latin gave the Roman church its imperial bearing.

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    Trapped by the New Iron Curtain

    Romania, having suffered under two of the nastiest dictators of the Soviet period, is now in the crosshairs of Putin’s new cold war.

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    The Bridge to Somewhere

    Techniques for smoothing the passage of humans and vehicles date to the Romans, whose famous roads were lined with hand-laid stones.

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