Michelle Stein— In The American Department Store Transformed, 1920-1960, Richard Longstreth documents the development of the department store as it moves from “a great, all-inclusive emporium that helped define the character and the purpose of the city” to its transformation into shopping centers and malls. Here in New York City,
In September, Yale University Press is publishing Melissa Harris-Perry’s new book, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America, titled after the author’s popular column for The Nation. As guest host this week on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, she steps in for Maddow’s role and brings her informed opinions to the news. We’ve compiled some of the highlights of Harris-Perry’s insightful commentary on the show this week and over the past year.
The information compiled in the R.R. Hawkins Award-winning Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, edited by David Eltis and David Richardson documents, in nearly 200 color maps, the paths of Europeans, Africans, merchants, slaves, and human life, showing how and when so many people went from port to port, hub to hub, as the many regions developed and evolved over the history of the slave trade.
In the search for truth, no fact is ever truly useless. Obtaining fact, not factoid, is crucial, because the public usually only hears one tiny facet of any major issue, Timothy Garton Ash argues in Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name.
Joan of Arc and Odysseus have more in common than one might think. Not only that, but since the former conversed with saints and the latter with goddesses, today would today recommend them to a shrink. According to Charles Hill’s Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order, both figures exist in literary works that capably demonstrate statecraft.
If a group of a scientist’s colleagues started an entire website to warn the world, especially the scientific community, about “the flaws in his work” before the scientist even published a book, you might be at least a little skeptical when his book was finally published. Howard Friel has finally done what should have been done a decade ago, as he points out, in the publishing house: fact-checking. In The Lomborg Deception: Setting the Record Straight About Global Warming, all Friel has to do is comb through the endnotes and compare them with their sources to find gaping holes more terrifying than a velociraptor.
An interview with Janet Malcolm is a rare thing. Malcolm’s latest book, Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial, recounts the sensational murder trial of Mazoltuv Borukhova, a young physician in Queens convicted in 2009 for arranging the public assassination of her husband in front of their four year-old daughter. We sat down with the author for special insight into her experiences observing the court drama and writing this fascinating account.
According to Taliban author, Ahmed Rashid, in this morning’s New York Times: “Afghanistan just got more dangerous and unpredictable.” Tim Bird and Alex Marshall’s Afghanistan: How the West Lost Its Way not only chronicles the United States’ longest war but also addresses the questions that have plagued the West since the early years.
With the Arab Spring affecting up to twenty nations, depending on the source, it is hard to know which warrants the most interest or concern. Victoria Clark, author of Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes, argues that the United States needs to make understanding Yemen a priority or risk the cultivation of more terrorists.
What symbols do you wear every day? Does your haircut symbolize your gender? Are you wearing a ring to tell the world you’re married, you graduated from a certain college, or just that you can afford it? In A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America, Leila Ahmed explores the trend of Muslim women embracing the veil since the 1970s after at least four decades of going bareheaded.