1861
by Adam Goodheart
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The Crimean War
by Orlando Figes
(Metropolitan, $25)
Orlando Figes’s compelling new history “illuminates a conflict so dimly understood that even the participants were unclear about its objectives,” said The New Yorker. Figes excels at bringing to life this unusual war—which found Anglican Britain and Catholic France siding with the Muslim Ottoman Caliphate against the Orthodox Russian czars. The 1853–56 war was particularly brutal: Passages of Figes’s book “could make a hardened war correspondent’s blood run cold.”
To End All Wars
by Adam Hochschild
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28)
Adam Hochschild’s “pensive narrative history” finds a fresh angle on World War I, said Maureen Corrigan in NPR.org. Focusing on Britain’s “patchy but persistent” movement of war resisters, he helps us both to see patriotic fervor in a fresh light and to “feel anew the shock of modern technological warfare.” The author of 2006’s Bury the Chains is “a master at chronicling how prevailing cultural opinion is formed and, less frequently, how it’s challenged.”
The Storm of War
by Andrew Roberts
(Harper, $30)
“I would have said it couldn’t be done, to do the whole of World War II in 600 pages and get it right, not at any rate without leaving out great chunks,” said Michael Korda in TheDailyBeast.com. But Andrew Roberts “has managed to do it, and do it superbly well.” If you’re looking for a concise, well-reasoned history, “this is it.” Roberts’s Holocaust chapter, for example, “leaves nothing out, but he manages to get it all into 30 pages: a miracle.”
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Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
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Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
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The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
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Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
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Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
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Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
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You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
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Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”