John Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud defied a nation’s reluctance to describe personal loss.
The cause produced undaunted trailblazers, Black and white, who continued to pursue social reform.
Joshua B. Freeman’s ‘Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World’
Half a century ago, a Czech illustrator’s vivid travel books helped open young minds to the rest of the planet.
“Though every Part gave real Pleasure/The Sum of all used up our Treasure.”
My review of Frank Trentmann's Empire of Things in the New York Review of Books, 25 May 2017.
Prone to quarrel-picking and partial to red-heeled, thigh-high boots paired with an outsized dress sword, the tyrannical army surgeon Dr. James Barry had, it seems, a whole society full of conspirators.
Review of Michael du Preez's and Jeremy Dronfield's Dr. James Barry in the London Review of Books, 2 March 2017.
Even by the formidable standards of eminent Victorian families, the Bensons were an intimidating lot.
My review of Simon Goldhill's A Very Queer Family Indeed in the March 2017 issue of the Atlantic.
Churchill spent money he did not have -- extravagantly. He relied upon rich acquaintances to bail him out. Still, sometimes the suspicious financial smoke comes only from a cigar.
My review of David Lough's No More Champagne in the January/February 2016 issue of the Atlantic.
For the Wall Street Journal's "Five Best" series --
The Five Best Books on Parents & Children, 19 December 2015.
Very twentieth-century. (Bedford, Ackerley....)
She had no mercy for those who betrayed her husband. ‘Clemmie dropped on him like a jaguar out of a tree,’ Winston once marveled.
Indie rock's founding premise – that everyone could be a producer of art and culture, the more inventively off-center the better – is now a staple of the new media of the information age. My piece in the June Atlantic.
Anita Anand's Sophia, reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, 6 February 2015
To understand how a spurned first lady can metamorphose into a presidential front-runner, let us follow one mastermind into the thicket of 19th-century marriage and politics. Review of Daisy Hay's Mr. and Mrs. Disraeli in the January/February Atlantic.
Review of Tristram Hunt's Cities of Empire in the Wall Street Journal, 13 December 2014
Alfred Habegger's Masked, reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, 21 June 2014.
Far from a prim and proper Victorian, Anna Leonowens was a serial fabricator—'mendacious to the bone.'
Have Literary Prizes Lost Their Meaning? (Have They Ever Had Any?)
Cultural prizes notoriously reward the wrong works for the wrong reasons: On the long list of worthies deprived of the Nobel for literature are Tolstoy, Proust, and Joyce.
Look closely at the emergence of our modern style, and you can see politics in the fabric seams. We have the 1930s to thank for a by-now-familiar paradox: Americans' clothes became more similar even as their bodies diverged along class lines.
My piece in the May Atlantic.
Why literature -- and not photography -- produced the iconic images of World War I. My piece in the December Atlantic.
"Shame: A Human History," Chicago Humanities Festival
Sunday, the 13th of October, 1:30-2:30.