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Beyond belief

One of the purposes of escapist reading is to feed our daydreams.
Three literary fantasies for summer — including a true one
By CHARLES TAYLOR | June 18, 2010

Planning to be lazy and let it all go this summer? Sorry, there are too many good books to read. From Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector to Richard Rhodes's The Twilight of the Bombs and Jean Valentine's Break the Glass , you'll find tomes gal
Load up your Goodman, Gordimer, Franzen, Moody, and more
By BARBARA HOFFERT | June 18, 2010

A Rhode Island filmmaker’s tribute to the Good War

Amid the moral ambiguity of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — the handwringing over weapons of mass destruction, drone attacks, and the rights of detainees — there is something startling about the raw patriotism of the documentary Navy Heroes of Norman
Heroes
By DAVID SCHARFENBERG | June 04, 2010

Cowardly new world

I know that the ancient Mayan calendar indicated the world may end in 2012, but I doubt it. Instead, let me illustrate how bad it might get, starting in that year.
Diverse-City
By SHAY STEWART-BOULEY | May 28, 2010

Photos: 'The Kennedys' at Peabody Essex Museum

Photographs of JFK and his family
"The Kennedys” exhibit at Peabody Essex Museum, through July 18
By RICHARD AVEDON | May 21, 2010

Hearing voices

Don’t be fooled by its textbook appearance — How To Wreck a Nice Beach (Melville House/Stop Smiling) is hardly a dry anthropological study of “The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop,” as the subtitle suggests.
Dave Tompkins chases the Vocoder
By CHRIS FARAONE | May 14, 2010

Meet Evan Thomas

Narrative is the throughline in the professional life of Evan Thomas.
The parallel careers of Newsweek's premier wordsmith
By PETER KADZIS | May 14, 2010

Slideshow: Photos from the War Lovers

Photos from Evan Thomas' book The War Lovers.
Photos of Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, William Randolph Hearst, and more from Evan Thomas' book.
By EVAN THOMAS | May 14, 2010

Jewishfilm.2010

They aren’t the most auspicious of couplings: an Arab and Jewish girl in Nazi-occupied Tunis in 1942; a butcher and his apprentice in Haredi Jerusalem; the survivor of a terrorist bombing and a stranger who might be a guardian angel.
Love is stronger than death at Jewishfilm.2010
By PETER KEOUGH | April 02, 2010

Hallelujah!

The Democrats won and the Republicans lost. That, in a nutshell, is the bottom line.
Health-care reform is a new high-water mark
By EDITORIAL | March 26, 2010

A black leadership silent on abortion fabrications

Last month, controversial anti-abortion-rights billboards appeared in Georgia hinting that abortion is a tool of black genocide.
Choice
By MARY ANN SORRENTINO | March 26, 2010

Titus Andronicus | The Monitor

As if to allay any fears of a starchy Civil War concept album, Titus Andronicus frontman Patrick Stickles spends the first minute of The Monitor shouting out a series of cultural artifacts that postdate that conflict by, oh, about a hundred years: th
XL (2010)
By MIKAEL WOOD | March 19, 2010

Nudity throughout history

By ALEXIS HAUK | March 19, 2010

Interview: Max Raabe

"It was so crazy in the '20s, in the Weimar Republic. Everything was so open-minded and wide, and that is why I love that period so much."
Killer cabaret: bringing Berlin to Boston
By JEFFREY GANTZ | March 05, 2010

Review: Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief

That must've been one rockin' party the gods of Ancient Greece had with the hotties of America back in the early '90s, since they left a string of demigods with absentee-daddy issues behind.
Freaks and Greeks
By BRETT MICHEL | February 19, 2010

Review: The Most Dangerous Man in America

At age 79, Daniel Ellsberg is getting the last guffaw.
Hail to Daniel Ellsberg
By GERALD PEARY | February 12, 2010

Interview: Daniel Ellsberg

"By ordinary standards of presidents, Obama is a decent man. But those standards aren't good enough."
Courage under fire
By CHRIS FARAONE | February 12, 2010

How to Celebrate Presidents' Day 2010

Pin the mustache on Teddy Roosevelt, and more
Big Fat Whale
By BRIAN MCFADDEN | February 12, 2010

Creating a legend

The soldiers of the 20th Maine Regiment marched quickly into the night, moving west from Hanover toward Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on July 1, 1863.
How Little Round Top made Chamberlain a hero
By DONALD G. FULTON | January 08, 2010

Lincoln Yule log

Abraham Lincoln, as he said in his second inaugural address, yearned to "bind up the nation's wounds." Since the great man was assassinated little more than a month later, he didn't quite get around to it. No worry, Paula Vogel has taken over the job wi
The Huntington celebrates A Civil War Christmas
By CAROLYN CLAY | November 27, 2009

The South's opt-out program

During the Civil War
Idiot Box
By MATT BORS | November 13, 2009

Sarah and the shipmates

Humorist, historian, superhero. Sarah Vowell is a woman of letters and voices.
Vowell on the Puritans and the founding of Rhode Island
By GREG COOK | October 23, 2009

Review: Earth Days

Those who worry that the eco-movement seems incapable of getting beyond its white upper-middle-class base will be disturbed anew by Robert Stone’s Earth Days , where every talking head is a well-bred Caucasian.
Did you know Nixon once signed progressive eco-legislation?
By GERALD PEARY | October 09, 2009

Classical inheritance

A teacher told me years ago that someday "you young people will inherit classical music. Then you can do with it what you want." And so I've been waiting.
Two fixtures hand over the reins to a younger generation
By EMILY PARKHURST | October 02, 2009

Review: Darkest of Days

In Darkest of Days you play as Alexander Morris, a soldier fresh from Little Big Horn. Right after you get nailed with some feather-tipped arrows, KronoteK rushes in to “save” you. There's a catch, though: you then go to work for KronoteK.
Time travel's last stand?
By MADDY MYERS | September 25, 2009

Interview: Ken Burns

After watching The National Parks: America's Best Idea , it would be easy to conclude that it all could have been said a lot faster. Ken Burns disagrees — but he's not just being defensive.
On his latest PBS documentary, The National Parks
By CLIF GARBODEN | September 25, 2009

The whole truth

It's the economy, stupid. Or maybe politics or literature. Fall non-fiction goes wide and deep, so plan for some marathon reading.
Tomes from the 'fact' department
By BARBARA HOFFERT | September 18, 2009

Beat Circus | Boy From Black Mountain

The subjects of the stories sung on this second installment of Beat Circus's "Weird American Gothic" trilogy attain greater awareness of family, culture, and the world by voyaging across schisms in perception.
Cuneiform (2009)
By BARRY THOMPSON | September 04, 2009

Hot Nazi beach reads

Nazis aren't blitzing just the movie screens this year, though — they're also invading the bookstores, with battalions of novels and non-fiction tomes published or upcoming.
The new wave of Reich books: pop genres, good Germans
By PETER KEOUGH | August 21, 2009

The Wat Misaka story

He only played three games and scored seven points in the 1947-48 season, but Wataru Misaka's story is netted, slammed, and sealed in NBA history. The 5'7" Japanese-American was the New York Knicks' first-round draft pick and the first non-white basket
Making a rebound
By ABIGAIL CROCKER | August 07, 2009

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