Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Under the direction of Oliver Cromwell, dozens of men deliberated to execute the captive King Charles I, and when Charles II came to power a decade later, those men were suddenly in the gravest danger. A fascinating new book tells their stories.
Read MoreA harrowing new book looks at the many spaces the Vietnam Was has occupied in the American mental landscape
Read MoreThe clashes of the Cold War weren't just matters of missiles and border guards; they also enlisted honey-voiced broadcasters, drunken novelists, and bookish magazine editors, as a fascinating new book makes clear
Read MoreIn 1944 a contentious group of delegates gathered in New Hampshire in order to lay out a blueprint for the postwar world economy; a great new history tells the story of Bretton Woods
Read MoreTwo years before he gained fame in the most painful way imaginable at the Battle of Little Bighorn, George Armstrong Custer led a large expedition into the Black Hills sacred to the Sioux - in search of gold
Read MoreIn his new book, historian Adam Zamoyski paints a picture of a Europe convulsed with fear of upheavals like the French Revolution and the tyranny of Bonaparte - and willing to do anything to prevent them
Read MoreA paradigm-shifting new book looks at the turbulent decade of the 1970s in United States politics and the re-shaping of the world
Read MoreA new reprint line from the New York Review of Books concentrates on literature from - and on - China's long literary history, and the first three volumes offer the strange, the familiar, and the beautiful.
Read MoreFrom the Puritans and their city on a hill to the Mormons to modern-day charlatans, the story of the United States is the story of competing faiths; a lively new book looks at that complicated tapestry
Read MoreRevolutionary Russian choreographer Leonid Yakobson fought prejudice, rivals, and the omnipresent Soviet censors to pursue his art, as a magnificent new book narrates
Read MoreA nimble and tremendously engaging history of the Middle Ages finally gets translated into English
Read MoreVeteran historian Brookhiser takes a look at the formative influences on Abraham Lincoln - not so much his own father as the Founding Fathers.
Read MoreWe think of the Middle East as a place of hopeless deadlocks - but once upon a time, an Egyptian president, an Israeli prime minister, and a U.S. president worked for two weeks to hammer out a plan for peace. Lawrence Wright takes readers to Camp David at a turning point in history.
Read MoreThe third voume of Rick Perlstein's Nixonland trilogy is sure to fly off the shelves, but those flying copies will be light to the tune of a few needed footnotes, omissions our managing editor finds, to say the least, troubling.
Read MoreBabe Ruth, Mayor Walker, Duke Ellington, Dorothy Parker - New York City in the Jazz Age was a bristling landscape of giants, most of them from out of town. A vast and enthralling new history tells the stories of the people who made the Big Apple.
Read MoreA controversial author's latest and most devastating indictment of Israel's policies toward its Palestinian citizens and neighbors
Read MoreRonald Reagan single-handedly ended the Cold War at Reykjavik in 1985. And if you believe that, his loyal aid Ken Adelman has a book to sell you.
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Read MoreIn her brilliantly scathing new book, Elaine Scarry charges that US Presidents, in maintaining and augmenting an enormous nuclear arsenal, have broken the social contract and become monarchs in all but name.
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Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.