By Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: The Dire Warning
by John Lukacs

Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England
by Lynne Olson

Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization
by Nicholson Baker

Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost the Empire and the West Lost the World
by Patrick J. Buchanan.

At the end of 1936, Winston Churchill's fortunes had sunk as low as he would ever know. His career had long resembled Snakes and Ladders, the nursery board game where a shake of the dice leads to either a brisk ascent or a downward slither. Already famous in 1900 when he entered Parliament at the age of twenty-five, he was home secretary at thirty-four (having nimbly deserted the Conservatives before the Liberals won their landslide in 1906), and went on climbing the ladder until the outbreak of the Great War. Then in 1915 he stepped on a nasty snake. He was saddled with the blame for the Dardanelles debacle and left government to command an infantry battalion on the Western Front. After easing his way back into office, he stealthily returned to the Conservative fold, but in 1931, while the Tories were in opposition, he resigned from the party leadership because of his bitter opposition to Gandhi's release from prison, and to any measure of Indian self-government.

By Frank Rich

When, in the summer of 1968, Norman Mailer covered the Republican and Democratic conventions on assignment for Harper's magazine, he was forty-five, an aging rebel looking for a new cause. He had started to drift restlessly from his single-minded pursuit of the Great American Novel into filmmaking and journalism, two callings that were also in the throes of seismic generational change.

By Thomas Powers

The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict
by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes

The Other Side of the Mountain: Mujahideen Tactics in the Soviet-Afghan War
by Ali Ahmad Jalali and Lester W. Grau

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001
by Steve Coll

The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America
by Kenneth M. Pollack

The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the State of Iran
by Yossi Melman and Meir Javedanfar

The Fateful Pebble: Afghanistan's Role in the Fall of the Soviet Empire
by Anthony Arnold

The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan
translated from the Russian and edited by Lester W. Grau

Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy
by Andrew Cockburn

Still Broken: A Recruit's Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, from Baghdad to the Pentagon
by A.J. Rossmiller

The Soviet-Afghan War: How a Superpower Fought and Lost
by the Russian General Staff, translated from the Russian and edited by Lester W. Grau and Michael A. Gress

There is a working assumption among the American people that a new president enters the White House free of responsibility for the errors of the past, free to set a new course in any program or policy, and therefore free--at the very least in constitutional theory, and perhaps even really and truly free--to call off a war begun by a predecessor. No one would expect something so dramatic on the first day of a new administration but it remains a fact that the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces, and the power that allowed one president to invade Iraq would allow another to bring the troops home.

By Ingrid D. Rowland

Bathers, Bodies, Beauty: The Visceral Eye
by Linda Nochlin

WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution
an exhibition at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, February 17–May 12, 2008

In 1971, Linda Nochlin, an assistant professor of art history at Vassar, published an essay asking 'Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?' Her question was meant to provoke, and it did, although she tried to suggest all along that it not be taken entirely seriously. Six years later, together with another art historian, Ann Sutherland Harris, she mounted an exhibition in several US venues featuring women artists from the Renaissance to the present.

By Francine Prose

Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky: A London Trilogy
by Patrick Hamilton, with an introduction by Susanna Moore

Hangover Square: A Story of Darkest Earl's Court
by Patrick Hamilton

The Slaves of Solitude
by Patrick Hamilton, with an introduction by David Lodge

Bob, a waiter at the London pub from which Patrick Hamilton's 1929 novel, The Midnight Bell, takes its title, has saved--from tips, in shillings and pence--eighty pounds. On his days off, Bob likes to stroll past the bank that houses the fortune which, he imagines, will someday enable him to quit the bar and become a writer. But Bob's plans for the future are disrupted when he falls in love with a young, beautiful, ferociously unredeemable prostitute, Jenny Maples. Unlike Bob, the reader soon intuits that Jenny will wind up with most, if not all, of those eighty pounds. But before we can think 'Oh, that story,' Patrick Hamilton has us too busy worrying about Bob--and about his bank account in particular. As the balance drops and drops again to finance generous 'loans,' to purchase a new suit, and to pay for a holiday trip to Brighton, we find ourselves anxiously subtracting these increasingly reckless sums from the original eighty as Hamilton evokes (in the reader, if not in his hero) the most upsetting financial panic in literature since Emma Bovary frantically counted and recalculated her debts.

By Malise Ruthven

Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-first Century
by Marc Sageman

Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11
by Matthias Küntzel, translated from the German by Colin Meade

The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State
by Noah Feldman

How We Missed the Story: Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, and the Hijacking of Afghanistan
by Roy Gutman

Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari'a
by Abdullahi Ahmed an-Na'im

Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of al-Qaida Strategist Abu Mus'ab al-Suri
by Brynjar Lia

The Sayyid Qutb Reader: Selected Writings on Politics, Religion, and Society
edited by Albert J. Bergesen

The Talibanization of Southeast Asia: Losing the War on Terror to Islamist Extremists
by Bilveer Singh

Al Qaeda in Its Own Words
edited by Gilles Kepel and Jean-Pierre Milelli, translated from the Arabic by Pascale Ghazaleh

In London eight men--all British nationals--are currently on trial for an alleged 2006 plot to destroy seven transatlantic aircraft in mid-air, using liquid explosives disguised as soft drinks. According to the prosecution they could have killed some 1,500 people, nearly half the number of those who died in the September 11 attacks. The airport security staff were to have their attentions distracted by 'dirty' magazines in the would-be suicide bombers' hand luggage--a neat example of jihad-by-pornography, fighting the infidel West with its own salacious habits.

By Robert Barnett

The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama
by Pico Iyer

Every so often, between the time a book leaves its publisher and the time it reaches its readers, events occur that change the ways it can be read. Such is the case with Pico Iyer's account of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, the exiled leader of Tibet. The eruption of major protests in March in the former mountain kingdom has rendered Iyer's gentle study of spirituality in the global age one that is less likely now to be seen as an inquiring portrait of a major thinker of our times than to be scanned for any sign of political prescience or treasured for the recollection of an innocence since lost. Few predicted the intensity of recent events inside Tibet, nor can anyone now be certain of their outcome.

By Herbert Schreier, M.D.

By Nicolaas H. Biegman

By Michael McGiffert

By Peter Green

The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories
edited by Robert B. Strassler, translated from the Greek by Andrea L. Purvis, with an introduction by Rosalind Thomas

A Commentary on Herodotus Books I–IV
by David Asheri, Alan Lloyd, and Aldo Corcella, edited by Oswyn Murray and Alfonso Moreno, with a contribution by Maria Brosius

When Herodotus was giving a public reading to an Athenian audience from his work-in-progress, one late source relates, among those present, brought along by his father Olorus, was the adolescent Thucydides. Herodotus' performance allegedly reduced the boy to tears, and the speaker, duly flattered, declared: 'Olorus, your son has a natural love of learning.' This improving, but almost certainly fictional, anecdote invites a cynical interpretation. Its author, I suspect--knowing what lay ahead for Thucydides, and his influence on posterity--saw those tears as precipitated by furious competitiveness rather than admiration. The young paragon was all set, first to learn everything he could, without acknowledgment, from his famous predecessor, and then to work out a methodology that would bury him without trace as a gullible and frivolous popularizer.

By Sanford Schwartz

Frida Kahlo
an exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, October 27, 2007–January 20, 2008; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, February 20–May 18, 2008; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, June 16–September 28, 2008.

Frida Kahlo was an ironic and devilish person, and so she might be intrigued by the thought that, for this writer, at least, her finest single work is in an outward respect her least typical. Kahlo is known, of course, for her many unsparing self-portraits, images where she can confront us with tears on her cheeks or exhibit herself as a bedridden patient or victim. They present a woman who, facing us as well with her distinctive and unforgettable dark, unbroken, single eyebrow and clear suggestion of a mustache, and often wearing clothes or accompanied by details that are redolent of her native Mexico, exudes a smoldering fury--an expressionist tension that, until recent decades, was rarely encountered in the work of women artists.

By George Soros

Judy Woodruff: You write in your new book, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets, that 'we are in the midst of a financial crisis the likes of which we haven't seen since the Great Depression.' Was this crisis avoidable?

By Amy Knight

Putin. Itogi. Nezavisimyi Ekspertnyi Doklad (Putin: The Results: An Independent Expert Report)
by Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Milov

As he prepares to step down from the Russian presidency in early May, Vladimir Putin has been boasting about his accomplishments. In a speech to the State Council on February 8, he talked of the stability that his government had established, thanks to which 'people once more have confidence that life will continue to change for the better.' A few days later, during the last of his long annual press conferences as president of the Russian Federation, Putin said: 'I have worked like a galley slave throughout these eight years, morning till night, and I have given all I could to this work. I am happy with the results.'

By Michael Dirda

Shadow Country: A New Rendering of the Watson Legend
by Peter Matthiessen

What becomes a legend most? Shadow Country--a nine-hundred-page recension of Peter Matthiessen's linked novels Killing Mr. Watson (1990), Lost Man's River (1997), and Bone by Bone (1999)--is quietly subtitled 'A New Rendering of the Watson Legend.' That last word is carefully chosen, for Edgar J. Watson (1855-1910) is, like Davy Crockett or Jesse James, one of those larger-than-life figures in American history, as much myth as man. While one Web site lists the sugar-cane planter among the twenty-five most important people in the history of Florida, his contemporaries dubbed him 'Bloody' Watson, 'Emperor' Watson, the desperado Watson. Though born in South Carolina, he left his indelible mark on the Gulf side of South Florida, in the region called the Ten Thousand Islands, a frontier world long attractive to outlaws and outcasts. Marjory Stoneman Douglas summarizes his story--or at least the received wisdom--in her 1947 classic The Everglades: River of Grass:

By Max Rodenbeck

Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East
by Robin Wright

If there is such a thing as a pinnacle in the landscape of international journalism, Robin Wright surely stands atop it. The Washington Post's chief diplomatic correspondent has braved thirty-five years of wars, crises, and famines, not to mention bureaucratic sniping in Washington, to illuminate the world's darker interstices. She has scored many scoops, captured a stack of awards, authored a half-dozen books, and accumulated a star-studded Rolodex that must be the envy of every hack within the Beltway.

By Sarah Kerr

Unaccustomed Earth
by Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri is, and is not, an old-fashioned writer. She is too natural to be anyone's imitator. Yet the kind of relationship she invites readers into can feel familiar from some of the books we were drawn into long ago, when we were first learning about the good company reading can provide. Among the pleasingly varied, carefully sequenced notes struck in Interpreter of Maladies (1999), Lahiri's first collection of stories, there are a couple of almost mythical-feeling character studies, painful in content but comic in execution, of unlucky Calcutta women and their watchful neighbors. A scene at an ancient temple casts judgment on a heedlessly selfish young Indian-American mother revisiting the old country. There are trysts and marriages: the flaming and fizzling of a Boston public radio worker's affair with an unavailable Indian husband, a young couple undone by a stillbirth, a Hartford housewarming thrown by mismatched newlyweds, one stodgy and the other chic and carefree.

By Natalie Zemon Davis

The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings
translated from the French and with an afterword by Tom Conley, edited and with an introduction by Luce Giard

The Certeau Reader
edited by Graham Ward

Culture in the Plural
translated from the French and with an afterword by Tom Conley, edited and with an introduction by Luce Giard

Heterologies: Discourse on the Other
translated from the French by Brian Massumi, foreword by Wlad Godzich

The Mystic Fable, Volume One: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
translated from the French by Michael B. Smith

The Possession at Loudun
translated from the French by Michael B. Smith, with a foreword by Stephen Greenblatt

The Practice of Everyday Life
translated from the French by Steven F. Rendall

The Writing of History
translated from the French by Tom Conley

Michel de Certeau: Interpretation and Its Other
by Jeremy Ahearne

Though in North America Michel de Certeau is known only in the university world, in France he was a celebrity, viewed as a major cultural critic, an innovative historian of early modern religion, and a religious thinker who in his life and work pursued a particularly engaged, open, and generous form of Catholicism. At his funeral in Paris in 1986, the strains of Edith Piaf's 'Non, je ne regrette rien'--'No, I regret nothing'--wafted over the pews in the Jesuit Church of Saint Ignatius in Paris, and through loudspeakers to the hundreds of mourners crowded in the square outside. The song followed a reading of I Corinthians, where Paul says that 'God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise,' and a poem by a seventeenth-century mystic about a 'vagabond soul' seeking divine love throughout the world. These verses, requested by Michel de Certeau himself, suggest the unorthodoxy of his spiritual and scholarly vision.

By Wendell Berry

By Ruth Zweifler