Books

In September 2015, the body of a 3-year-old Syrian boy washed up on the shores of the Mediterranean, drowned during his family’s attempted escape from the civil war at home. The image of Alan Kurdi has since become an indelible symbol of a humanitarian crisis that continues today, and it …

THE BROWNS OF CALIFORNIA The Family Dynasty That Transformed a State and Shaped a NationBy Miriam Pawel Illustrated. 483 pp. Bloomsbury. $35. After the United States pulled out of the Paris climate accords, California’s governor, Jerry Brown, became the nation’s unofficial climate change ambassador. In this age of Trump, his …

“Where the Crawdads Sing,” by Delia Owens — the September pick of Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine book club — enters the fiction list this week at No. 9. This is Owens’s first novel; readers may remember the memoirs she wrote with her then-husband, Mark, about their years in Africa studying …

Six new paperbacks to check out this week. Read Automatic By TracePress.com Company if this Post need Change Tell Us!

♦ Even in peacetime, Bess Crawford, the intrepid battlefield nurse in Charles Todd’s World War I-era mysteries, finds herself in situations as dire as those in any combat zone. “The war had ended, but not the suffering,” she reflects, thinking of the wounded veterans now in her care. “No conquering …

It is, especially when Klinenberg discusses social infrastructure in terms of quality, not just quantity. While some of his examples simply reinforce the inarguable fact that we need more of these resources (more libraries! more gyms! more gardens!), his most illuminating cases gauge what happens in spaces whose designs are …

Lewis is particularly good at showing how Willkie’s implausible victory at the 1940 convention, often described as “the miracle of Philadelphia,” was in fact a carefully planned and skillfully organized stealth offensive by his well-connected supporters. While political types worked behind the scenes to organize a huge grass-roots campaign, newspaper …

THE LOST HISTORY OF LIBERALISM From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century By Helena Rosenblatt 348 pp. Princeton University. $35. Image These days, it seems nobody in America wants to be a liberal — or at least to be called one. For decades, right-wing politicians and media figures have wielded …

With each new season of children’s books, subjects seem to cluster. Not long ago, a slew of sloth books appeared. Then two blobfish books, in the same month. This year it’s picture books that wear their hearts on their sleeves, displaying value statements, as titles, on their jackets. Recently, “Be …

Goodwin’s special strength as a historian has always been her ability to present subtle, complex studies of her subjects’ personalities and to show how they interact with their times. Decades ago, as a graduate student in political science, she took an interest in the application of psychoanalytic theory to biography, …