Alice Kaplan tells the life story of L’Étranger (The Outsider in Britain, The Stranger in the United States) with verve and insight.

In “Phenomena,” Annie Jacobsen explores the government’s research into things that go bump in the night. By Dick Teresi.

He was tour manager for the Band, producer of Mean Streets… so why, at nearly 70, is Jonathan Taplin taking on Facebook and co?

A new book profiles people who have devoted their lives to protecting the world’s at-risk animals. By Colette Harris.

On the 50th anniversary of his death, we take a look back at Langston Hughes' 1930 debut novel, Not Without Laughter.

Why do intellectuals fall in love with dictators and totalitarians?

Writing as an individual pursuit has been replaced by “community”—and literature is the worse for it.

What’s behind literary inflation? Authors get more verbose as they garner success, but prestige TV has also changed readers’ habits

Art historian’s book sheds new light on the Mona Lisa

Tooth decay is our most prevalent chronic health problem. Mary Otto's new book, ‘Teeth,’ examines the sources of rot, starting with the dental profession.

Spoiler alert: science won. By Eric Grundhauser.

A chat with Paul Hawken about his ambitious new effort to “map, measure, and model” global warming solutions. By David Roberts.

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, turns Leibniz’s argument for “the best of all possible worlds” on its head by proposing that we instead live in “the worst of all possible worlds.”

A social thinker illuminates his country’s populist divides. By Christopher Caldwell.

H.R. McMaster is one of the United States’ most astute theorists of modern warfare. Unlike so many other military thinkers, he understands that history is complex, contingent, and irrational, and that no amount of technological superiority could tame the real world’s unpredictable dynamism. So how could he have gotten it so wrong? Why, in spite of his sophistication, did his solutions to the American disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan ultimately fail to produce even medium-term victory? By Daniel Bessner.

I was half way through reading ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’ by Yuval Noah Harari on the tube the other week when a fellow commuter asked me what the book is about. Even though I have been writing reviews regularly for over five years, I still don’t enjoy being put on the spot about books I am still reading and mulling over, particularly at 8:15am on a crowded train.

We’re still feeling the aftershocks of the existentialist earthquake. Roger Scruton reviews Sarah Bakewell’s ‘At the Existentialist Café.’

“In 2013 Groth quit her job as an editor at Business Insider in New York in order to immerse herself in the hipster commune–cum–start-up accelerator–cum–urban renewal project–cum–weirdbeard performance-art scene known as the Las Vegas Downtown Project, initiated by Zappos.com cofounder Tony Hsieh, who believes that life should be based on the Ten Principles of Burning Man…” By Joe Bob Briggs.

Deborah Cohen reviews “Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First” by Frank Trentmann.

A concise biography of the complex symbolism and perception of this hue of blood and fire.

The University of Göttingen, in Germany, owns one of the world’s rarest books: an intact Gutenberg Bible. When Gerhard Steidl, a printer and publisher of photography books, was growing up in Göttingen, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, the book—one of only twenty surviving complete copies, and one of only four printed on vellum, rather than on paper—was sometimes on display at the university’s library.

In his new book, Michael Ruhlman explores how and why Americans have changed from corner-store customers to insatiable consumers of every edible product at our fingertips.

The image of Egypt as conceived by innovative Japanese publisher Takejirō Hasegawa was well outside the dominant paradigm and thus startling to Western eyes.

The Bloomsbury painter Vanessa Bell, née Stephen, lived most of her life (1879–1961) in the chilly, concealing shade of her younger sister, Virginia Woolf—the last twenty years following Virginia’s suicide in 1941. Though the attention paid to the Bloomsbury Group seems to be waning on both sides of the Atlantic, there is currently a surge of interest in Bell.

Harvard Business School (HBS) has come under the cosh this month. A new book, “The Golden Passport” by Duff McDonald, argues that HBS has lost its crown as the top business school in America and also become a breeding ground for toxic behaviour, with conflicts of interests rife within the school, and its alumni responsible for pushing a rapacious form of capitalism that explains many of the ills of the world’s biggest economy. Mr McDonald is a well-regarded author whose previous books, on McKinsey & Company, a consultancy, and JPMorgan Chase, a bank, were authoritative. Why is he attacking the school, and does he have a point?

The 1660 Klencke Atlas at the British Library is taller than most people, and now digitized its rare maps are easily accessible online.

Reports of the decline of the eBook are premature. The publishing industry is changing rapidly and data that appears robust tells us less than it once did.

The area affected by the Mississippi flood of 1927, the most severe in US history, is unrivaled in the annals of American “natural” disasters. By Peter Coates.

Just a few years ago, the Kindle was being blamed for the death of the traditional book. But the latest figures show a dramatic reversal of fortunes, with sales of ebooks plunging. So what’s behind this resurgence?

Marc Peter Keane in an American landscape architect who spent almost 20 years in Kyoto practicing landscape design. In fact, he was the first foreigner to receive a working visa as a landscape architect. Now back stateside, Keane maintains an office in upstate New York where he designs Japanese gardens for both public and private spaces. It’s hard to think of a better person to serve as a personal guide through 100 of Japan’s Finest Gardens.

Matthias Hollwich wants to upend the way we think about getting old, starting with the design of our homes and cities.

Long live actual, physical books

Besides gloomy

CBS News correspondent Jeff Pegues' new book exposes the under-reported "ghost skins": hidden white supremacists in law enforcement.

When the edges take center stage.