Robert Oppenheimer
By Ian Crouch
This huge biography emphasizes Oppenheimer’s contributions as a theoretical physicist, but these are still overshadowed by the compelling story of his tenure as the director…
Zealot
By Macy Halford
Aslan’s riveting biography seeks the “historical” Jesus—not the God-man found in the canonical Gospels but the illiterate Jew from a Palestinian backwater who fought to…
The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan
By Amy Davidson
In 1938, Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old Jewish refugee in Paris, shot a German diplomat dead. The case, as Kirsch writes, remains surprisingly obscure, given our tendency…
The Girl Who Loved Camellias
By Julia Pierpont
The great French courtesan Marie Duplessis was muse to Alexandre Dumas fils and Franz Liszt, and, via Dumas, Verdi’s inspiration for “La Traviata.” Fleeing a…
You Are One of Them
By Jon Michaud
Holt’s beguiling début reimagines the story of Samantha Smith, the ten-year-old American girl who, in 1983, started a correspondence with the Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov.…
Southern Cross the Dog
By Jiayang Fan
In 1927, an epic flood engulfed Mississippi, tearing apart countless black families already mired in the savagery of the Jim Crow South. Robert Lee Chatham,…
Perilous Question
By Andrea Peed
The author of many historical biographies addresses the two-year period in the early nineteenth century when Britain, under the threat of populist revolt, considered electoral…
Story of My People
By Macy Halford
In 2004, Nesi, an Italian novelist and translator, was forced to sell the business that had been in his family for more than eighty years—a…
This Town
By David Remnick
Washington is a capital of biographies, histories, policy tomes, and even thrillers, but the fiction is invariably cartoonish and satirical or glumly portentous in the…
Dreadful
By Macy Halford
John Horne Burns rose to fame in the late nineteen-forties with “The Gallery,” a novel about American soldiers stationed in Italy during the Second World…
