Blues for a Blue World
The topic of the Anthropocene is so vast and, well, everywhere, that sometimes you just have to make brief forays into the muck and see if anything makes sense or connects.
Sarah Kendzior
Sarah Kendzior is best known for her reporting on St. Louis, her coverage of the 2016 election, and her academic research on authoritarian states. She is currently an op-ed columnist for the Globe and Mail and she was named by Foreign Policy as one of the “100 people you should be following on Twitter to make sense of global events.” Her reporting has been featured in many publications, including Politico, Slate, The Atlantic, Fast Company, The Chicago Tribune, TeenVogue, and The New York Times. Her books include The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior (2018, Flatiron Books) and, most recently, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America (2020, Flatiron Books).
By Sarah Kendzior
Making Merry Adventure from Sophisticated French History
France: An Adventure History remains, from cover to cover, a truly different history. It is long and densely packed with knowledge, just not told in a traditional narrative.
Why I Fly
Tomorrow I will drive thirty miles to pull out of a pole-barn hangar with peeling sheet metal siding a seventy-year-old, tube-and-fabric realization of my deeply embedded, retro dream, because for me and for the folks I most enjoy drinking a beer with, the soul is still to be found in flight and the machines that do it.
The Glory of the American Road
Jeff Guinn’s light-hearted prose takes the reader back to the early twentieth century. The book reads like a musical fugue: Its continuous theme is the annual trip; the variations, the uniqueness of each outing.
On Cars as Art
When Italian carmaker Enzo Ferrari declared the 1961 British Jaguar E-type sports car the most beautiful car ever made, it was a rare instance of a functional design object coming to be seen as a work of art. Thirty-five years later, Ferrari’s assessment was vindicated when the original Jaguar E-type was put on display in the Museum of Modern Art.
Touchstone Texts: The Continuing Importance of a Classic Work
To seek a more cautious understanding of fascism through scholarly literature, there is probably no place to start more respected than Robert O. Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism, now more than a decade old.
Why the Hemingway Monument Still Matters
It is useful and maybe refreshing that a new book by Steve Paul allows us to meet a pre-monumental Ernest Hemingway.
How to Save America
This America takes on academic historians for abandoning liberalism in the 1960s, when scholars became enamored with globalism and stopped writing about the nation’s history.
The “Long” 1968: A Historical Overview
What happened in the tumultuous 50 years before 1968, why 1968 shaped the 50 years that would follow, and how that pivotal year may yet shape our future.
Tales of Russia’s Politics of Darkness
Charles Clover catalogs each of Putin’s references to Eurasianism and, in so doing, draws a picture of Putin’s policies that pose an existential threat to Russian democracy, the Ukraine and other former Soviet republics, to Crimea, to European unity, NATO, and liberal and democratic institutions everywhere.
Remembering the War to End All Wars
Commentators have debated for almost a century the reasons why America entered the First World War. In the wake of the centennial observance, a raft of new books on the subject has appeared. Together they contribute information and interpretations that challenge readers to rethink their ideas about the subject and its significance for understanding present predicaments.
Fueling the American Decline
In the story of the 1970s' energy criris, historians have so far acknowledged the twin oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 as important events during the decade, but have not made them central to their analysis. Now Meg Jacobs argues that the politics of energy was in fact critical, as “the failure of the nation’s politicians to address the energy crisis contributed to the erosion of faith that Americans had in their government to solve their problems.”