Social historian Frank Snowden offers a very different route to an answer about Southern Italy in his meticulously researched and convincingly argued book, The Conquest of Malaria: Italy, 1900-1962: epidemiological, not economic.
Blog readers know I’ve been obsessing this summer over the causes of southern Italian underdevelopment. One obvious hypothesis blames the relative poverty of southern Italy on organized crime.
It’s always nerve wracking when a friend publishes a book. What if it’s not good? That question never arises with my friend David Gratzer, rapidly emerging as one of this continent’s leading experts on free-market healthcare reform.
Edith Wharton seems at one point to have intended The Custom of the Country as a feminist novel, an expose of the harm done to women by their exclusion from public life.
I re-listened to David Copperfield as I was applying the finishing touches to my own novel, for the same reason that I watched a lot of pro-tennis when I was struggling to master the game.
Robert Draper, author of Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush, scored an amazing coup in gaining six hours of interview time with the president shortly after the 2004 presidential election.
In The Death of the Grown-Up, Diana West has produced an ambitious, sophisticated, and closely argued case that the ills of American culture can be traced to a society-wide revulsion from the obligations and responsibilities of adulthood.
James A. Garfield has always been for me one of the great might-have-beens of American history: the most substantial personality to hold the presidency between Ulysses Grant and Theodore Roosevelt, and the only one of the post-Civil War presidents to care