Judge and writer Adam Gopnik said that Red Memory is a “haunting” read. “Haunting for the memories, many of them horrible, that it evokes; haunting because so much of that memory has been suppressed or repressed by the Chinese Communist party in the years since; and haunting because of how violent ruptures in social fabric can often seem to heal themselves while leaving a scar behind.” Read more
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This conviction of history’s importance is driving a national movement of underground historians that has slowly taken shape over the past 20 years. I call these people historians as a shorthand for a broad array of China’s brightest minds: university professors, independent filmmakers, underground magazine publishers, novelists, artists and journalists. Some might be thought of as dissidents, but most have one foot inside the system, where they continue to hold jobs, own property and raise families. All of them risk their careers, their futures and prison to publish clandestine journals, banned books and independent documentary films. Read more
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In an age variously described as posthumanist, transhumanist, or anti-humanist, an age where inhumane rulers hold sway over large swathes of the globe, an age where artificial intelligence threatens to render humanism a quaint relic from the past, Bakewell makes clear what we risk losing should we fail to connect with our humanist heritage. She distills this credo into three principles: freethinking (which emphasizes our moral conscience and duty to others), inquiry (which privileges reason over dogma as a guide to our lives), and hope (which insists that, though our lives are brief and fallible, we can achieve meaningful things). Read more
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The award, one of the most prestigious in the field of American history, honors “scope, significance, depth of research and richness of interpretation.” Read more
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Harvard professor Tiya Miles’s book about the history of an enslaved mother and her daughter has won this year’s US$75,000 Cundill History Prize. Read more
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Over a recent 9 month period more than 1,500 books have been banned in schools, most featuring nonwhite protagonists, dealing with racism, or addressing the LGBTQ experience. Read more
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New York City is home to wonderful bookstores, but there used to be so many more of them to choose from — from Coliseum Books, just south of Columbus Circle; to Ivy’s Curiosities and Murder Ink on the Upper West Side; to the dearly departed St. Mark’s Bookshop in the East Village. By one count, there were 386 booksellers in Manhattan in 1950, including almost 40 on a six-block stretch of Fourth Avenue. (By comparison, there are fewer than 100 in the city now.) Here’s a look back at a few old favorites. Read more
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A group of Dutch historians has published an in-depth criticism of the work and conclusion of a cold case team that said it had pieced together the “most likely scenario” of who betrayed Jewish teenage diarist Anne Frank and her family. Read more
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In this exceptional true crime account, Franscell (The Darkest Night) tells the fascinating story of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit’s early days and the very first psychological profile used to catch a killer … Franscell’s portrait of rural Montana will remind many of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and the way he weaves together the threads of the different killings is spellbinding. This is a must for Mindhunter fans. Read more
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Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, historian Jonusas debuts with an impressive and deeply unsettling account of the Benders, a family of German immigrants who killed at least 10 people after they settled in Kansas’s Labette County in 1870 … Radiant prose enhances the page-turning narrative. The combination of true crime and a vivid depiction of frontier life earn this a spot on the shelf next to David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon. Read more
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