“In 1860, at the climax of the Second Opium War, a joint English and French army marched on Peking and burned the imperial summer palace to the ground. It was the most dramatic possible demonstration of the accelerating superiority, military and financial, of Europe over the rest of the world.
Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History Of the Human Body, by Neil Shubin
“For the first time, Americans have the chance to meet an ancient ancestor. Lucy, the famous 3.2-million-year-old, human-like fossil from Ethiopia, is here on tour.
The Assist: Hoops, Hope, and The Game of Their Lives, by Neil Swidey
“Now is the winter of every sports fan’s discontent. The sports page these days all too often reads like a rap sheet, if not a treatise on advanced pharmacology.
Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism, by Ha-Joon Chang
“Bookstore shelves are loaded with offerings by economists and commentators seeking to explain, in accessible prose, why free-trade-style globalization is desirable and even indispensable for countries the world over.
Conception, by Kalisha Buckhanon
“On the same day I began reading Kalisha Buckhanon’s ambitious new novel, Conception, I just happened to receive a newsletter from a major African American literary Web site featuring its latest bestseller list.
Song Yet Sung, by James McBride
“James McBride’s famous memoir, The Color of Water, was a personal examination of the author’s upbringing in a large, biracial family. Looking back at the life of his white, Jewish mother, McBride chronicled a good part of the last century, from the pre-World War II South, to New York through the turbulent ’60s, right up
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