What was the real significance of William James's breakdown? Of the anti-Semitism in T.S. Eliot's writing? What's the connection between Larry Flynt's Hustler and Jerry Falwell's evangelism? Why doesn't Norman Mailer "get" Madonna? And who else but Louis Menand would describe former Vice President Al Gore as "a holist, a post-postmodernist, and a goo-goo"? At each step in his latest journey through American culture history, Menand has an original...

Has American higher education become a dinosaur? Why do professors all tend to think alike? What makes it so hard for colleges to decide which subjects should be required? Why do teachers and scholars find it so difficult to transcend the limits of their disciplines? Why, in short, are problems that should be easy for universities to solve so intractable? The answer, Louis Menand argues, is that the institutional structure and the educational philosophy...

The Metaphysical Club was an informal group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, to talk about ideas. Its members included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., future associate justice of the United States Supreme Court; William James, the father of modern American psychology; and Charles Sanders Peirce, logician, scientist, and the founder of semiotics. The Club was probably in existence for about nine months. No records were kept. The one thing...

The classic thriller about a hostile foreign power infiltrating American politics: “Brilliant . . . wild and exhilarating.” —The New Yorker
 
A war hero and the recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, Sgt. Raymond Shaw is keeping a deadly secret—even from himself. During his time as a prisoner of war in North Korea, he was brainwashed by his Communist captors and transformed...

"On the night of July 3, 1870, Elizabeth Tilton confessed to her husband that she'd had an affair with their pastor, Henry Ward Beecher. This secret would soon transfix America, for Beecher was the most famous preacher of the day, founder of the most fashionable church in Brooklyn Heights, a presidential hopeful, an influential supporter of abolition, and a leader of the campaign for women's suffrage. When Beecher tried to silence the Tiltons, it...

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview: #1 As schools and businesses shut down, the Fed went into overdrive. Alongside COVID-19, another disease was spreading, and its progress could not be halted using N-95s or social distancing. This disease moved faster than any virus, and threatened economic harm as great as the pandemic itself. #2 A panic is when a shock causes an initial round of selling, which in...

"A delightful blend of history, romance, and the supernatural, served with a generous helping of wit and humor."—Booklist

Nostradamus, a ruthless queen, and a young poet find themselves in the fight of their lives...

Lady Sibille never goes looking for trouble, but trouble always seems to find her. When she inadvertently becomes the master of an ancient cursed head of Menander the Magus—the Master of All Desires—she suddenly has

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"A great story—how modernism brought down the regime of censorship—told as a great story. Kevin Birmingham's imaginative scholarship brings Joyce and his world to life. There is a fresh detail on nearly every page."—Louis Menand, Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Metaphysical Club
For more than a decade, the book that literary critics now consider the most important novel in the English language was illegal to own,...