Much of science and the study of nature in the years before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859 came down to an effort to understand the mind of God.... Read More

Wine enthusiasts know the importance of terroir: environmental factors, and how grapes are grown, impact the flavor of the beverage. In "The Terroir of Whiskey", Rob Arnold—a... Read More

Supernatural creatures and earthly temptations haunt the characters of Nikolai Gogol’s "The Nose and Other Stories". A man is forced to win back a stolen letter by playing... Read More

Set during World War II, Endō Shūsaku’s novel "Sachiko" shifts from the fated city of Nagasaki to the horrors of Auschwitz, developing versatile individual and intersecting... Read More

Karl Coplan’s "Live Sustainably Now" suggests ways to reduce one’s carbon footprint with a “carbon budget” that may seem like a severe challenge, but whose strategies... Read More

Sarah Cole’s fascinating literary investigation "Inventing Tomorrow" shows how H. G. Wells’s work is relevant and meaningful today. Beginning by juxtaposing Virginia... Read More

Maya Abramovna Klotsvog, a Jewish Ukrainian mathematics teacher born in 1930, comes of age during the Soviet Union’s post-war era of power and becomes an exemplary Russian... Read More

David K. Johnson’s "Buying Gay" is a compelling retrospective of physique magazines, which provided gay men with an outlet in the 1950s and 1960s. The “Physique Era”... Read More

Jacques Schiffrin was an influential publisher in Paris at the outbreak of World War II, but soon he had to flee the life he’d built and begin again in the United States. The... Read More

The destructive earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster that struck Japan in March of 2011 may be growing more distant in the public consciousness, but in Kimura Yūsuke’s... Read More

Every day, thousands of “leading experts” tell us what to embrace and what to avoid. But how useful is the advice? How do useless trends and products make their way into the... Read More

In "Sentimental Tales", Mikhail Zoshchenko masterfully exhibits a playful seriousness. Hilarity flits over a biting satirical indictment of the 1920s Soviet literary scene. As... Read More