the New York Times Books & Reviews

Uncomfortable, but Invaluable

Urban's is not a happy memoir. The subtitle, My War Within the Cold War, sums up his theme. The new policy involved years of often bitter struggle with both grotesque reactionaries and Western appeasers.

The Cult of Secrecy

Senator Moynihan has expanded his appendix to the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy report into an elegant, quotable, scholarly, and timely book.

Acheson, Simply Put

Chace's Acheson is encompassing, graceful and prodigiously researched and annotated.

What Combat Does to Man: Private Ryan and its Critics

Saving Private Ryan challenges our moral seriousness, and that is a daunting thing for a summer film to have done.

The Other France

 Modernizing the Provincial City does not tell us anything we did not already know about how the French became and are becoming what they have been and are.

Globalism and the American Tide

In this new book, Cairncross is a little breathless about the electronic communications that will conjure new worlds into existence. Nevertheless, because her text is well informed and her prose lucid, and because the technological developments ar

Loose Cannon

Whereas the principal aim of American nuclear policy during the Cold War was to deter a strong and aggressive Soviet Union, the nuclear risks we face today stem from Russian weakness.

Rude Awakening

Fouad Ajami's new book argues that the Arabs have defeated themselves by a blind adherence to anachronistic ideologies of self-glorification, both nationalist and Islamist.

Too Impressive to be Real

Two biographies clarify questions about Sumner Welles' long and spectacular career

Conrad's Nostromo and the Third World

Joseph Conrad's Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard, a 1904 novel about Westerners and indigenous inhabitants of an imaginary South American country, skillfully defines and dissects the problems of the Third World.

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May 22, 2013