When a history of civil disobedience moves us, it is because the writer is able to convey the human emotion at the heart of efforts to stand against the crowd. Ruth Rosen in The World Split Open captures the rage that both forged and tore the women's movement in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Before W., there was Q.--John Quincy Adams, son of John Adams, the nation's second president. The Adamses were America's first political dynasty, and like Bush, Q. inherited his father's first name and a well-worn middle one from a favorite relative. But American dynasties aren't what they used to be. Where John Quincy Adams succeeded in becoming president 24 years after his father served, Bush may fail--and the difference will owe much to the level of independence each son was encouraged to pursue within the family, and the political value of that independence.