Books, Arts and Culture

Advice and Consent: The Politics of Judicial Appointments by Lee Epstein and Jeffrey A. Segal (Oxford University Press, 192 pages, $23.00 ) When John Roberts testified before the Senate in 2003 on his nomination to a federal appellate court, he described a process that had been used to vet judicial candidates while […]

The Opportunity: America’s Moment to Alter History’s Course by Richard N. Haass (Public Affairs, 242 pages, $25.00) Gulliver Unbound: America’s Imperial Temptation and the War in Iraq by Stanley Hoffmann with Frederic Bozo (Rowman and Littlefield, 168 pages, $19.95) Some books derive their significance not only from what they say but also from who […]

California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat Brown by Ethan Rarick (University of California Press, 501 pages, $29.95) On the rainy January morning in 1959 when Pat Brown took the oath as governor of California, he delivered an inaugural address that today would stun listeners as breathtakingly bold, if not suicidal. Seven times […]

Idea and reality are often miles apart, especially when it comes to business schemes. It’s a Panglossian truism displayed a few weeks ago with the release of Ed Klein’s The Truth About Hillary, the first high-visibility title from Sentinel, the imprint of the august publishing house Penguin that was launched in August 2004 for the […]

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas L. Friedman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 496 pages, $27.50) I opened Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat expecting another paean to globalization, and though it surely is that, this book is also a well-reported, original, and nuanced discussion that every […]

The Ethics of Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah (Princeton University Press, 384 pages, $29.95) Many of us, when we pause to reflect on the larger questions, tend to think of our lives as vast projects that we are responsible for planning, organizing, and living out to completion. We often think, in fact, that a […]