Books, Culture & the Arts

Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor (Pantheon Books, 603 pages, $27.95) This vivid book wraps a political bombshell inside a riveting tale. Its central chapters deliver a blow-by-blow account of the unstoppable American dash toward Baghdad, blinding sandstorms and all, in […]

The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again by Peter Beinart (HarperCollins, 304 pages, $25.95) Has the time come for liberals to put Iraq behind us? The answer depends to some extent on which Iraq we’re talking about. Iraq the […]

Solidarity For Sale: How Corruption Destroyed the Labor Movement and Undermined America’s Promise by Robert Fitch (PublicAffairs, 560 pages, $28.50) Mobsters, Unions, and Feds: The Mafia and the American Labor Movement by James B. Jacobs (New York University Press, 320 pages, $32.95) America’s unions may be shrinking, but the literature on […]

Getting Even: Why Women Don’t Get Paid Like Men — And What To Do About It by Evelyn Murphy with E.J. Graff (Touchstone, 352 pages, $24.95) Just when you thought the news couldn’t get any worse, here comes a report from the trenches of the American workplace, where apparently women are still being […]

Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered our Government — and How We Take It Back by David Sirota (Crown, 384 pages, $24.00) David Sirota is the kind of pundit you’d like to have on your side in a knife fight and wouldn’t want to cross in a dark alley. After toiling […]

That must be a joke, I thought — along with a million or so others. Months ago, there began to appear, on newspapers and Web sites and storefronts, pictures of a tall young white man in a long beard, broad-brimmed hat and flowing coat: the perfect Talmudic scholar, dressed in the uniform of the Hasidic […]

The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time by Jeffrey D. Sachs, foreword by Bono (Penguin Books, 416 pages, $27.95) The Global Class War: How America’s Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future — And What It Will Take to Win It Back by Jeff Faux (Wiley, 304 pages, $27.95) Jeff […]

Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed The Reagan Legacy by Bruce Bartlett (Doubleday, 310 pages, $26.00) Even before it was published, Bruce Bartlett’s Impostor had a dramatic effect: It cost Bartlett his job as a policy analyst at a conservative think tank, the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), based […]

Taking Care: Ethical Caregiving in Our Aging Society by President’s Council on Bioethics (309 pages, free at www.bioethics.gov) When George W. Bush appointed the President’s Council on Bioethics in 2001, he stacked it with conservatives who had already taken stands against abortion, embryonic stem-cell research, euthanasia, and assisted suicide. Nonetheless, I approached the council’s sixth […]

On democratic wrongs both past and present, as told by two books and a new commission study on reform.