An Echo from the Cold War

The Nazis Next Door: How America Became A Safe Haven For Hitler’s Men by Eric Lichtblau. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2014. Hardcover, 231 pages (plus acknowledgments, notes, and index), $28. Write a nonfiction history to read like a novel—offering suspense, interesting...

Anti-Catholicism and Manifest Destiny

Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican-American War by John C. Pinheiro. Oxford University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 256 pages, $45.Missionaries of Republicanism, a volume in Oxford University Press’s prestigious Religion in America series,...

A New Look at George Orwell

George Orwell: English Rebel by Robert Colls. Oxford University Press, 2013. Hardcover, 330 pages, $34.95. Reviewed by John P. Rossi This is a curious book. It is not a traditional biography. Nor is it an intellectual biography. Instead it is an attempt, through a...

The Critic as Catalyst

The Long Voyage: Selected Letters of Malcolm Cowley, 1915–1987. Edited by Hans Bak. Harvard University Press, 2013. Hardcover, 848 pages, $40. Hans Bak rightly calls Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989) the “chronicler of the lost generation.” His pioneering literary history,...

Repeating Calamities

A conversation with Simon Schama.Simon Schama is University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University in New York. He has published fifteen history books and two novels, titles including The American Future: A History, The Embarrassment of Riches: An...