History Essays

In the first 20 years of the 21st century, New York City has been convulsed by terrorist attack, blackout, hurricane, recession, social injustice, and pandemic. New Yorkers weaves the voices of some of the city's best talkers into an indelible portrait of New York in our time—and a powerful hymn to the vitality and resilience of its people.

Duffy engages with some of the central aspects of Western religion in the thousand years between the decline of pagan Rome and the rise of the Protestant Reformation. In the process, he opens windows on the vibrant and multifaceted beliefs and practices by which medieval people made sense of their world: the fear of death and the impact of devastating pandemic, holy war against Islam and the invention of the blood libel against the Jews, provision for the afterlife and the continuing power of the dead over the living, the meaning of pilgrimage and the evolution of Christian music.

For more than a decade, Jay McInerney’s vinous essays, now featured in The Wall Street Journal, have been praised by restaurateurs (“Filled with small courses and surprising and exotic flavors, educational and delicious at the same time” —Mario Batali), by esteemed critics (“Brilliant, witty, comical, and often shamelessly candid and provocative” —Robert M. Parker Jr.), and by the media (“His wine judgments are sound, his anecdotes witty, and his literary references impeccable” — The New York Times).

The Memory Chalet is a memoir unlike any you have ever experienced before. Each essay charts some experience or remembrance of the past through the sieve of Tony Judt's prodigious mind.

From the beloved host and creator of NPR's All Songs Considered and Tiny Desk Concerts comes an essential oral history of modern music, told in the voices of iconic and up-and-coming musicians, including Dave Grohl, Jimmy Page, Michael Stipe, Carrie Brownstein, Smokey Robinson, and Jeff Tweedy, among others - published in association with NPR Music.

In The Possessed we watch Elif Batuman investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy's ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin's wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has 100 different words for crying; and see an 18th-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their places in The Possessed.

Indiana champions shining examples of literary and artistic merit regardless of whether the individual artist or writer is famous; asserts a standard of care and tradition that has nothing to do with the ivory tower establishment; is unafraid to deliver the coup de grâce when someone needs to say the emperor has no clothes; speaks in the same breath—in the same discerning, insolent, eloquent way—about high art and pop culture. Few writers could get away with saying the things Gary Indiana does. And when the writing is this good, it's also political, plus it's a riot of fun.

History Matters brings together selected essays by beloved historian David McCullough, some published here for the first time, written at different points over the course of his long career but all focused on the subject of his lifelong passion: the importance of history in understanding our present and future. Edited by McCullough’s daughter, Dorie McCullough Lawson, and his longtime researcher, Michael Hill, History Matters is a tribute to a master historian and offers fresh insights into McCullough’s enduring interests and writing life. The book also features a foreword by Jon Meacham.

Solitude offers us that other space of thinking, another modality where we can meet different ingredients of perfection. The author is letting his pen engrave what the fuel of the holy history of solitude may inspire.

With the rise of cyberbullying and hate speech online, issues around climate change and technology, and the "move fast and break things" mentality of tech culture, Which Side of History? will urge listeners to draw the line. This book will help shape the conversations we have around technology in our society and our future for years to come.

Jorge Luis Borges wrote about Argentina as only someone passionate about his homeland can. On Argentina reveals the many facets of his passion in essays, poems, and stories through which he sought to bring Argentina forward on the world stage, and to do for Buenos Aires what James Joyce did for Dublin.

It is where Fidel Castro raised money to overthrow Batista and where two generations of Castro's enemies have raised armies to overthrow him, so far without success. It is where the bitter opera of Cuban exile intersects with the cynicism of U.S. foreign policy. It is a city whose skyrocketing murder rate is fueled by the cocaine trade, racial discontent, and an undeclared war on the island 90 miles to the south.

Famines are becoming smaller and rarer, but optimism about the possibility of a famine-free future must be tempered by the threat of global warming. That is just one of the arguments that Cormac Ó Gráda, one of the world's leading authorities on the history and economics of famine, develops in this wide-ranging audiobook, which provides crucial new perspectives on key questions raised by famines around the globe between the 17th and 21st centuries.

Stephen King once said that books are “a uniquely portable magic.” Here, Emma Smith takes listeners on a literary adventure that spans centuries and circles the globe to uncover the reasons behind our obsession with this captivating object. From disrupting the Western myth that the Gutenberg Press was the original printing project, to the decorative gift books that radicalized women to join the anti-slavery movement, to paperbacks being weaponized during World War II, to a book made entirely of cheese, Portable Magic explores how, when, and why books became so iconic.

What made FDR a more successful leader during the Depression crisis than Hoover? Why was Eisenhower more effective as supreme commander during World War II than he was as president? Why was Grant one of the best presidents of his day, if not in all of American history? What drove Bobby Kennedy into the scrum of electoral politics? Find the surprising and revelatory answers to these questions and more in this collection of new essays by great historians.

The Tashkent-born Russian-American literary critic, editor, essayist, and journalist Vladislav Davidzon has been covering post-Soviet Ukraine for the past ten years, a tumultuous time for that country and the surrounding world. In late 2015, a year and a half after the 2014 Revolution swept away the Moscow-leaning kleptocratic President Viktor Yanukovich, Davidzon and his wife founded a literary journal, The Odessa Review. This eagerly anticipated debut tells the real story of what happened in Ukraine from the keen and resilient perspective of an observer at its center.

New York Times best-selling author and cultural critic Chuck Klosterman presents a unique Audio Companion for Chuck Klosterman X, in which he contextualizes and reads from the collection of his best articles and essays, providing both a fascinating tour of the past decade and an ideal introduction to the mind of one of the sharpest and most prolific observers of our unusual times.

This essay comes from the NPR series This I Believe, which features brief personal reflections from both famous and unknown Americans. The pieces that make up the series compel listeners to rethink not only what and how they have arrived at their beliefs, but also the extent to which they share them with others.

In a series of penetrating and alarming essays, whose centerpiece is a commentary on the events of September 11, 2001 (deemed then too controversial to publish), Gore Vidal challenges the comforting consensus following September 11th and goes back and draws connections to Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. He asks were these simply the acts of “evil-doers?”

This collection of 24 essays is a perfect introduction to the world of Lewis Thomas. Topics ranging from the riddle of smelling to nuclear proliferation carry the gentle, unassuming persuasiveness that characterizes the author’s work. Here we are also introduced to the concerns that have distinguished Thomas’ literary career: the natural altruism of organisms; the inter-relatedness of all creatures; the fragility of the human species; the uneasiness of life on a threatened planet.