Estimated reading time: 6 minutes Name just about any billionaire in the tech industry, and Kara Swisher is sure to know him. In fact, she’s probably interviewed him several times onstage at her events or her podcasts or for her New York Times column, the Wall Street Journal, or one of the other publications she’s worked for over the past thirty years. Yes, that includes Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and all the other boldfaced names in tech that crop up in the news on a daily basis. Some she considers friends. Others, not so much. But she leaves no prisoners—not a singl ..read more

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Stories of the French Resistance crowd library shelves. They’re among the most popular books about World War II. But many give a misleading picture of reality. Only about 500,000 French men and women worked for the Resistance during the five years of the war, a little over one percent of the country’s population. And most enlisted only in the final months of the war, as Allied victory came to seem more likely. By contrast with resistance movements in other occupied countries, especially Poland and Yugoslavia, the French effort was paltry. In Poland, the Under ..read more

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes They ruled England (and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland from time to time) for more than three centuries. By my count, there were sixteen of them in all. They held sway, sometimes shakily, from 1154 to 1485. French in origin—their family’s roots lay in the County of Anjou—the Plantagenet kings reigned during the High and Late Middle Ages, when the English language evolved into Britain’s dominant tongue and the British parliamentary system began to take shape. But even the greatest of them—arguably, Henry II (1154-89), Edward III (1327-77), and Henry V (1413-22 ..read more

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes Part history, part memoir, part travelogue, Smoke and Ashes is the latest work by acclaimed Indian author Amitav Ghosh. Grounded in the extensive research he conducted in writing his extraordinary Ibis Trilogy, this new history of opium traces the story of the drug from its earliest known use six thousand years ago to the twenty-first century. It’s an account of how opium transformed the life of Ghosh’s family and shaped the course of events in India, China, and the United States in numerous and often surprising ways. As he writes, “opium remains pharmacologi ..read more

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes What most of us in the US know about Cuba revolves around three events. The Spanish-American War (“Remember the Maine” and Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders). The Bay of Pigs Invasion. And the Cuban Missile Crisis. But our two countries have a much longer and richer history than that. In fact, as historian Ada Ferrer illustrates so brilliantly in Cuba: An American History, the affairs of Cuba and the United States have been intertwined ever since President Thomas Jefferson envisioned adding Cuba as the seventeenth state. And Jefferson was just the first of many ..read more

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes Forget just about everything you learned in school about the peoples of the Americas before 1492—and about the land, too. It turns out that yesterday’s historians, anthropologists, paleontologists, and ecologists got it pretty much all wrong. As Charles C. Mann explains in this revised edition of this bestseller, latter-day investigations in all these fields have turned up persuasive evidence that the Americas before Columbus were far more heavily populated, the leading civilizations far more sophisticated, and their origins far further back in time than earl ..read more

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes For generations of boys and girls throughout the English-speaking world, British history comes across as one bloody king after another. And you might expect the same from The Shortest History of England, which weighs in at less than three hundred pages. But no. Historian James Hawes offers here a lively presentation, studded with scores of charts, maps, photos, and infographics that spotlight the principal takeaways in the text. The kings are there, and the queens, too. The most important of them, anyway. But Hawes illuminates the trends in society, politics ..read more

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes Anyone with more than a cursory knowledge of World War II knows that the Soviet Union paid the greatest price for resisting the Nazis. Estimates of the country’s total dead range from 24 to 30 million. But fewer know that China’s losses in the war were also massive. They were somewhere between 15 and 20 million, far greater than those in any other country. But for the USSR the war lasted four years. For China, it lasted fourteen. Because beginning in 1931, the Empire of Japan seized China’s northernmost province, Manchuria, and held it until the war’s bitter ..read more

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes On December 10, 2012, Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s acclaimed film about the hunt for Usama bin Laden, debuted in Los Angeles. The central figure is a CIA officer named Maya, who pursues traces of “UBL” for years until finally locating him in his compound in Pakistan. Her targeting information enables President Obama to unleash the SEAL team that finished the job on May 2, 2011. In fact, however, that hunt had begun not years but decades earlier in the 1980s. Then, a team of women analysts in a backwater office of the CIA began tracking UBL and his ..read more

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes You might pick up Tina Nguyen’s memoir, The MAGA Diaries, expecting a confessional, a mea culpa. I did. But that’s not the book she wrote. As Nguyen makes clear at the outset, “I never became a true believer and cannot profess to be one.” She is a journalist, and her seven-year immersion in the bizarre world of Right-Wing politics began when her college boyfriend dragged her into it at age nineteen. And it came to an end only when she started a mainstream job at Vanity Fair—where, sure enough, she ended up reporting on the Right. “Shuddering revulsion” for an ..read more