First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country  Thomas E. Ricks (Harper, 416 pages, $23) The next time I start a college, I’d like to hire Thomas E. Ricks as the…

The Blessing and the Curse: The Jewish People and Their Books in the Twentieth Century By Adam Kirsch (W. W. Norton, 279 pages, $22) I am a mark for a good survey, either in book or college-course form. I think…

What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley  By Adrian Daub (FSG Originals, 160 pages, $13.50) Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s iconoclastic 1995 essay “The Californian Ideology” was the first stab at an intellectual history…

Between Two Millstones, Book 2: Exile in America, 1978-1994  By Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated by Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore (University of Notre Dame, 566 pages, $27) In 1978, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn settled into a writerly life of unprecedented focus, four years…