What’s the antidote to the global anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) threat on college campuses? For Joel Greenberg, a founder of one of the world’s largest privately held investment firms, it’s making sure students understand that Israeli soldiers aren’t…
Steal the Menu: A Memoir of Forty Years in FoodBy Raymond Sokolov(Knopf, 242 pages, $25.95) LET US BEGIN with a happy ending. On the last page of his engaging and appetizing food memoir, author Raymond Sokolov sounds a note of culinary…
LONG BEFORE THERE was the Big Apple, there was the Red Apple. Constantinople, the “Second Rome” capital of the Byzantine Empire, was the richest, most splendid city in the world for most of the millennium between its establishment by the…
Bolívar: American LiberatorBy Marie Arana(Simon & Schuster, 603 pages, $35) Although he stood only five and a half feet tall and weighed a scant 130 pounds, Simón Bolívar was one of history’s giants…and with an ego to match. He was…
Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern IndiaBy Ananya Vajpeyi(Harvard University Press, 342 pages, $39.95) SOMEWHERE BACK IN THE 1980s, at a small dinner gathering at the Indian Embassy in Washington, the then-ambassador (K.S. Bajpai if memory serves), who knew that…
Silent HouseBy Orhan Pamuk(Alfred A. Knopf, 334 pages, $26.95) About halfway through Silent House, Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk has one of his characters—a rather pathetic failed history professor named Faruk—complain that, “I had to find a little story, to make a…
Once upon a time, old friends John Hay (personal secretary to Abraham Lincoln and later secretary of state for both Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft) and Henry Adams (scholarly descendant of our second and sixth presidents and the author…
The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940–1965By William Manchester and Paul Reid(Little, Brown and Company, 1,182 pages, $40) Winston Churchill emerged from a rather murky gene pool. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, a brilliant but erratic younger son of…