Wednesday, July 9th   Ark of the Liberties: America and the World by Ted Widmer

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The foundations of Wilsonian foreign policy and its permutations under George W. Bush A Review by Art Winslow Woodrow Wilson is a tip-of-the-tongue name in foreign policy circles these days, largely because the members of the Bush administration are seen as revamped Wilsonians. Former Middle East envoy Dennis Ross, in his recent book Statecraft, identifies them as such, citing their belief in the transformative power of the United States and its role as an example and their conviction that divine providence guides their work -- with the profound difference, Ross notes, that Wilson "believed fervently in collective security and international law," which would limit national sovereignty and also "constitute a practical and a moral inhibition on the use of force." Similarly, Council on Foreign Relations fellow Walter Russell Mead contends, in Power, Terror, Peace, and War, that the new claque of Wilsonians, neoconservatives who have dominated Republican foreign-policy debates in recent years, have "radically restructured the Wilsonian agenda" and that the secular shapers of progressive...   Read the entire review More reviews from Los Angeles Times

The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer New Fiction A Review by The Atlantic Monthly The characters of Meg Wolitzer's latest novel are so insightful and articulate that it's a pleasure to listen to them think. Wolitzer's engaging novel focuses on women who are breath-takingly educated and fully prepared to fill the most-rigorous roles in the workplace, but who nevertheless spend a good portion of what might have been peak career-building time fully engrossed in child-rearing and homemaking. They have the resources -- both external and internal -- to be well-satisfied by such a course. At the same time, though, these women are the most inclined to doubt and wonder: having...   Read the entire review More reviews from The Atlantic Monthly				Fire and Knowledge: Fiction and Essays by Peter Nadas The Genius of Péter Nádas A Review by Deborah Eisenberg In countries where a state apparatus, by means of continuous and perceptible monitoring, threats, and reprisals, accords due respect to the power of language, it is hardly surprising that both readers and writers would take words and their uses seriously. And although it's certain, insofar as anything can be, that Peter Nadas would have become an extraordinary writer no matter what his circumstances, life in Hungary under a Soviet-backed regime has left a burning imprint on his writing. His work's frank claims to be on a high level, its ambition, assurance, rigor, and tone of urgency, as well ...   Read the entire review More reviews from New York Review of Books
The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing by Richard Dawkins Rules and wonderment A Review by Jerry A. Coyne Richard Dawkins's new collection of delectable prose, The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, is less an anthology of set pieces than a treasury: a series of short titbits designed to pique the reader's appetite, helping him to decide which science writers to investigate more deeply. It enables you to sample eighty-three selections by seventy-nine writers - physicists, geologists, mathematicians, chemists and, of course, evolutionary biologists. Unlike its main competitor, the estimable Faber Book of Science (2005), this collection confines itself to writing by scientists rather than...   Read the entire review More reviews from Times Literary Supplement				Massacre River by Rene Philoctete A Review by Chris Faatz At once magical and grotesque, Rene Philoctete's amazing novel captures in a unforgettable manner a particularly dire moment of Haitian history: the 1937 massacres of Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic. Massacre River is a monument of magical realism, a cascade of images and bizarre incongruities that nevertheless tell an irresistible story, complete with sympathetic (and unsympathetic) characters and a chilling moral. It's the story of Dominican worker and union activist Pedro Brito and his young Haitian wife, Adele. Set in the Dominican town of Elias Pina, and in the border...   Read the entire review More reviews from Powells.com
American Nerd: The Story of My People by Benjamin Nugent Nerds Rule A Review by A. J. Jacobs When I was assigned this review, the editor wrote me a note: "I hope you don't take offense at this, but your name sprang to mind as a reviewer for a book on nerds." I probably qualify as a nerd because, among other things, I wrote a book about reading the encyclopedia -- an activity that's up there on the dorkiness scale with speaking Elvish over ham radio. But take offense? Not at all. Perhaps in high schools where quarterbacks still sit atop the social hierarchy, the word "nerd" continues to damage egos. But in adulthood, it's lost much of its sting. In fact, we live in a golden...   Read the entire review More reviews from Washington Post Book World				Happiness: A Revolution in Economics (Munich Lectures in Economics) by Bruno S. Frey Hedonic Man -- The new economics and the pursuit of happiness. A Review by Alan Wolfe I. When I first began hearing about what Bruno S. Frey, professor of economics at the University of Zurich, calls the "revolution" in his discipline, my reaction was one of delight. As far as I was concerned, it could not happen fast enough. Neoclassical economists had insisted upon the primacy of self- interest only in order to model human behavior, but the way rational choice theory developed (at the University of Chicago in particular) suggested that self-interest was not just a fact for these thinkers, but also an ideal: not just how people do act but also how they should act. Their...   Read the entire review More reviews from The New Republic Online