Good Writing. Serious e-Reading.

The contested election of 2000 that brought George W. Bush to the White House was filled with a strange sort of drama.  But, as historian Kenneth O’Reilly shows in this fresh recounting, it was even stranger than we know.

Jeremy Bernstein traces the circuitous route by which Iran secured the expertise to develop a nuclear capability. Since Iran’s program appears to be aimed at weapons production, he concludes, the time of decision for action is fast approaching.

 The distinguished historian John Prados calls for a total rethinking of our expansive concept of national security. If we fail to make hard decisions about existential threats, he concludes, we will find ourselves in a death spiral as a nation.

When Franklin Roosevelt came to the White House, 13 million—roughly 25 percent of the work force—were unemployed. By the day of  his inauguration, thirty-eight states had closed their banks. Soon the nation would witness the most furious period of legislative activity in American history.

Mr. Dooley, a turn-of-the-20th-century Irish saloonkeeper from Chicago’s Archer Avenue (“Ar-rchey Road,” he called it) on the city’s southwest side, was the creation of Finley Peter Dunne, a Chicago newspaperman. Mr. Dooley analyzed world affairs for the equally fictitious Mr. Hennessey, and his opinions went out to the real press and the reading public. They are current—and funny. The problems confronting America a hundred years ago are among those that remain unsolved today.

President Harry Truman skirted Congress and boldly used the Justice Department to support the rights of black Americans. How he did it, and his effort’s lasting consequences, are told in this sharply observed account.

The so-called Roaring Twenties were not only about loose morality and a devil-may-care display of opulence. In the byways of America, working men and women were seeking labor justice and struggling against the entrenched powers of capitalism. Nowhere was this struggle more poignant and important than in the coalfields of West Virginia. There in the 1920s the United Mine Workers confronted the coal operators who sought to bust their union. The ensuing conflict, violent and bloody, had much to say about the future of relations between working people and their bosses in America.  

Alger Hiss’s turn toward the political left, leading to his association with Whittaker Chambers, is portrayed in Bruce Craig’s incisive account of Hiss’s early years, drawing upon previously untapped sources.