It’s common knowledge that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. But the way it did is surprising

By Riley Black

While writing my book The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, I didn’t want to yada yada yada away a mass extinction. I had been guilty of doing that for decades. Initially, I thought that the extinction of dinosaurs happened suddenly; Tyrannosaurus was happily dining on Edmontosaurus filets when an asteroid struck the planet, yada yada yada. All the non-avian dinosaurs were gone and the Age of Mammals had started.

That story is nice and simple. There’s a clean break from a world filled with saurians and one replete with fuzzy beasts. But as I learned more about the pivotal event, I realized just how much I had overlooked. READ ON

By Peter Conradi

It is not often that a memoir leads to a change in the law. But such was the impact of this powerful book that within weeks of its publication in France in January last year, its parliament began studying a bill to tighten the rules on incest.

Olivier Duhamel, the Left Bank intellectual accused in it of assaulting his stepson, dropped out of public life, while tens of thousands of people used the hashtag #MeTooInceste to tell their own stories of abuse.

Curiously Duhamel’s accuser is not his stepson but rather the victim’s twin sister, Camille Kouchner, 46, a law lecturer by day. Given the grim nature of the subject matter, it might be expected to be heavy going. But this is no mere misery memoir. READ ON

Don’t miss a timely look at the men who invented guns, a romp through the origins of modern feminism, and a thriller set on a cross-country train ride

Long before the N.R.A. and mass shootings at schools and a country riven by a debate over what “the right to bear arms” means in today’s society, the men who invented guns were hailed as visionaries whose names still resonate today as pioneers: Winchester, Remington, Colt, Wesson. John Bainbridge Jr. does a brilliant job of bringing to life these men and the 19th-century times in which they flourished, making the point along the way that not only did they change warfare but they shaped American industry as well. By both fluke and design, these individuals created a gun culture READ ON

By Tom Freston

One night in 1958, a 21-year-old Chris Blackwell went with a friend to see the Miles Davis Quintet at Café Bohemia, in Greenwich Village. Afterward, he wrangled his way into a small, smoky backstage room to meet both Davis and John Coltrane. Davis took a liking to the young, white Jamaican, and they began to hang out. One night, watching Blackwell moving his leg unconsciously up and down to music, he scolded him. “Slow down, man. Enjoy it in your head. Keep it to yourself.” Stay cool and be cool—it was a message from the master.

In The Islander, Blackwell (working with journalist Paul Morley) has written a highly READ ON

By Cullen Murphy

Writing a James Bond novel, like performing gymnastics, comes with compulsories. A gymnast has to hit certain marks: the long-hang kip, the flyaway dismount, the backward roll to push-up position. So, too, with Bond. If you’ve been chosen by the estate to extend the work of Ian Fleming—the original 12 novels have grown to 41—then you must refer to the gunmetal cigarette case and the Sea Island cotton shirts; you must bring in M and Miss Moneypenny and the Balkan blend from Morland; you must mention the martinis prepared in a manner we all know. The winks can become a facial tic. READ ON

Howard Hunt imagined himself the Ian Fleming of the C.I.A. Then came Watergate

By Jefferson Morley

As I investigated the hidden hand of the C.I.A. in the Watergate affair for my new book, Scorpions’ Dance: The President, the Spymaster, and Watergate, I sifted the fictional oeuvre of burglar-in-chief Howard Hunt for factual clues.

In the years before his arrest, Hunt had published seven paperback adventures of Peter Ward, a pipe-smoking C.I.A. operative who outwitted treacherous Communists from Hong Kong to New Delhi while taking orders from an impressive deputy director back at headquarters named Avery Thorne. Thorne resembled no one so much as Hunt’s great friend Richard Helms, the real-life, pipe-smoking director of the agency from 1966 to 1973. READ ON

By John Self

What a relief it is to find a novel that treats the reader as a grown-up, that is fresh without chasing literary fashion, provocative but not shouty, and idiosyncratic but fully satisfying from the strange comedy of its opening pages to its decisive conclusion.

The Irish writer Audrey Magee’s second novel starts with a man in a tiny boat being rowed across the choppy waters off the west coast of Ireland in the summer of 1979. Lloyd is an English artist, heading to a three-mile-long island to paint its cliffs and birds, to “create them as they already are”. READ ON

By Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Alice Urbach’s bestselling cookbook of 1935 had a delightfully idiomatic Viennese title ending with an exclamation mark: So Kocht Man in Wien! (“So Cooks One in Vienna!”). It captured the jocund spirit of its author, an accomplished cook who was always smiling, rolling pastry and using exclamation marks, and of her beloved city, a center of culinary excellence that (she thought) welcomed assimilated Jews like herself.

In September 1938, after the Nazi Anschluss, Alice’s name was removed from her book. She was summoned to her publisher, Ernst Reinhardt Verlag, and told by her editor, Hermann Jungck, to hand over all her copyright and publishing rights. Quaking and powerless in the new overtly anti-Semitic regime, she signed. READ ON

Joel Meyerowitz’s study of the many shades and styles of red hair is an ode to the world’s natural redheads

These days, everyone’s going red. From models Gigi Hadid and Kendall Jenner to actresses Sophie Turner and Sydney Sweeney, red hair is having a moment. But no matter the stylist used or the shade chosen, those stars, of course, are not part of the 2 to 3 percent of the world’s population who are natural redheads.

Early on in his career, the photographer Joel Meyerowitz became fascinated by redheads and the way their hair and features interact with his camera. “Like film itself, redheads are transformed by sunlight,” Meyerowitz has said. In 1991, he published a book of photographs READ ON

By Jonathan Darman

For a brief moment in the fall of 1964, the most talked-about place in American politics was a dark Y.M.C.A. basement a few blocks from the White House. That was where, late one night in October, two men having oral sex in a men’s bathroom stall were entrapped and arrested by the local police.

This sort of thing was not unusual in mid–20th century Washington, a city with a teeming underground gay scene and a crusading vice squad to match. Lafayette Square, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, had been a popular, and legally treacherous, gay cruising spot for decades. READ ON

Joshua Cohen couldn’t find a publisher for his novel about Harold Bloom and the Netanyahus. Now it’s a heralded prizewinner

By Anshel Pfeffer

The size of Joshua Cohen’s achievement sank in only when he received an anonymous e-mail showing his head Photoshopped on to the body of a Jewish person being pushed into a Nazi gas chamber.

The writer, 41, had arrived in Israel last week to spend a few quiet days working on his next novel before an appearance at the Jerusalem International Book Forum. Then he got a surprising phone call from New York informing him that his latest novel, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, had just won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. READ ON

By Jim Kelly

To be the child of a successful parent is a mixed blessing, and to pursue the same career and to possess the identical name with “Jr.” attached borders on a curse. Just look at Frank Sinatra Jr.

George Stevens Jr., now 90 years old, writes beautifully about his dad, the director George Stevens, in his memoir, an account he can bring vividly to life because as a young man he witnessed the making of such classics as A Place in the Sun, Shane, and Giant. Some outtakes from Red Dog, as his dad affectionately called his son due to the hair color of his youth: READ ON

Just after World War II, six nuns from Kentucky moved to India to set up a missionary hospital. Their letters home offer insight into life on the ward

By Jyoti Thottam

Whenever I describe the story of Nazareth Hospital, the subject of my new book, The Sisters of Mokama, most people ask how I learned about it. The easy answer is: it’s a family story.

In 1947, six Catholic nuns from Kentucky traveled to Mokama, India, to start a missionary hospital. The country was just emerging from the devastation of World War II, while Partition had just split colonial India into two countries. The nuns started the hospital in an empty warehouse with no running water or electricity, and with few medical supplies. Within two years, they established a working hospital, primary-health-care clinic, and nursing school. READ ON

In an interview with the lieutenant turned military historian Antony Beevor about his newest book on a pre-U.S.S.R. Russia, it all goes back to Ukraine

By Misha Glenny

Lieutenant Antony Beevor remembers August 21, 1968, with his trademark precision. Stationed at Hohne garrison, a British Army base in north central Germany, he awoke to the news that Russian tanks had invaded Czechoslovakia to bring to an end the country’s liberal experiment known as the Prague Spring. Nobody outside the intelligence world had really expected this. Fear swept across Europe that the Cold War was turning hot.

Beevor, 75, recounts how members of the British 7th Armored Division in Hohne started tracking Russian communications. The parallels with Ukraine are striking because the Russian troops failed to establish a READ ON

Don’t miss a journalist’s memoir about re-invention; an appeal for readers to start writing; and the story of two men’s search for the source of the Nile River

There are, to adapt the saying, two kinds of people: those who write memoirs and those who read them. One can be forgiven for feeling that the first group easily outnumbers the second, which is a pity if that means the reader might skip this book. Tad Friend is a sharp, wry writer of New Yorker profiles, but it turns out his best subject by far is himself and his family, which includes his father, once president of Swarthmore; his wife, Food 52 co-founder Amanda Hesser; and their twins. The author is incapable of writing a bad sentence (trying READ ON

By Jim Kelly

It is difficult to explain to nonbelievers why so many worship at the food temple called Zabar’s. True, the store has a great backstory: a young immigrant grocer named Louis Zabar developed a painful rash handling fruit and vegetable skins, an affliction relieved only by sticking his hands and arms into a barrel of pickled herring and its soothing brine. Thus, the need to branch out into less allergic products combined with an attractive lease in a building on New York’s Upper West Side led Louis and his wife, Lilly, to open Zabar’s in 1934.

The Zabars had three sons, Saul, Eli, and Stanley, all three still alive and READ ON

The case of the Russian spy Robert Hanssen has been called the “worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history.” Many years on, the risk of espionage is just as high

By Lis Wiehl

As the daughter of an F.B.I. agent and a third-generation federal prosecutor, I grew up believing that the men and women of the F.B.I. were always the good guys, combating crime and working hard toward the ultimate goal of keeping us all safe. My father was that kind of F.B.I. agent, and so were the people I worked with.

But all the while my father and other F.B.I. agents were working to keep Americans safe, F.B.I. special agent Robert Hanssen was working just as hard to betray the agency he had sworn allegiance to and the people and country he had sworn to protect. READ ON

Pulitzer Prize–winning war correspondent Ray Bonner always had a taste for trouble, but he just took on his most dangerous assignment yet: he bought a bookstore in Australia

By Alan Riding

Ray Bonner isn’t afraid to take risks. In fact, he seems to go looking for them. He was the first in his family to attend college. He made it through Stanford Law School and then joined the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War because, he says, “back then, I thought, ‘America right or wrong.’” His stint as a military lawyer was followed by jobs with Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen Litigation Group, Consumers Union, and the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office.

Then he got bored and went to Bolivia to become a reporter.

Now, I’ve known Ray for more than 40 years, and boredom is one of his leitmotifs. I first heard this moan when he was covering the civil war in El Salvador for READ ON

By Romesh Ratnesar

The Stanford Mausoleum lies a few steps off of Palm Drive, the majestic roadway designed by Frederick Law Olmsted that leads to the university’s main quad. Tucked behind eucalyptus trees and a cactus garden, the mausoleum is among the more obscure attractions on campus and by far the weirdest. I visited it as a freshman, to attend the dance party held there every Halloween, and never went back.

Like most Stanford students, I was vaguely aware that the crypt held the remains of Leland Stanford Jr., after whom the school is named, and his parents, Leland and Jane Stanford. READ ON

Actresses and other deceptive women dominate this month’s new thrillers. Plus, a look back at a true original: Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple

By Lisa Henricksson

“If you pretend with all your energy and focus, you can forget that you’re pretending.” That’s the essence of successful acting, as Chris Pavone explains in Two Nights in Lisbon, that zone you enter where you become one with your character. In three new thrillers, it’s a skill that’s central to each of the heroines, whose talents range from those of gifted amateur to experienced professional. All are fiercely committed to their performance goals.

As a young woman, Ariel Pryce trained to be an actress, which proved useful when she fled her bleak Park Avenue marriage to re-invent herself with a new house, name, and baby in a rural Long Island town. At the beginning of READ ON

How did Ryan Holiday, a former marketing executive in rural Texas, become the go-to philosopher for these times?

By William D. Cohan

It takes guts to write a book about courage when you have been less than courageous yourself. But that is what Ryan Holiday has done.

Over the past few years, the 34-year-old former marketing executive has transformed himself into what you might call a philosopher-popularizer. His third book, The Obstacle Is the Way, sold more than one million copies and became a bible among players in the N.F.L. and N.B.A. It also became a No. 1 best-seller, as did his 2016 book The Daily Stoic, where he repackaged the wisdom of ancient philosophers for modern life.

Now he’s back with READ ON

On the 50th anniversary of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St., and the legendary tour that followed, the unlikely story of how a rock ‘n’ roll masterpiece came to be

By Nathan King

That one can still descend into the great, sloppy trough of tumbleweed pageantry that is Exile on Main St. is miraculous. In fact, that we can, at this knotty moment in history, listen to the music of the men who wrote that album 50 years ago tomorrow—ladies and gentlemen, the Rolling Stones—is nothing short of a miracle.

Aside from being the rock ’n’ roll album, it’s the rock ’n’ roll album as: a child of divorce; a double-barreled blast of love and loss; an unadulterated paradox; a beautiful piece of filth; and an enduring monument of what music can READ ON

Don’t miss the history behind the Kentucky Derby anthem; a biography of the philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville; and a dazzling look at Renaissance altarpieces

Most folks know “My Old Kentucky Home” today as the crowd-sung anthem that kicks off the Kentucky Derby every May, but Emily Bingham does a superb job of historical evacuation as she shows how a plaintive song about a slave sold downriver, composed by Stephen Foster in the 1850s, grew distorted into a nostalgic ode to life on the plantation. Kentucky, naturally enough, played the central role in reshaping the song’s meaning (it remains to this day the state’s official song), and tourists still flock to My Old Kentucky Home State Park, in Bardstown, which features a spacious plantation READ ON

By John Walsh

When Elizabeth Anscombe gave her first lecture at the University of Oxford in 1948, on Protagoras’ doctrine of belief, the authorities worried that female students might be corrupted. Not by the thrust of her talk, but by her trousers. The clerk of schools wrote to her, insisting that she come to the university in a skirt.

Every week he lay in wait, refusing to let her enter if she was improperly attired. Eventually a compromise was reached: they gave her a changing room containing a skirt (and a decanter of sherry as a bribe) and said she could arrive in trousers provided she appeared before students in the skirt. Anscombe agreed — and then wore both. READ ON