Can you be the most productive writer of history books and also be among the very best? Simon Sebag Montefiore proves you can be, and I dare you to pick up any of his nine history books and not be enthralled from the first sentence. (A particular favorite is Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.) Now he has turned to chronicling the Middle East since 1900, and provides the kind of perspective and judgment that will be revelatory to those who are either consumed by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or who have tuned it out because the situation is so complicated and tragic. The Cauldron draws the camera back to look at a region stretching from Morocco to Iran, and makes what seems incomprehensible far more understandable by starting decades before the establishment of Israel in 1946. Montefiore’s prose is elegant, his narrative flows with detail, and his analysis is highly persuasive. The Cauldron is history at its best and most timely.
Ludwig Bemelmans is best known for creating that adorable children’s-picture-book character Madeline (and, for the louche among you, the murals that adorn Bemelmans Bar in New York’s Café Carlyle), but the author also has an admirable reputation for writing fictionalized adventures of his own life. How to Travel Incognito,first published in 1952, is the latest reissue of his book by the estimable Pushkin Press, so sit back and enjoy the ride as Bemelmans’s alter ego—a fake German prince—and his companion, Comte de St. Cucaface, enjoy the best of France with unearned nonchalance. It is not so much Dirty Rotten Scoundrels as Witty Clean Rapscallions, complete with charming drawings by the author.