Racism is premised on the false and immoral idea that people’s minds are functions of their ancestry and, consequently, that a person’s accomplishments are less morally relevant than the color of his skin. But George Mason University law professor David E. Bernstein shows in Classified that racism contains still another layer of incoherence.

By giving us doorways into a wider world of art and ideas—and doing so without the backing of any major publishing houses—Luc Travers and Sandra Shaw have not only done us all a great service but have testified to the enormous value of art in all our lives.

Despite occasional oversights, Kevin Birmingham's The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece offers a dramatic and enlightening introduction to the complicated context in which one of literature’s greatest and most horrifying novels was created.

Louis H. Sullivan's buildings are the remaining monuments to a genius who gave voice, as no artist had ever done before, to the distinctive achievement of the modern age: the skyscraper. Hopefully, books such as this will help ensure that this master builder is never forgotten.

One reason critics often ignored Elmer Kelton was that his novels celebrate the virtues of integrity, honor, hard work, and bravery, with none of the nihilism or mournfulness that mark other Western authors. “Critics don’t read a Western unless the book is contemptuous of its subject matter,” Kelton once said.

Written in the final days of his life, as Herschensohn learned of the arrests of brave friends, A Profile of Hong Kong was left unfinished, and it ends on a tragic note, with a run-on sentence that reads like a wail of grief.

The special glow of O. Henry's prose and the magic of his plots show us the world as it should be—and almost bring it within reach.

Hundreds of airmen and sailors—mostly young, many only teenagers, many of them civilians—under terrifying circumstances, “redeemed from the brink of disaster one of the most hazardous naval operations of the Second World War.” In expertly recounting their courage and the horrors they faced, Max Hastings has helped ensure the well-deserved immortality of this band of heroes.

Americans need a book that will help them better understand the values underlying our early constitutional history—and they need an authoritative and compelling intellectual voice to explain and vindicate the nation’s fundamental law. Sad to say, they will not find those here.

“One of the most extraordinary features of Ibsen’s works,” Sprinchorn writes, is the way “each play grows out of its predecessor.” By examining them in order, he draws out their weightier elements, combining an acute understanding of theater and a thorough grasp of the political, social, and artistic controversies that set the background for Ibsen’s career.

Louis Menand is a writer of great gifts, whose 2000 book The Metaphysical Club is a masterpiece of intellectual history. Unfortunately, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War fails to recapture the magic. That’s partly because despite its bulk—880 pages—it’s curiously incomplete.

Oedipus the King has been considered a masterpiece for two and a half millennia. No less a luminary than Aristotle called it the ideal tragedy. But today’s readers are often disturbed by its apparent injustice. How is it fair that the gods consign Oedipus—a genuine hero who strives to avoid committing the sins for which he is damned—to such an awful fate?

Root’s book provides a thoroughly researched and readable introduction to the arguments that formed the basis of what has rightly been called the “refounding” of the United States a century and a half ago—and that remain relevant today.

Far from a history of liberty, de Dijn’s book is a conscious effort to undermine that concept and to substitute in its place what she calls a “democratic conception of freedom,” which, in principle, amounts to collective control over every aspect of individual behavior.

Markovits’s reliance on loaded language is a good sign that his argument cannot stand—pardon the pun—on its own merits.