This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.Our summer reading guide is now live! This is our annual feature in which The Atlantic’s writers and editors get a chance to play that slightly pushy character at the backyard barbecue who practically screams out, “I just finished this book, and you need to read it! Right now.
The partnership of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb is beautifully anachronistic. As writer and editor, respectively, they have together produced 4,888 pages over the course of 50 years, including the multivolume, still unfinished saga that is Caro’s biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. A lasting collaboration of this sort is impossible to imagine in today’s publishing world of constant churn.
Imani Perry, a contributing writer to the Atlantic, has won the National Book Award for nonfiction for her book South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. Melding the language of poetry and historical research, Perry sought to understand the South, the region where she was born, and which contains, she believes, the key to understanding America.
Salman Rushdie has had a price on his head for 33 years. He is a writer who has lived with the fear of being killed for his words. Whatever other opinion one might have about Rushdie and his skills as a novelist or his public persona, this much is true: He has understood what it means to be targeted and hated—burned in effigy—forced to hide and, even in recent years, to continue to look over his shoulder. All because he wrote a book.
Last week came news that Russian President Vladimir Putin was threatening to shut down the offices of the Jewish Agency for Israel in Russia. For those unfamiliar with it, the agency is a nonprofit that for nearly a century has been tasked with figuring out the nuts and bolts of Zionism—that is, how to get Jews to a Jewish state. It was banned from the Soviet Union, but began operating in the region in the late 1980s and helped about a million Jews get to Israel through the 1990s.
What distinguishes Mark Leibovich’s new book about the Trump years from all the many, many others is that he started it with an unusual premise: He was bored with Trump. “I never found Donald Trump to be remotely captivating as a stand-alone figure,” Leibovich writes in an excerpt for The Atlantic. Far more interesting were those who stood next to Trump and enabled his rise—the Lindsey Grahams and Kevin McCarthys—those who should have known better.
It’s baffling. How can there be so much consensus among Americans about the need for stricter gun laws—63 percent want an outright ban on assault weapons—while we seem locked in this house of horrors, a schoolroom of slaughtered children around every turn, with no way out?Yet moments of such misalignment, when the ideals of a critical mass clash with the rules that govern our collective lives, can also give rise to effective social movements.
War presents a unique challenge for the artist. When reality has ripped in two and extremes of emotion and opinion take hold, it becomes near impossible to do what art does best: scramble easy categories and introduce complexity into the world. The Ukrainian writer and photographer Yevgenia Belorusets, currently in Kyiv, is facing this dilemma head-on.
Not long after tanks rolled into Ukraine, Vladimir Putin started to block social media at home. Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok were curtailed. The move was straight out of the contemporary dictator’s playbook: Take away the potential to go viral, and people can’t spread a narrative that might undermine the leader’s legitimacy. It was also a sign that Putin is wary of the loud, public criticisms that have fueled many global protest movements over the past decade.
For those inclined to see history as depressingly cyclical, the war in Ukraine offers fairly strong evidence. It all feels lifted from a familiar script in which only the actors have been switched—at anti-Russian protests, a popular placard even has the 20th century’s most evil mustache Photoshopped onto Putin’s face. But there is one protagonist who is an unusual fit for his role: Volodymyr Zelensky.