History & Society

Primary category

How Democracies Die

By Steven Levitsky , Daniel Ziblatt

How Democracies Die examines how elected leaders can dismantle democratic government without abolishing elections or staging a traditional military coup. Drawing on cases from Europe, Latin America, and the United States, political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt describe a gradual process in which incumbents weaken institutional checks, discredit opponents, intimidate independent organizations, and alter political rules in their own favor. The authors emphasize the gatekeeping responsibility of political parties: established leaders can either block authoritarian figures or help normalize them. They also argue that constitutions cannot protect democracy by themselves. Democratic survival depends on unwritten practices—especially accepting opponents as legitimate and exercising restraint in the use of legal power. The book applies this comparative framework to Donald Trump’s rise and to the longer deterioration of political norms in the United States, presenting democrat…

Primary category

The Soul of a New Machine

By Tracy Kidder

Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine follows a team of Data General engineers as they race to design and debug a new 32-bit minicomputer under intense competitive and organizational pressure. Rather than treating computer development as an abstract sequence of inventions, Kidder presents it as collective human labor shaped by ambition, rivalry, improvisation, exhaustion, management decisions, and technical judgment. The resulting work is both a history of the Eclipse MV/8000 and an enduring study of how demanding technological projects acquire momentum—and what they ask of the people who complete them.

Primary category

Being Mortal

Medicine and What Matters in the End

By Atul Gawande

In Being Mortal, surgeon and writer Atul Gawande examines how modern medicine responds when cure, recovery, or indefinite independence is no longer possible. Moving between medical history, reported case studies, conversations with patients and families, and the illness of his own father, Gawande argues that care should be organized around the life a person still wishes to live—not only around safety, treatment, or survival. The book explores aging, frailty, nursing homes, assisted living, serious-illness conversations, palliative care, and hospice while asking how autonomy, purpose, dignity, and human connection can be preserved near the end of life.

Primary category

The Vaster Wilds

By Lauren Groff

The Vaster Wilds is a historical survival novel centered on a young English servant who escapes a devastated colonial settlement during the winter of 1609–1610. Although the settlement is not immediately named, the historical circumstances identify it with Jamestown during the catastrophic period remembered as the Starving Time. The girl’s flight into the forests of Virginia supplies the book’s forward momentum: she must find food, water, warmth, shelter, and a route toward a place she imagines may offer safety. Memories gradually disclose the conditions that formed her, the household she served, the Atlantic crossing, the colony’s breakdown, and her reason for fleeing. The novel consequently operates on several levels at once—as a physically exacting survival narrative, a psychological portrait of a socially powerless person, a critique of colonial assumptions, and a spiritual inquiry into humanity’s place within nature. Rather than treating the landscape as an empty stage awaiting E…

Primary category

Pachinko

A Novel

By Min Jin Lee

Pachinko is a multigenerational historical novel following a Korean family from a fishing village near Busan into immigrant life in Japan. Beginning during Japan’s colonial rule of Korea, the narrative develops from Sunja’s consequential early choices and follows their effects through successive generations. Family members confront poverty, war, displacement, social exclusion, religious conviction, commercial ambition, and changing ideas about what constitutes a successful life. Rather than treating history primarily through political leaders or military campaigns, Min Jin Lee places large historical forces inside homes, workplaces, marriages, schools, churches, and family relationships. Colonialism and discrimination become visible through restrictions on movement, employment, housing, education, reputation, and belonging. The novel’s wide time span also allows it to examine how hardship changes form: later generations may acquire education and money without escaping inherited stigma…

Primary category

The Nickel Boys

A Novel

By Colson Whitehead

The Nickel Boys is a historical literary novel about Elwood Curtis, a studious Black teenager growing up in Tallahassee during the civil rights era. Inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.'s moral vision, Elwood believes that integrity and disciplined resistance can help bend society toward justice. An encounter with a stolen car—without his knowing participation in the theft—derails his plans and sends him to Nickel Academy, a segregated juvenile reformatory. Nickel presents itself as a place of education and rehabilitation, but its official mission conceals a system built on violence, exploitation, racial hierarchy, sexual predation, and administrative corruption. The institution distributes punishment arbitrarily while shielding employees from accountability. Black boys face especially brutal treatment, yet the novel also shows that institutional power can prey on any child made dependent and socially invisible. Elwood's friendship with Turner supplies the novel's central ethical tensio…

Primary category

The Remains of the Day

By Kazuo Ishiguro

The novel follows Stevens, the longtime butler of Darlington Hall, during a motoring trip through the English countryside in 1956. Although the journey ostensibly allows him to visit Miss Kenton, the hall’s former housekeeper, it becomes an extended reconsideration of his professional ideals, his loyalty to Lord Darlington and the personal choices he has made. Stevens narrates through recollection rather than straightforward confession. His measured explanations gradually reveal discrepancies between how he wishes to understand his life and what readers can infer from the events he describes. The result is simultaneously a character study, a restrained love story and an examination of moral responsibility. Public history and private regret remain intertwined: Stevens’s emotional evasions resemble his reluctance to judge the political activities conducted at Darlington Hall before the Second World War.

Primary category

The Island of Missing Trees

A Novel

By Elif Shafak

The novel links a divided family to the divided island of Cyprus. Its principal human story follows Kostas, a Greek Cypriot, and Defne, a Turkish Cypriot, whose youthful relationship develops amid communal hostility and the violence surrounding Cyprus in 1974. A second timeline centers on their London-born daughter, Ada, who inherits the emotional consequences of a past her parents have largely concealed from her. Between these narratives stands a fig tree descended from one that grew through a Nicosia tavern where Kostas and Defne once met. Shafak uses the fig tree not simply as a symbol but as a speaking character and witness. Human history, family memory, migration, plant life and ecological damage are therefore narrated as interconnected rather than separate subjects. The chronology moves between Cyprus and London and between the 1970s and a later family present, gradually disclosing how political violence enters intimate relationships and persists through silence. The novel’s six…