“Reading is a many-layered process — like writing,” observes Samuel R. Delany, a Nebula and Hugo award-winning author and a major commentator on American literature and culture. In this collection of six extended essays, Delany challenges...
How will Russia redraw post-Soviet borders? In the wake of recent Russian expansionism, political risk expert Agnia Grigas illustrates how—for more than two decades—Moscow has consistently used its compatriots in bordering nations for its...
The Arctic convoys that sailed through the cold malevolent waters of the Barents Sea ran the gauntlet of German air and sea attacks as they struggled to transport vital supplies to Britain’s Russian allies. Convoy JW51B sailed in December...
During the Nazi period of government (1933–1945), Adolf Hitler, enthusiast of new technologies and means of production, invested millions in scientific research and development centers, with the hiring of renowned engineers and scientists, and the...
In a series of conversations with Between the Covers’s David Naimon, Ursula K. Le Guin discusses her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—both her process and her philosophy—with all the wisdom, profundity, and rigour we expect from one of our...
The German concentration camps of World War II, the horrors of the Vietnam war, the prolific rape and brutality during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia and the Hutu massacres of Tutsis in Rwanda. All are abhorrent violations of the laws and...
Are we noble in reason? Perfect, in God’s image? Far from it, says New York University psychologist Gary Marcus. In this lucid and revealing book, Marcus argues that the mind is not an elegantly designed organ but rather a “kluge,” a clumsy,...
More than 98 percent of human genes are shared with two species of chimpanzee. The 'third' chimpanzee is man. Jared Diamond surveys out life-cycle, culture, sexuality and destructive urges both towards ourselves and the planet to explore the ways in...
On September 8, 1941, eleven weeks after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, his brutal surprise attack on the Soviet Union, Leningrad was surrounded. The siege was not lifted for two and a half years, by which time some three quarters of a...