The problem with our view of history is we revere the violence rather than review the issues that caused it. Movies display in detail the attack on Pearl Harbor, the D-Day invasion, the Battle of the Bulge. Re-enactors playing dress-up perform in Kabuki-like ritual, a dumb show, reliving the carnage of Civil War battles, parading about old battlefields, while we dissect the tactics, the geography of military movement but rarely focus on the causes, the events which brought us into conflict. ...more

December 8, 2008

"Chagall: A Biography," by Jackie Wullschlager (Alfred A. Knopf, $40) ...more

December 7, 2008

A rare enamel-and-gold Faberge egg that had been in the Rothschild banking family for more than a century sold for record $18.5 million at auction Wednesday. ...more

November 28, 2007