As the senior White House correspondent for the nonpartisan Voice of America news network, Steven L Herman had the difficult assignment of covering the Donald Trump administration while it routinely attacked VOA for its commitment to the... Read More

In the funny and harrowing short stories of Joan Leegant’s excellent collection Displaced Persons, characters navigate myriad forms of displacement, from putting a new life together after divorce to finding their place in an adopted... Read More

During the final decades of the Soviet Union, the country’s Jewish population was stuck in an impossible situation, unable to practice their religion and also forbidden to leave. Shaul Kelner’s "A Cold War Exodus" shows how a... Read More

For those wondering why another book on Jerusalem is needed, Jodi Magness’s "Jerusalem through the Ages" provides an eloquent answer based in archaeology, from the biblical era through the crusades of the twelfth century. The book... Read More

In T. L. Simpson’s moving coming-of-age novel "Strong Like You", a high school student in Arkansas struggles to understand what happened to his missing father. When the book begins, Walker’s father is already gone without... Read More

Through the social justice-themed essays of "The Jail Is Everywhere", activists work against the expansion and normalization of jails. After decades of massive expansion in the United States’s carceral system, most counties now host at... Read More

Islam Issa’s "Alexandria" is an outstanding biography of a unique city, describing how the Egyptian locale changed from its founding by Alexander the Great into the modern day. “Despite its classical renown and enduring impact,... Read More