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As architectural critic for the New Yorker, Paul Goldberger has followed plans for rebuilding the World Trade Center site since early 2002. It is what he calls the most challenging urban-design problem of the 21st century. Goldberger provides the fascinating backstory of the design process in the engrossing Up From Zero: Politics, Architecture, and the Rebuilding of New York.

The WTC project, already surrounded by the conflicting forces of political power, money, and architecture and planning, was made even more difficult, he says, by the still-fresh memory of the attacks and the cultural significance of the destroyed towers. But Minoru Yamasaki’s towers weren’t always so beloved, explains Goldberger, commenting on our changing relationship to architecture and how structures once hated think Eiffel Tower eventually become accepted parts of the landscape. Given the towers’ ascendance to landmark status, it is perhaps easy to understand why some people felt they should be rebuilt.

To others, who felt that building anything on the site amounted to sacrilege, restoring the towers was tantamount to pretending September 11 never happened. The challenge facing architects and the powers that be The Port Authority, developer Larry Silverstein, mayors Giuliani and later Bloomberg, Governor Pataki, etc. was that of balancing a fitting memorial with the replacement of a significant amount of commercial real estate while working it all into a neighborhood plan for lower Manhattan. Goldberger not only goes behind the scenes of the planning process, he provides mini-profiles of people like Daniel Libeskind, David Childs, Rafael Vi–oly, Santiago Calatrava and Maya Lin and describes their work in terms accessible to the lay reader. He chronicles the give-and-take that led to the selection of Libeskind’s overall plan, the modifications by Silverstein-associated architect Childs and the incorporation of Michael Arad’s Reflecting Absence memorial.

Up From Zero provides a clear, evenhanded exploration of the attempt to present a powerful statement of resilience and remembrance through aesthetics. Pulitzer Prize winner Goldberg also sets the stage for the continuing drama associated with the WTC site: just weeks after the Freedom Tower groundbreaking this summer, master plan architect Libeskind sued Silverstein for unpaid fees.

As architectural critic for the New Yorker, Paul Goldberger has followed plans for rebuilding the World Trade Center site since early 2002. It is what he calls the most challenging urban-design problem of the 21st century. Goldberger provides the fascinating backstory of the design process…
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In her stimulating and, for some, controversial book The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments, historian Gertrude Himmelfarb seeks to reclaim the Enlightenment from French thinkers such as Voltaire and Diderot and restore it to the British, where it began. The French have acknowledged their debt to Newton and Locke, but these thinkers did not significantly influence those of Himmelfarb’s British Enlightenment. She focuses instead on moral philosophers such as the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, Edward Gibbon and others. The emphasis in France was on reason, while in England these thinkers were more concerned with the social virtues of compassion, benevolence and sympathy. In America, religion was an ally, not an enemy. Himmelfarb makes a convincing case for redefining the Enlightenment, making it both more British and more inclusive by welcoming figures such as John Wesley and Edmund Burke. In Britain the moral philosophers were reformists, but not subversive, while in France, reason became the ideology to challenge religion, the church and other institutions.

Burke wrote of the commonality of human nature in numerous works. Wesley believed that Christianity was essentially a social religion, and Methodist preachers engaged in a variety of humanitarian endeavors that were practical expressions of the ideas of the moral philosophers. In America, political liberty was the primary concern. As Himmelfarb points out, it was on slavery that the politics of liberty dramatically clashed with the sociology of virtue. The Roads to Modernity is a thoughtful and wide-ranging discussion of an important period in the history of ideas. Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and frequent contributor to BookPage.

In her stimulating and, for some, controversial book The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments, historian Gertrude Himmelfarb seeks to reclaim the Enlightenment from French thinkers such as Voltaire and Diderot and restore it to the British, where it began. The French…

As he did in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond continues to make us think with his mesmerizing and absorbing new book. In The World Until Yesterday, he pushes us to reconsider the contours of human society and the forces that have shaped human culture.

Drawing on both his personal experiences of traditional societies, especially among New Guinea Highlanders, and in-depth research into cultures as diverse as Amazonian Indians and the !Kung of southern Africa, Diamond convincingly argues that while many modern states enjoy a wide range of technological, political and military advantages, they often fail to offer an improved approach to such issues as raising children or treating the elderly.

Hardly naïve, Diamond acknowledges that the modern world would never embrace many practices, such as infanticide and widow-strangling, embedded in traditional cultures but horrifying to modern ones. Yet traditional societies also value societal well-being over individual well-being, so that care for the elderly is an integral part of their social fabric—an arrangement that “goes against all those interwoven American values of independence, individualism, self-reliance, and privacy.”

Ranging over topics that include child-rearing, conflict resolution, the nature of risk, religion and physical fitness, Diamond eloquently concludes with a litany of the advantages of the traditional world. “Loneliness,” he observes, “is not a problem in traditional societies,” for people usually live close to where they were born and remain “surrounded by relatives and childhood companions.” In modern societies, by contrast, individuals often move far away from their places of birth to find themselves surrounded by strangers. We can also take lessons from traditional cultures about our health. By choosing healthier foods, eating slowly and talking with friends and family during a meal—all characteristics Diamond attributes to traditional societies—we can reform our diets and perhaps curb the incidence of diseases such as stroke and diabetes.

Powerful and captivating, Diamond’s lucid insights challenge our ideas about human nature and culture, and will likely provoke heated conversations about the future of our society.

As he did in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond continues to make us think with his mesmerizing and absorbing new book. In The World Until Yesterday, he pushes us to reconsider the contours of human society and the forces that have…

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<B>Talkin’ bout his Baby Boom generation</B> Because they grew up in an age in which media particularly network television connected them with a common diet of images and attitudes, members of the Baby Boom are more aware of themselves as a distinct group than any preceding generation. They are more self-absorbed, too, Steve Gillon contends in <B>Boomer Nation: The Largest and Richest Generation Ever, and How It Changed America</B> (Free Press, $27.50, 384 pages, ISBN 0743229479). A former Yale and Oxford professor and currently a professor of history at the University of Oklahoma, the author includes within this much-anatomized populace those who were born between 1946 and 1964 a horde that now accounts for 39 percent of Americans over the age of 18 and 29 percent of the total population.

Gillon, who also hosts the weekly public affairs show <I>History Center</I> on A&andE’s History Channel, weaves his study around representative Boomers. They are Bobby Muller, a severely wounded vet who helped found the Vietnam Veterans of America advocacy group; Fran Visco, a Philadelphia lawyer who turned her own battle with breast cancer into a national crusade; Elizabeth Platter-Zyberk, an architect with strong ideas of how communities should be designed for social good; Marshall Herskovitz, co-creator of the Boomer-based TV series, "thirtysomething"; Alberta Haile Wilson, a black activist turned religious fundamentalist turned teacher; and Donny Deutsch, whose advertising agency excelled at speaking the language of his generation. Raised amid rising national prosperity and the mood of self-confidence it nurtured, Boomers display certain common values, according to Gillon, among which are a sense of entitlement, willingness to experiment, distrust of authority, self-reliance, internal motivation, idealism and a preference for doing things their own way. When these values were brought to bear in the 1960s and ’70s, they helped achieve civil rights for minorities and women, create greater social and economic justice and end the Vietnam War. But, the author argues, these impulses were not always progressive. They also gave rise, in many instances, to religious fundamentalism and fiscal conservatism, both logical extensions of the group’s deeply entrenched go-your-own-way ethic. "The Boomer ascendancy," Gillon writes, "contributed to the shattering of the New Deal coalition, the end of the solid Democratic South, and the rise of ticket-splitting independents." As Gillon traces the six Boomers through their life trajectories, he examines how family, school, jobs and media converged to shape their outlook and how this outlook, in turn, has forced them to assess their own degree of worth and success. Predictably, some major contradictions emerge. "Baby Boomers want less government," he says, "but they also want Washington to find jobs for everyone who wants to work. They want government to do more for the poor, but not expand welfare. They want it all: new social programs, lower taxes, and a balanced budget. The gap between what they expect of government and what they are willing to pay for it mirrors what they expect of themselves compared to what they achieve." On June 13, A&andE will broadcast its documentary version of <B>Boomer Nation</B>, a program that also features Gillon’s six representative Boomers. The film will begin with the pivotal question, "Where were you on November 22, 1963," a reference, of course, to the day President Kennedy was assassinated. While many Boomers are close to retirement, they are still vital enough, rich enough and determined enough, Gillon shows, to affect the nation’s social policies for years to come. <I>Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.</I>

<B>Talkin' bout his Baby Boom generation</B> Because they grew up in an age in which media particularly network television connected them with a common diet of images and attitudes, members of the Baby Boom are more aware of themselves as a distinct group than any…

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Everyone can think of a grim anecdote about Detroit—the highest murder rate in the country, 70,000 abandoned buildings—that they saw in a magazine article or in a news report. The city is an easy punch line, a convenient example to use when citing how America’s good fortune is running out.

There’s a larger truth. A city does not reach this state without a story behind its decline. And what about the thousands who live and work in Detroit, who must grow tired of being viewed as targets of pity or weary subjects for magazine features?

Rolling Stone contributing editor Mark Binelli’s Detroit City Is the Place to Be is part history, part explanation and part profile of a city he knows intimately—he grew up in the Detroit area. Sounds complex? It is, and it should be. The city doesn’t need any more labels or quick summaries. It needs someone to put a face on Detroit, to show that it’s not rolling over and playing dead. Binelli proves he’s up to the task in this refreshing, intriguing work.

What’s most apparent in Binelli’s thorough reporting is that Detroit is in constant battle mode. With so much unused land in the city, urban farming has become popular, but there are also those who want to make this neighborhood unifier into a corporate endeavor. Neighborhoods have become havens for creative types, but the changes brought by this influx “were miniscule in comparison with the problems facing the rest of the city,” Binelli reports. The American auto industry has created some noteworthy cars in recent years, but the unions are in the middle of a slow, endless death.

Binelli actually lived in Detroit while writing the book, and he talks to dozens of residents. It feels like he’s invested in Detroit’s future, not just reveling in the relevancy. He wants to understand what happened and what will happen. By looking beyond the troubling headlines and promises of politicians, Binelli discovers what determines a city’s fate: people who care. Detroit has more than you might expect.

Everyone can think of a grim anecdote about Detroit—the highest murder rate in the country, 70,000 abandoned buildings—that they saw in a magazine article or in a news report. The city is an easy punch line, a convenient example to use when citing how America’s…

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Plutocrats is an immensely useful and entertaining book, not only because it lets the striving 99 percent of the world’s population see how the glittering 1 percent live but, more significantly, because it provides insight into the mindsets and methods of the super-rich—insights that sympathizers will regard as instructional manuals and opponents will seize upon as Achilles’ heels. A former reporter for the Financial Times, the Economist and the Washington Post, the author moves with ease among the financial titans she anatomizes, chatting with the likes of investor George Soros and Google chief Eric Schmidt and moderating panels at international economic conferences where the wealthy ponder ways of remaining so.

Freeland does not concern herself here with mere millionaires. Her microscope is trained on those whose outsized wealth gives them global impact. She seeks to determine the factors that enabled them to become wealthy and then considers what the social effects may be of the widening gap between the self-satisfied rich and the resentful middle class and poor.

The two biggest factors in gestating today’s megafortunes, Freeland concludes, have been advances in technology and the breaking down of national trade barriers. Add to these basics such economic opportunities as the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent privatization of its state-owned resources, China’s rapid embrace of capitalism and the U. S. government’s shielding of Wall Street from the consequences of its risky speculations and you have an entrepreneur’s concept of heaven.

Freeland is a bit too ready to buy into the “self-made” rationale from which some plutocrats derive smug comfort. “[T]he bulk of their wealth,” she says, “is generally the fruit of hustle, intelligence, and a lot of luck.” Overlooked in this sunny equation is the essential contribution of workers whose pay and benefits are kept low by outsourcing, union busting and lax or non-existent labor laws. One may get by but no one gets rich on his own, much less super-rich.

Using the economic rise and fall of 14th-century Venice as a cautionary tale, Freeland lays out a warning to plutocrats. Once Venice’s entrepreneurial class had made its vast fortunes, she says, it tried to safeguard them by closing off the very social mobility that enabled these fortunes to be created in the first place. Today’s plutocrats are inclined to do the same, she says, through manipulating laws and regulations and disregarding “the interests of society as a whole.” That path, she acknowledges, is fraught with peril.

Plutocrats is an immensely useful and entertaining book, not only because it lets the striving 99 percent of the world’s population see how the glittering 1 percent live but, more significantly, because it provides insight into the mindsets and methods of the super-rich—insights that sympathizers…

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In their critique of modern society, conservatives tend to cite two points as self-evident: amorality is rampant, and it’s all the liberals’ fault. That picture, argues David Callahan, isn’t so simple. While the right sounds its alarm over, say, teen sex and socialized medicine, it’s equally valid to see the transgressions of corporate tycoons, doped-up athletes and doctors shilling for dubious medications as signs of moral decay a decay made especially reprehensible in that it exploits the weak and is driven by greed.

In The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Do Well, Callahan makes his case by piling on story after story of selfishness exercised from boardrooms to classrooms. These examples from overaged Little Leaguer Felipe Almonte to Sears mechanics who doctored automotive diagnoses become more depressing with each passing page. Why is it that we know so much about these scoundrels and so little about those who lead less predatory lives? The answer is even more sobering: in uncertain times, many of us feel secret fascination and envy for those who rip off the system. In fact, Callahan writes about his subjects with a kind of sympathy because, as he sees it, they are victims as much as perpetrators of the system, no different at heart from kids who download rather than buy their music because, first, it’s free and, second, they know that some record executives have earned more in one good year than they’ll probably see in a lifetime.

When we get, as we inevitably must, to questions of how to deal with all this, the author suggests steps that even he admits seem inadequate. “Be the chump who files an honest tax return . . . who gives your friends a hard time for cheating on their taxes,” he writes, and you can almost hear the apology that such nostrums are doomed even as they are uttered. For in the end, The Cheating Culture persuades us of the permanence, as well as the gravity, of this problem.

In their critique of modern society, conservatives tend to cite two points as self-evident: amorality is rampant, and it's all the liberals' fault. That picture, argues David Callahan, isn't so simple. While the right sounds its alarm over, say, teen sex and socialized medicine,…
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The American Myth tells us that anyone who works hard and lives sensibly can achieve financial well being in the United States. Those who fail have only themselves to blame. The American Anti-Myth tells us the opposite: poverty is the fault of society. The poor face a rigid system that makes it close to impossible for them to rise.

Writer David K. Shipler identifies those two competing visions in The Working Poor: Invisible in America and proceeds to demolish both. He persuasively demonstrates through scores of compelling examples that the real answer is “all of the above.” The system is rigged, and people make terrible decisions. The common problems low wages, poor health care and housing, bad education, clueless parenting, sexual abuse, addictions are interlocking, creating what Shipler calls “the destructive synergy of many hardships.” Shipler, a former New York Times reporter, approaches the topic like the journalist he is, with profiles of a wide range of people struggling to get by. The tales of their lives are heartbreaking. Take Caroline from New Hampshire, a hard-working striver trying to support a learning-disabled daughter who was molested by her father. With little education, overwhelming burdens and a need for instant gratification, she moves from one dead-end job to another. Claudio, an illegal immigrant from Mexico working in the farm fields of North Carolina, lives with his wife in a cinderblock camp; together the couple is paid a total of $40 a day after deductions for “expenses.” They owe $2,300 to the “coyote” who smuggled them here, and have a sick 14-month old at home. Most of Working Poor is descriptive, but Shipler has a strong point of view, and his last chapter offers provocative prescriptions. His “holistic remedies” would include minimum wage rates that vary by region, sophisticated job training, a radical change in school funding and universal health insurance. Not everyone will agree. But at the least, his well-researched book should make the working poor a little less invisible. Anne Bartlett is a journalist who lives in South Florida.

The American Myth tells us that anyone who works hard and lives sensibly can achieve financial well being in the United States. Those who fail have only themselves to blame. The American Anti-Myth tells us the opposite: poverty is the fault of society. The poor…
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Two intriguing new books one by an outspoken African-American journalist and another by an equally candid civil rights activist offer starkly different views on race relations in America. The End of Blackness by Debra Dickerson and Quitting America by Randall Robinson explore the many ways in which African-Americans have been maligned, discriminated against and mistreated. However, Dickerson and Robinson disagree strongly on who or what is responsible for the plight of African Americans and what should be done to change it.

Dickerson, a former Air Force intelligence officer and a Harvard Law grad, is a journalist known for her bluntness, particularly on issues of race and gender. In a critically acclaimed memoir, An American Story (2000), she revealed her own circuitous route to success as a black woman and accepted responsibility for most of her personal and professional failings. In The End of Blackness: Returning the Souls of Black Folk to Their Rightful Owners, Dickerson argues that some African Americans are so mired in past wrongs done to them that they are unwilling and/or unable to move forward and work to improve their status. “Blacks simply do not know who and how to be absent oppression,” Dickerson writes in characteristically straightforward fashion. “To cease invoking racism and reveling in its continuance is to lose the power to haunt whites, the one tattered possession they’ll fight for while their true freedom molders unclaimed. It is to lose the power to define themselves as the opposite of something evil, rather than on their own terms.” For Dickerson, the solution is in self-reliance, with African Americans working to free themselves from what constrains and limits them, focusing on the future rather than the past. She urges African Americans to look inside in order to find the answers to problems on the outside, never defining themselves solely on the basis of race. As for the expected backlash her ideas will bring from fellow African Americans, Dickerson says she would welcome the opportunity to debate her critics.

Randall Robinson takes an equally caustic approach to espousing his views about race, but reaches a dramatically different conclusion. In Quitting America: The Departure of a Black Man from His Native Land, Robinson explains why he lost hope and literally “quit” the U.S. Disgusted, aggravated and burnt out, Robinson left the country and relocated to the Caribbean island of St. Kitts where his wife was born.

For Robinson, the decision to leave was the culmination of years of resentment toward his treatment as a black man and civil rights advocate in America. Experiences such as being forced to sit at the back of the bus and being denied courteous service at a restaurant or department store contributed to his rage. He angrily tells stories about his protest marches, hunger strikes and political rallies through the years most of which were fruitless, his cries for change falling on deaf ears.

Robinson provides many sobering and grim statistics about injustice and inequality in America. “In a country that just squandered more than two hundred billion dollars on a war of dubious legality, forty-three million Americans sixteen percent of the population are without health care insurance,” he writes. “One in four blacks, including those who need health care insurance most, the poorest, are wholly unprotected.” Quitting America is a sharp contrast to Robinson’s 2002 book, The Reckoning: What Blacks Owe to Each Other, in which he encourages African-Americans to speak out and support each other in eradicating crime and poverty from urban America. At this point, Robinson has simply given up on America and believes that the only way for people of color to thrive and succeed is to vacate this country for greener, or perhaps, blacker, and friendlier pastures elsewhere.

Glenn Townes is a journalist based in New Jersey.

Two intriguing new books one by an outspoken African-American journalist and another by an equally candid civil rights activist offer starkly different views on race relations in America. The End of Blackness by Debra Dickerson and Quitting America by Randall Robinson explore the many ways…
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In the introduction to Hidden America, Jeanne Marie Laskas observes that “we become so familiar with the narrative [of celebrity culture] we forget that there are any others happening at all.” That’s how Kim Kardashian gets branded a success while the truck driver who brings valuable parts to factories is viewed as unimportant.

A veteran journalist, Laskas gets her hands dirty in this collection of profiles, many of which are based on her work for GQ. Among her stops: an Alaskan oil rig, a gun shop in Arizona and an NFL stadium.

Great stories define these occupations. A trip to a California landfill leads to an engineer-turned-PR guy who sees trash as an opportunity to improve the world, by using landfill gas to produce electricity. Working on a cattle ranch is a rustic throwback complete with cowboys, but its existence hinges on technology. For immigrant farmers, many of whom are in the United States illegally, the promise of a good paycheck comes with the daunting prospect of not being able to trust anyone.

No job is examined the same way, a tribute to Laskas’ talents as a writer. Her attention to detail is vivid: One man is “packed solid as a ham”; the Cincinnati Bengals’ cheerleaders are “glimmery and shimmery kitty-cat babes.” She is also adept at giving explanatory passages a conversational feel, essential in a book introducing readers to jobs and mindsets.

Laskas’ enviable stylistic flow hides her most useful tool: restraint. The chapters in Hidden America aren’t star-spangled odes to American pluck or pleas for working-class understanding. Laskas simply gives voice—as well as dignity and poetry—to America’s blue-collar ranks.

In the introduction to Hidden America, Jeanne Marie Laskas observes that “we become so familiar with the narrative [of celebrity culture] we forget that there are any others happening at all.” That’s how Kim Kardashian gets branded a success while the truck driver who brings…

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Beware the apocalyptic book title. It’s a great marketing device, but the forcefulness and flash with which a title states a book’s theme virtually ensures that the author’s more measured conclusions will be overlooked. Hanna Rosin, who previewed the thesis for The End of Men in a 2010 cover story for the Atlantic, doesn’t use the word “end” to mean “termination” or even “destination.” She’s essentially arguing that men, particularly in the lower and middle classes, are losing ground economically to their female counterparts.

To illustrate this point, Rosin peers into the day-to-day lives and evolving motivations of several groups, including college girls and post-grads who embrace their sexuality as a career tool, upper-class couples who have made their marriages work to their mutual advantage (as opposed to lower-class ones who haven’t), men left idle or underemployed after a textile mill leaves town and women who are inundating the once primarily male profession of pharmacy.

Rosin also investigates the little publicized fact that women are so outpacing men in college enrollment and completion that some schools have quietly instituted “affirmative action” programs to recruit more men by lowering or re-structuring admission standards.

As Rosin demonstrates, women are getting ahead on the economic front in no small part because they work for less money and fewer benefits. In addition, many of them are too occupied in their off hours by children and unemployed or underemployed mates to demand more from their employers.

Don’t look for any Norma Rae unionizers or 9 to 5 score-settlers here. The men Rosin shadows are not out of work because there’s no work to be done but because companies can make more money and pay less taxes by shifting the work elsewhere. It’s not a pretty picture to see women and men forced to compete with each other for economic success and happiness.

Beware the apocalyptic book title. It’s a great marketing device, but the forcefulness and flash with which a title states a book’s theme virtually ensures that the author’s more measured conclusions will be overlooked. Hanna Rosin, who previewed the thesis for The End of Men

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Some of My Best Friends Are Black looks at integration and the ways it has failed from a fresh perspective. While campaigning for Barack Obama in 2008, Tanner Colby realized he didn’t know any black people. Asking around, he found that his friends didn’t either. There were very few circumstances when blacks and whites, as Colby would phrase it, hang out and play Scrabble together. He set out to learn why.

Four related stories come together here: a Birmingham school system’s gradual integration; a Kansas City neighborhood that fought housing discrimination; the separate and unequal strata occupied by blacks and whites in advertising; and the intergration of a Louisiana Catholic parish whose parishioners were separated only by a parking lot.

There’s no “a-ha” moment in the book, promising an easy solution and more Scrabble nights if we all follow directions. As Colby writes, “White resistance and black reticence are hopelessly entwined with one another, endlessly variable from situation to situation.” It’s not the recipe for racial harmony, but Some of My Best Friends Are Black moves the discussion forward and out into new territory.

Some of My Best Friends Are Black looks at integration and the ways it has failed from a fresh perspective. While campaigning for Barack Obama in 2008, Tanner Colby realized he didn’t know any black people. Asking around, he found that his friends didn’t either.…

In the modern board game of Life, players come to a fork in the journey very early on: get a job or go to college. If they choose college, they might find a higher-paying job in the long run, but they’ll have to take out loans and pile up debt before ever collecting a paycheck. Players might start a family along life’s road, but whichever fork they choose, unlike real life, always leads to retirement and never to death.

The Mansion of Happiness—the prototype for Life—was the most popular board game in 19th-century Britain, and while it was more moralistic than its later American counterpart, it raised many of the same questions about this journey called life. With her characteristically vivid storytelling, New Yorker writer Jill Lepore uses this British game to embark on a stunning meditation on three questions that have dominated serious reflection about human nature and culture for centuries: How does life begin? What does it mean? What happens when we die?

Lepore proceeds by exploring the stages of life from before birth, infancy and childhood to growing up, growing old, dying and life after death. For example, she examines 17th-century physician William Harvey’s discovery that human life begins with an egg (as opposed to the long-held belief that humans germinated from seeds), and illustrates the ways that such an idea came to have significant political consequences for women by the latter half of the 20th century. She focuses on the Karen Ann Quinlan case to show how the definitions of life and death—once the province of religion—were suddenly decided not in a hospital or a church but in a courtroom.

Through these stories, Lepore demonstrates how the contemplation of life and death moved from the library to the laboratory, so that scientific narratives of progress now promise a different sort of eternity—right up to the vague idea that one day, when the Earth dies, humans will simply move to outer space. In The Mansion of Happiness, Lepore’s refreshing and often humorous insights breathe fresh air into these everlasting matters.

In the modern board game of Life, players come to a fork in the journey very early on: get a job or go to college. If they choose college, they might find a higher-paying job in the long run, but they’ll have to take out…

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