I’m so pissed off after reading these books I can hardly type. But my ire begins with baseball—and the same is true for Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel who lost a son in Iraq.

“This is not a novel,” says Poul Hannover, witness to this amazing story of the Holocaust. “No fancy trimmings.”

In our unstable neoliberal world, the venerable social ideal of equality is perhaps the most precarious commodity of all. To be sure, evidence of its absence abounds—in the casual enclosure and systematic auctioning of once-public goods, in the gaudy bailouts of our nonproductive financial sector, in the riotous indulgences of the 1 percent and the gnawing penury of the 99. And as the sphere of its exercise has narrowed to the vanishing point, equality seems to have been downgraded into the great dirty secret of our public life—only in contrast to the old Potter Stewart saw, fewer and fewer of

A decade ago, Sudhir Venkatesh inspired the insular world of academic sociology with American Project, his closely observed ethnography of the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago. Venkatesh’s hard-fought insider access was hugely impressive: As he labored for years in the sprawling public-housing project, Venkatesh took participant observation to new heights, documenting the complex social networks that governed life in the Taylor homes.

As I sit down to write, it’s roughly day 3 of the Washington political class’s overheated response to the release of Mark Leibovich’s This Town, and day 800 or so of what that class regards as the real story: the chatterbox narrative surrounding Mark Leibovich’s This Town. Politico has come forward with its latest report on the surveillance data it’s been collecting on all things “Leibo,” as the rag calls him. Glancing over the dispatch, it’s clear that the crucial question on Washington’s mind is this: Will this saboteur—who has courted no end of damning disclosures from his sources via

From the beginning of the South Asian crisis that culminated in the birth of Bangladesh in 1971, argues Gary J. Bass in this impressively researched book about a “forgotten genocide,” the major responsibility for what happened falls on two men—Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. While the president and national-security adviser directly collaborated in the secret bombing that touched off another genocide in Cambodia, the Bangladeshi crisis was more a study in conventional Cold War intrigues and personal piques than the Cambodia bombing had been—one reason, perhaps, that the full details of the US response are only now coming to light.

Singer and guitarist Chuck Brown invented go-go music in mid-’70s Washington, DC; it was an infectious blend of funk, Latin rhythms, and audience call-and-response that became the sound of African-American DC for decades. By the time of Brown’s death in May at age seventy-five, he had become the undisputed godfather of the genre, and a civic icon, even though go-go never found much of an audience outside the capital city. At Brown’s funeral, DC Council chairman Kwame Brown (no relation) began his eulogy in a defiant tone. “I am go-go,” he declared. “To the media, you better get that right.

On page 102 of The Center Holds, former Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter’s account of the 2012 election (and his second book about the presidency of Barack Obama), we learn that the president was facing a problem as his 2012 “reelect” approached: Liberals didn’t particularly care what happened to him. “Reenergizing the base was tough,” Alter writes. Fortunately, however, Obama got an assist in this task from right-wing governors such as Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio, whose wars on public-employee unions and their pensions “proved to be powerful motivators for the base.” Clever Obama campaign people noticed