Reviews

Long overshadowed by Lindbergh, The Big Hop: The First Non-Stop Flight Across the Atlantic and Into the Future by David Rooney returns Alcock and Brown to aviation's top flight.

The Writer’s Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France by Robert Darnton discovers a literary flowering in the shadow of the guillotine.

Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire by Sarah E. Bond assembles a case for the power of the worker in ancient Rome.

Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus by Elaine Pagels finds that the son of God is more than the sum of his parts.

The Alienation Effect: How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century by Owen Hatherley follows in the footsteps of those who fled fascism.

The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and the Plot to Infiltrate the West by Shaun Walker sheds light on the Soviet Union’s undercover intelligence gathering.

America, América: A New History of the New World by Greg Grandin finds a place for Latin America and its ideals in the story of the United States.

The Sun Rising: James I and the Dawn of a Global Britain by Anna Whitelock offers a panoramic view of Jacobean foreign policy.

In The World of the Cold War: 1945-1991 Vladislav Zubok argues that circumstance rather than ideology shaped the clash between communism and capitalism.

Hitler’s Deserters: Breaking Ranks with the Wehrmacht by Douglas Carl Peifer surfaces the stories of those who sought to sit out the Second World War.