Books

Two of the nation’s top investigative journalists teamed up for a book talk that effectively untangled some of the mystery surrounding opposition research and the role of dark money in undermining democratic principles.

Is aerial bombing a strategic weapon or an instrument of terror? Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, “The Bomber Mafia,” tells the story of how American military aviation thinking transformed from aiming to dismantle enemy industrial capability to delivering wholesale slaughter of civilians … and how the pendulum now has swung back. 

Peter Steiner from Sharon, Conn., has all the dream jobs that one might want. It’s not enough that he’s a talented painter, or a cartoonist for The New Yorker (and Lakeville Journal Co.), responsible for one of the most famous cartoons of the last half century (“On the internet, nobody knows you’re dog”). 

In case we didn’t already know it, COVID-19 most certainly taught or reminded us that life is uncertain and that the best way to make God laugh is to have plans.

At the one-year anniversary of the start of the pandemic, we have become unwitting experts on the subjective nature of time. In joy, hours escape us, when waiting in expectation the second hand stands still, and when we have nowhere to go and nothing to do for a year, we reconsider what time means to us.

In his new book, “The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge,” Peter Kaufman (an author who lives in Lakeville, Conn.) takes us deep into history to locate the moments when information was made accessible to the people — and the moments when making it accessible was a crime punishable by death.

This is a masterclass in a book. In “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russian Writers Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life,” George Saunders, fiction author extraordinaire and professor of creative writing at Syracuse, takes us through a close reading of seven short-story masterpieces, all by Russian writers.

Simon Winchester was an adventure traveler, a young Brit in the 1960s who started small by hitchhiking around North America and then dove deeper by joining a six-man sledding expedition in an uncharted section of the East Greenland ice cap.