A New Species of Trouble: The Human Experience of Modern Disasters

Kai T. Erikson. W. W. Norton & Company, $19.95 (264pp) ISBN 978-0-393-31319-2

Erikson examines how various communities and victims have dealt with man-made disasters, concluding that these experiences can help keep people's faith in the government and social systems. (July)

Featured Nonfiction Reviews

Mary Frances Berry

In this eye-opening and disturbing account, historian Berry (History Teaches Us to Resist) reveals that Black children were routinely “trafficked” by white Southerners via Continue reading »

Kate Winkler Dawson

Historian Dawson (American Sherlock) aims in this engrossing account to solve the murder that inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Catherine Read Williams’s Continue reading »

Ruth Franklin

This trenchant study from literary critic Franklin (A Thousand Darknesses) chronicles the brief life of Anne Frank (1929–1945) and traces the complex ways in which her story Continue reading »

Tao Leigh Goffe

In this roving, erudite debut study, Goffe, a professor of literary theory and cultural history at Hunter College, traces the attitudes and beliefs that undergird today’s Continue reading »