“A brilliant, sweeping portrait of Afro-American history that transports the reader from the first arrival of slaves in Virginia in 1619 to the election of President Barack Obama.  Like Alex Haley’s Roots, this historic publication vividly reminds us of the long, painful experience of violence that African-Americans have endured and survived.  Thomas C. Holt’s Children of Fire is a monumental work that should be required reading for every American.”—William Ferris, Professor of History, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill

"In A Nation Among Nations: America's Place in World History, New York University Professor Thomas Bender sets out to break our dependency on this comforting paradigm by challenging us to reimagine the development of the United States as but 'one history among histories' and to relocate our national history within 'an interdependent world' . . . [This book is] a sophisticated polemic combining intellectual precision with moral passion, written for a general audience in lively prose that is neither condescending nor arcane. Bender does not pretend to write an exhaustive history of the United States but rather whets our appetite with tastes of his global and spatial revisionism . . . If you are tired of learning about this country's past through a prism of nationalist myopia and relish a good argument, this is the book for you . . . You will never  again think about 'American history' in the same provincial way."—Tony Platt, San Francisco Chronicle

"'Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion,' Gray, a British philosopher, insists in this outspoken attack on utopianism and the ‘faith-based violence’ it has inspired. History, Gray writes, offers no new dawns or sharp breaks, and, from the French Revolution to the war on terror, he is as critical of the humanist belief in progress as of the ‘belligerent optimism’ of neoconservatives. Sketching the roots of utopianism, he emphasizes the similarities between seemingly disparate movements: radical Islam, he suggests, might best be thought of as ‘Islamo-Jacobinism.’ Taking the Iraq war as an object lesson, he argues for an acknowledgment that the ‘local pieties of Atlantic democracy’ are not the only way to govern. Gray’s writing has a bracing clarity."—The New Yorker

“Jacobson said, 'The 9/11 Commission Report basically told its own story. In doing the research for After 9/11 . . . I recognized how much of what’s happened over the past six and a half years hasn’t really stayed with us. One function of the book, we hope, will be to help readers remember' . . . In addition to providing a vividly comprehensible time line, After 9/11 makes intelligible—in a way that even an overtaxed Presidential candidate can grasp—the tribal and religious-factional complexities within Iraq and Afghanistan.”—Mark Singer, The New Yorker