Reviewed: Deception: The Untold Story of East-West Espionage Today by Edward Lucas (Walker & Company, 384 pp., $26.00). Communism is dead, but the threat from Russia is still very much alive—and we in the West are dangerously complacent in the face of this menace.

Reviewed: Uncle Swami: South Asians in American Today by Vijay Prashad (The New Press, 208 pp., $21.95). Preet Bharara, A Punjab-born U.S. attorney, prosecutes Raj Rajaratnam, a Sri-Lankan born billionaire insider trader:

Reviewed: Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War by Edmund Wilson (Norton, 848 pp., $37.95). Fifty years after its publication, it’s still easy to understand why Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore got

Reviewed: Useful Enemies: When Waging Wars Is More Important Than Winning Them by David Keen (Yale University Press, 312 pp., $38). Heraclitus said that war is the father of all things, and though the great Greek’s utterances are 

Reviewed: Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution, by Linda Hirshman (Harper, 464 pp., $27.99). Wear at least three “gender-appropriate” garments to the bar or risk a police bust. Get booted from the Army for loving a consenting adult.

Reviewed: Land of Promise: An Economic History of The United States, by Michael Lind (Harper, 592 pp., $29.99). America is fickle. Or at least our economic history is. According to Michael Lind, author of Land of Promise, we can’t make

Reviewed: Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady, by Kate Summerscale (Bloomsbury, 320 pp., $26). We associate Victorians with plenty of moral codes and few women’s rights. But as Kate Summerscale meticulously

Reviewed: Metro: A Story of Cairo by Magdy El Shafee (Metropolitan Books, 112 pp., $20). Magdy El Shafee is a Libyan-born Egyptian comics artist. In 2008, his first graphic novel, Metro: A Story of Cairo, was published in Egypt. 

Reviewed: The Passion of Bradley Manning, by Chase Madar (OR Books, 167 pp., $15). Bradley Manning could not possibly have known, when referring to the hundreds of thousands of classified defense documents he ostensibly slipped

Reviewed: The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It, by Timothy Noah (Bloomsbury, 272 pp., $25). From the 1980s onward, Timothy Noah writes in his new book, “a democratization

Reviewed: The Crisis of Zionism, by Peter Beinart (Times Books, 304 pp., $26). Peter Beinart’s new book has provoked great uproar among American supporters of Israel, although it is hard to see why.

Reviewed: Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier by Neil deGrasse Tyson (Norton, 361 pp., $26.95).

I can’t pay no doctor bill

Reviewed: The World America Made by Robert Kagan (Knopf, 160 pp., $21). Robert Kagan is a neocon's neocon, a veteran of the Reagan State Department and a leading honcho of the Project for a New American Century group

Reviewed: Rights at Risk: The Limits of Liberty in Modern America by David K. Shipler (Knopf, 400 pp., $28.95). It may seem odd that a book about the recent erosion of our individual liberties devotes only limited space

Reviewed: Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Lawrence Otto (Rodale, 384 pp., $25.00). In december 2010, republican house majority leader Eric Cantor launched a website he called “You Cut,” encouraging citizens to identify “wasteful” grants awarded to scientists by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The agency, the premier U.S. institution that funds non-medical research in science and engineering, was poised for attack by citizen assailants.

In the third book of Paradise Lost, God explains to Jesus that his role as savior is necessary because Adam and Eve messed up. As Milton's God tells it: I gave them free will and I gave them only one regulation — Don't listen to Satan. But "Man falls deceiv'd by the other" (Satan), bites the apple, and is evicted from Paradise.

Reviewed: Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain by Dwight Macdonald. Edited by John Summers. Introduction by Louis Menand. (NYRB Classics, 289 pp., $16.95). For those of a certain age and temperament,