Books about corporations tend to stick to a few tried-and-true formulas. Many read like sports stories: Companies win with visionary leadership and by being smarter and showing more gumption than their competitors. Some of these accounts are anthropological treatments—thick descriptions of what it’s like to work within the unique culture of a firm. Then there are the angry tirades about the damage companies do.

Google, in many ways the most significant company of our time, has been the subject of books in each of these genres in recent years. Ken Auletta told the “great man” story of the

“Kipling’s case is curious. For glory, but also as an insult, Kipling has been equated with the British Empire,” wrote Jorge Luis Borges in 1941, and, some seventy years later, the curiosity of Kipling’s case still persists. On the one hand it’s tempting and safe to pigeon-hole him as the author of The Jungle Book for children and the poem “If — ,” that corny, beautiful, Buddha-like exhortation to stoicism and self-control. On the other, there are those who, like James Joyce, choose to condemn Kipling for “semi-fanatic” ideas about patriotism and race and consider him barely worth reading. An

How do you write a biography of David Bowie? How do you pin down a grasshopper aesthete whose core belief is that the only thing worse than looking the same twice is sounding the same twice?

Think of any period from the past century or so, and a few images or events will probably come to mind—often transmitted by popular culture as much as the history classroom. We remember the Depression through Henry Fonda playing a migrant Okie; the Eisenhower era's spirit of ruthless normality is preserved in the adventures of Jerry Mathers, as the Beaver. The enormous and rather puzzling exception, at least in the U.S., is World War I and its immediate aftermath. This marked the arrival of American military and political power on the global stage. But the images in our public memory are few

Five years ago, when Twitter was just another start-up and the iPad was a gleam in Steve Jobs’s eye, the state of print book reviews in this country was undergoing a spectacular and noisy collapse. Newspapers that were failing financially killed off their stand-alone print book sections, or folded them into the entertainment, ideas, or culture sections. They fired staff book editors and critics and cut freelance budgets. Hundreds of newspapers shut down altogether. Many magazines stopped covering books, and the literary quarterlies, for decades the champions of poetry and literary fiction