I know all about traffic. So do you. So does everyone. We curse it. We try to avoid it. When we’re pedestrians, we try not to be run down by it. Of course, we also cause it. And as we sit stuck in it, we sometimes develop one or two pet theories about it, generally based on nothing more than conjecture and personal prejudice. To that extent, Tom Vanderbilt is one of us. In the prologue to Traffic, he wonders whether those who merge lanes at the last possible moment are arrogant queue jumpers or simply making the best use

Media circus, family circus, circus catch, political circus, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and the Circus Circus casino in Vegas—yet nowhere among these usages is there to be found an actual sawdust and elephant-scat circus. Before its devolution into mere metaphor (when did you last sit ringside?), the circus was indeed the greatest show on an unwired earth. In their glory days from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the last, Barnum & Bailey, Ringling Brothers, and lesser outfits crisscrossed America bringing spectacle to the masses. This suitcase-size compendium, The Circus, 1870–1950, features nearly nine hundred illustrations documenting an

Gary Panter is a difficult artist to pin down. He’s a cartoonist, best known for his buzz-cut everyman, Jimbo. He performs light shows, makes puppets, constructs tiny cardboard architectural models, and writes and draws an animated Internet show. He’s done illustration work and album art. He’s even been a production designer, creating much of the surreal set for Pee-wee’s Playhouse (the job earned him three Emmy Awards), and an interior designer, for a children’s playroom in Philippe Starck’s Paramount Hotel in New York. But this two-volume monograph makes the case for his paintings.

Formalist art critics used to say that the life of an artist was irrelevant to an understanding of his or her work,” Calvin Tomkins writes in the preface to Lives of the Artists, a collection of New Yorker profiles published over the past ten or so years. “In my experience, the lives of contemporary artists are so integral to what they make that the two cannot be considered in isolation.” For critics of a certain generation—me, for instance—educated by art historians more inclined to mapping Lacan’s L Schema than outlining an artist’s formative years, Tomkins’s statement is like a grenade.

Memoirs proliferate like kudzu,” wrote Randy Cohen in a recent issue of the New York Times Magazine. A quick perusal of the next week’s book review confirmed his assertion: memoirs of a drunken dad, of eating in China, of marriage to a Maori, and of the death of a child. Memoirs that chronicle divorce, widowhood, spiritual quests, and the renovation of charming properties in Tuscany and the south of France fairly explode from bookstore windows; Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle has been ensconced on the best-seller list for more than 128 weeks—and counting. Memoirs, it seems, are us.

This probably isn’t a good time to fall in love with the English. Their economy—subject to an even more inflated property market than ours—is poised for a fall. Their boozy, clever, and always-for-hire Hitchens-style newspaper hacks are starting to wear thin. And with just about the worst diet in the EU and an unquenchable thirst for our trashiest cultural exports (from Bret Easton Ellis to Desperate Housewives), it’s not always easy telling them apart from, well, us.

David Rhodes was still a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1971 when Atlantic–Little, Brown editor Joseph Kanon bought his first novel, The Last Fair Deal Going Down, a fantastical, dark tale of two Iowa cities, launching a prolific literary career. Two more novels appeared in quick succession: The Easter House (1974), which earned Rhodes comparisons to Sherwood Anderson, and Rock Island Line (1975), which John Gardner cited as an exemplar of the form in On Becoming a Novelist. In 1972, the writer settled into a quiet life in a century-old farmhouse in the southern Wisconsin town of Wonewoc

The Civil War was by far the bloodiest war in American history. The Union and Confederate armies suffered more than 620,000 fatalities— roughly equivalent to the American dead of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War put together. Among all combatants, the death rate was six times that of World War II; among Southerners, three times that of Northerners. Noncombatants, too, were swept up in this first modern, total war: An estimated fifty thousand civilians died. The numbers can be fleshed out with images