Ana Siljak

The title of Jennifer Welsh’s book, The Return of History: Conflict, Migration and Geopolitics in the Twenty-First Century, would make little sense without the lingering influence of Francis Fukuyama’s bold 1989 declaration that history had ended. In that year, Fukuyama, a political theorist, penned an essay boldly declaring that the major ideological contests of the 19th and 20th centuries were…

Margaret MacMillan’s book on the causes of World War One appropriately begins with the Paris Exposition of 1900, that triumphant display of western civilization in all its glory. Pavilion after pavilion lavishly displayed the technological achievements, imperial conquests and cultural magnificence of the European and American worlds. Canadian furs, Russian matrioshka dolls, the Palace of Electricity—all were designed to overwhelm viewers with the impression of the wealth and power of the modern…

“Here in the Russian Court,” writes Varvara, the narrator of The Winter Palace, “life is a game and every player is cheating.” She speaks with experience. Varvara arrives at the palace as an orphan of Polish and Catholic descent, a friendless foreigner in a Russian Orthodox world. Relying entirely on her wits, she manages to secure a position as a “maid of the bed chamber” to the Grand Duke…

In the prologue to Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth Century Lives, Natalie Zemon Davis imagines a remarkable dialogue with her three women subjects. The three rise up in protest against Davis and her book about them. They are not mere “women,” they insist, nor do they see themselves as “on the margins.” They are…

The Sense of Sociability: How People Overcome the Forces Pulling Them Apart is a sweeping, ambitious book that attempts to synthesize insights from generations of sociological analysis, and thus to provide the tools we can use to help “humans live together more happily and more effectively.” With years of introductory lectures in sociology at the University of Toronto under his…