1421 book review new york times

1421: The Year China Discovered America

Gavin menzies, . . morrow, $27.95 (576pp) isbn 978-0-06-053763-0.

Reviewed on: 01/06/2003

Genre: Nonfiction

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1421: The Year China Discovered America Paperback – Illustrated, June 3 2008

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On March 8, 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen set sail from China to "proceed all the way to the ends of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas." When the fleet returned home in October 1423, the emperor had fallen, leaving China in political and economic chaos. The great ships were left to rot at their moorings and the records of their journeys were destroyed. Lost in the long, self-imposed isolation that followed was the knowledge that Chinese ships had reached America seventy years before Columbus and had circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan. And they colonized America before the Europeans, transplanting the principal economic crops that have since fed and clothed the world.

• Print length 672 pages
• Language English
• Publisher William Morrow Paperbacks
• Publication date June 3 2008
• Dimensions 15.24 x 3.4 x 22.86 cm
• ISBN-10 0061564893
• ISBN-13 978-0061564895
• See all details

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“Menzies’ enthusiasm is infectious and his energy boundless. He has raised important questions and marshaled some fascinating information.” — Toronto Globe and Mail

“Captivating . . . a historical detective story . . . that adds to our knowledge of the world, past and present.” — Daily News

“ is likely to be the most fascinating read of 2003.” — UPI

“No matter what you think of Menzies’s theories, his enthusiasm is infectious.” — Christian Science Monitor

“What you’ve done, brilliantly, is to raise many questions that people are debating.” — Diane Rehm, The Diane Rehm Show

“[Menzies] makes history sound like pure fun...a seductive read.” — New York Times Magazine

From the Back Cover

About the author.

Gavin Menzies (1937-2020) was the bestselling author of 1421: The Year China Discovered America ; 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance ; and The Lost Empire of Atlantis: History's Greatest Mystery Revealed . He served in the Royal Navy between 1953 and 1970. His knowledge of seafaring and navigation sparked his interest in the epic voyages of Chinese admiral Zheng He. 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Harpercollins publishers, inc., chapter one, the emperor's grand plan.

On 2 february 1421, China dwarfed every nation on earth. On that Chinese New Year's Day, kings and envoys from the length and breadth of Asia, Arabia, Africa and the Indian Ocean assembled amid the splendours of Beijing to pay homage to the Emperor Zhu Di, the Son of Heaven. A fleet of leviathan ships, navigating the oceans with pinpoint accuracy, had brought the rulers and their envoys to pay tribute to the emperor and bear witness to the inauguration of his majestic and mysterious walled capital, the Forbidden City. No fewer than twenty-eight heads of state were present, but the Holy Roman Emperor, the Emperor of Byzantium, the Doge of Venice and the kings of England, France, Spain and Portugal were not among them. They had not been invited, for such backward states, lacking trade goods or any worthwhile scientific knowledge, ranked low on the Chinese emperor's scale of priorities.

Zhu Di was the fourth son of Zhu Yuanzhang, who had risen to become the first Ming emperor despite his lowly birth as the son of a hired labourer from one of the poorest parts of China. In 1352, eight years before Zhu Di's birth, a terrible flood had struck parts of China. The Yellow River had burst its banks, submerging vast areas of farmland, washing away villages and leaving famine and disease in its wake. The country was still in the throes of a terrible epidemic. The Mongols had ruled China since its conquest in 1279 by the great Kublai Khan, grandson of the greatest warlord of them all, Genghis Khan. But in 1352, plagued by famine and disease and desperately poor as a result of the depredations of their Mongol overlords, the peasants around Guangzhou on the Pearl River delta rose in revolt. Zhu Yuanzhang joined the rebels and rapidly emerged as their leader, rallying soldiers and farmers to his cause. During the next three years the revolt spread throughout China. Over decades of peace, the once ferocious Mongol warriors, the scourge of all Asia, had grown idle and complacent. Riven by internal dissension, they proved no match for the army raised by Zhu Di's father. In 1356, his forces captured Nanjing and cut off corn supplies to the Mongols' northern capital, Ta-tu (Beijing).

Zhu Di was eight years old when his father's army entered Ta-tu itself. The last Mongol Emperor of China, Toghon Temur, fled the country, retreating north to the steppe, the Mongol heartland. Zhu Yuanzhang pronounced a new dynasty, the Ming, and proclaimed himself the first emperor, taking the dynastic title Hong Wu. Zhu Di joined the Chinese cavalry and proved himself a brave and skilful officer. At the age of twenty-one he was sent to join the campaign against the Mongol forces still occupying the mountainous south-western province of Yunnan, bordering modern Tibet and Laos, and in 1382 he was ordered to destroy Kun Ming, to the south of the Cloud Mountains, the remaining Mongol stronghold in the province. After the city was taken, the Chinese butchered the adult defenders and castrated those prisoners who had not reached puberty. Thousands of young Mongol boys had their penises and testicles severed. Many perished of shock and disease; the surviving eunuchs were conscripted into the imperial armies or kept as servants or retainers.

Eunuchs served as 'palace menials, harem watch dogs and spies' for rulers throughout the ancient world, in Rome, Greece, North Africa and much of Asia, and they had played an important role throughout Chinese history. Surprisingly, they were intensely loyal to the emperors who had authorized their mutilation. There had been eunuchs at the imperial court since at least the eighth century BC and as many as seventy thousand were employed in and around the capital. Only sexless males were permitted to act as personal servants to the emperor and to guard the women of his family and the quarters occupied by his concubines in the 'Great Within', inside the palace doors. Emperors retained thousands of concubines both as a symbol of their power and to ensure a number of male heirs at a time of high infant mortality; guaranteeing the continuity of the dynasty and the worship of ancestors was a vital part of Chinese cultural rites. Non-eunuchs, even relatives of the emperor and his consorts, were barred from the vicinity of the women's quarters on pain of death. The absence of potent males ensured that any children born to the concubines had been sired by the emperor alone.

Eunuchs also helped to preserve the aura of sanctity and secrecy that surrounded the imperial throne. While the gods granted a 'Mandate of Heaven' to legitimize the emperor's rule, they could rescind it if he proved guilty of human failings, misgovernment or misconduct. It was forbidden to look upon the emperor: even senior officials kept their eyes downcast in the imperial presence, and when he passed through the streets, screens were erected to shield him from public gaze. Only the 'effeminate, cringing eunuchs', slavishly dependent upon the emperor for their very lives, were considered cowed enough to be silent witnesses to his private foibles and weaknesses.

Ma He, one of the boys castrated at Kun Ming, was billeted in the household of Zhu Di, where his name was changed to Zheng He. Many of the Mongols whom Zhu Di and his father expelled had adopted the Muslim faith. Zheng He was a devout Muslim besides being a formidable soldier, and he became Zhu Di's closest adviser. He was a powerful figure, towering above Zhu Di; some accounts say he was over two metres tall and weighed over a hundred kilograms, with 'a stride like a tiger's'. When Zhu Di was elevated to Prince of Yen -- a region centred on Beijing -- and given the new and more important responsibility of guarding China's northern provinces, Zheng He went with him.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ William Morrow Paperbacks; Illustrated edition (June 3 2008)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 672 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0061564893
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0061564895
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 820 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.24 x 3.4 x 22.86 cm
• #243 in History of Ancient China
• #252 in Ancient Chinese History
• #307 in Canadian Art (Books)

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Bad Monkey 's Carl Hiaasen is the Mark Twain of Florida Men

Carl Hiaasen and I were talking about recent absurdities in Florida politics, namely Moms for Liberty and their fight against a public liberal arts college, which ended with the school’s new administration literally trashing hundreds of books about gender and race at the same time that Moms for Liberty’s royal couple trawled the greater Tampa Bay area for group sex.

“You wait long enough in Florida and the other shoe drops,” he said.

For decades, Hiaasen’s visions of Florida have folded the state’s ancient beauty—mangroves, raptors, manatees—into the slop of now: buttercream-colored mansions built on the cheap, watered-down strip club cocktails, politicians with rictus grins tiptoeing across shorelines wounded by hurricane debris.

His novels for adults are fixtures on best-seller lists. His first book for younger readers was a Newberry Honor winner. He had a legendary run as a relentlessly accurate, knife-between-the-teeth political columnist for the Miami Herald . In the world of American publishing, he is one-of-one. If there’s any living American writer funnier, then they lack his edge and his readership. No one more politically pointed can touch the sleekness of his prose. If you want to call Hiaasen the Mark Twain of post-Vietnam America, you’ll get no arguments here.

But Hollywood has struggled with his work. A 2006 adaptation of that award winning children’s’ novel Hoot is charming. We don’t talk about 1993’s Striptease . That’s pretty much it. Historically, producers and directors and screenwriters have struggled to crack the Hiaasen code.

“I feel safer here in Florida than I do in the world of Hollywood,” he told me. “I always look at it philosophically: I say no way more than I say yes. There’s an option here and an option there. Most times it doesn’t go further than a first draft. That’s okay with me. If they don’t get it, I’m never heartbroken if that happens. I go in with modest expectations, because I know how tough my stuff is.”

That has changed. Bad Monkey , an adaptation of his 2013 novel, arrived on Apple TV with Hiaasen’s narrative charisma wholly intact . Vince Vaughn is note-perfect as Andrew Yancy, a homicide detective demoted to restaurant inspector—“roach patrol,” in Hiaasen’s words. When Yancy agrees to transport a dismembered arm as a favor to an old colleague, the task sends him down a rabbit hole of fraud, violence, and illegal development on Andros Island in the Bahamas.

Vaughn is the show’s star, and his divine ability to torque a line reading with the deadpan, the arch, the absurd, or the suspicious makes his performance a “home run,” in Hiaasen’s assessment. But Florida itself holds the center of Bad Monkey . Apple’s budget meant that they could shoot on location. Hiaasen’s role as a consulting producer meant that all the necessary details were spot on: Key deer, Rhum Barbancourt, the slurry inside cut-rate conch fritters, the red lights on costal homes engineered so as not to stun sea turtle hatchings. Bad Monkey feels right because it looks right.

“The main thing I said from the beginning,” Hiaasen says, “was that it has to be shot in Florida, and in the Keys. There isn’t any place that looks like that. I had a pilot shot in Louisiana. Lake Pontchartrain was supposed to look like Biscayne Bay—if you can imagine how many different levels of filters you have to put on Lake Pontchartrain to make it look like Florida.”

For showrunner Bill Lawrence, Bad Monkey represents a stretch. The infrequent moments of darkness on Ted Lasso or Scrubs were purely emotional. That’s not a knock. Lawrence’s métier is programming as welcoming as Florida water. But Bad Monkey features severed body parts, endangered animals having their habitat crushed, and Bahamian places and cultures up for sale. Hiaasen and Lawrence meeting in the middle makes for an ideal marriage: Lawrence permeates the screen with Hiaasen’s immaculate vibes and Hiaasen adds a serrated edge to Lawrence’s prestige-dad tendencies.

Hiaasen told me the story of their partnership both in terms of Bad Monkey ’s long gestation and Lawrence’s understanding of his work. Years ago, Lawrence flew to Florida to tell Hiaasen how much he liked the book. After that, Hiaasen says, “We had a bunch of pitch meetings—which are torture for me. Bill’s good at it! This was before Apple TV existed. At the time, you’re sitting in a room with executives. Sometimes they looked confused, like little puppies looking at each other.”

Hiaasen attributed Lawrence and Bad Monkey ’s success in capturing “the balance” in his work, the humor of the individual scenes, and the darkness in the overarching plots. The limitations of feature film would carve away the detailed tapestry that makes a Carl Hiaasen book special.

On Apple, the adaptation unfurls with care. Bad Monkey , like the bulk of Hiaasen’s crime novels, is narrated in third-person, giving the novel a cool, ironic distance and the necessary edge of satire. The show took a risk to preserve that, reproducing narration verbatim from the novel and putting it in the mouth of its own narrator, a local charter boat captain (Tom Nowicki).

In the first few chapters of the novel, we meet a typically Hiaasenian set of local freaks. The TV show does them all justice, from the sinister bee expert and extermination pro, to a wastrel of a seafood restauranteur, to a cringe real estate agent (Alex Moffat) desperate to sell a garish, environmentally belligerent mansion next to Yancy’s house. The beats are weighted perfectly, more than local color and less than a full subplot. It emulates the zoom-in zoom-out cadence that makes Hiaasen’s novels so winning.

The gift of streaming isn’t lost on Hiaasen. “You have the chance to get the backstory I slip into all my characters in my novels, here was a chance to get it on the screen, not in broad strokes, but the actual characters, strange as that might be,” he told me.

And the patient approach to moments of strangeness affords more room for the overarching darkness. “The current that propels the story is dark because I care about Florida so much. I know they [his novels] are supposed to be funny. But a lot satire comes from a place of injustice and anger. The best satire I’ve read has come from anger and [someone feeling] strongly about something. Satire is a weapon,” he said.

Maybe this season could be a chance to not only celebrate Hollywood getting Hiaasen right, but also a chance to put Hiaasen’s bibliography in a new context. The tired reading is that his books are vacation food. Typical pull quotes from reviews compare his novels to neon drinks in hurricane glasses—confections and distractions. Those takes drive me nuts. One of Hiaasen’s earliest books is Team Rodent , a scathing collection of episodes from the Disney corporation’s decades of bullshit in Florida. I bet Naomi Klein would admire it.

And Thomas Pynchon would salute Hiaasen’s openings. One of Hiaasen’s favorites (and mine) is the first chapter of Native Tongue , in which an endangered rodent is tossed into a tourist family’s car, terrifying them, and ending with a Florida state trooper blasting the endangered blue-tongued mango vole to oblivion (“Terry Whelper manfully directed his brood to move safely out of the line of fire. The state trooper approached the LeBaron with the calm air of a seasoned lawman”). A collision between the natural world and the dumbasses of the human one remains the ideal Hiaasen scene.

If Hiaasen is a container of Florida past and present and future, then he’s a Greek amphora. When I shared my Florida connection to Hiaasen—I lived in South Florida for a while and taught school at a Catholic high school in West Palm Beach with a famed athletic program— we chatted about how Okeechobee Boulevard runs from the wealthiest zip code in America, the island of Palm Beach, to one of its poorest, Belle Glade. We discussed how young Black men were often dragooned into the region’s biggest Catholic school football programs, and how a generation of new immigrants and migrants and refugees have changed Florida classrooms in wonderful ways. When I told him that my high school classrooms in West Palm averaged a half dozen languages each, including multiple Caribbean creoles, he paused for a moment and then said, “I think that’s pretty fabulous.”

When he shared the routines of his own childhood, a lost territory unfolded: “I’d get on my bike with a fishing rod with my buddies and we would just ride to where the swamp started at the wilder part of western Broward County. That was our world. At one point, I had a pet possum. It was an injured animal. I was trying to rehab it. It followed me around the neighborhood like a dog. Nobody else on my block had a pet possum.”

Hiaasen’s more recent career as an author of books for kids has added optimism to his work, he told me.

“Kids love the smart-ass humor. They love nature. They plug into the natural world immediately if they access to it. I spent my whole career making fun of grownups. Honestly, that’s what you do in a newspaper column. And kids love to see grown-ups made fun of. I was only going to do one [novel for kids]. I wrote Hoot and the response to it was beyond anything I imagined. I’m about as cynical as you can get, but the letters I get from young readers about these books really do give me hope. The kids are so smart and so thoughtful. They are so much more savvy than I was at that age.”

If the combination of telling details and swift prose reflect Hiaasen’s record as a journalist, then there’s another ingredient in the mix: songwriting. Hiaasen had a long friendship and fruitful collaborations with the late Warren Zevon, co-writing songs on Zevon’s 1995 Mutineer and 2002’s My Ride’s Here . They met at a book reading in LA. The connection was instant. “Warren and I went out and had coffee. All we did was talk about writing for two and a half hours. He was incredibly well read. He read all kinds of literature and novels,” he told me.

Music is always a strength of Lawrence’s shows. Bad Monkey ’s soundtrack is all Tom Petty covers . That the late singer’s estate signed off “absolutely thrilled” Hiaasen. The soundtrack was also serendipity for Hiaasen who told me Petty was one of his all-time favorites and that years ago they began their careers in the same town. “We were both in Gainesville at the same time. They were playing at the bars, but I didn’t go out much then. My oldest son was about 18 months old at the time,” he laughed.

As good as Lawrence’s shepherding of Hiaasen’s work to screen has been—I have Bad Monkey tied with Spin City for Lawrence’s best show—Hiaasen’s prisms of tone and violence and satire and politics make me curious about an extended universe of adaptations. What would Danny McBride on Hiaasen look like? Graham Yost took a short story from Hiaasen’s late friend Elmore Leonard and made Justified ; what would his take on Hiaasen be? Could P-Valley ’s Katori Hall take a run at Striptease and craft a limited series worthy of one of Hiaasen’s best novels?

Hiaasen’s stories are national ones because his home state is the bleeding edge of American delusion. “There are very few people you meet that don’t have a Florida connection. That don’t have a grandmother living down here, don’t have a cousin waxing surfboards, don’t have a relative in prison down here,” he said.

On his Instagram , Hiaasen has posted against a now-defeated plan to chop up Florida’s state parks into golf courses and about how proud he is that his publisher is fighting against book bans. His edge has not dulled. “My oldest son gets asked, ‘Has your dad mellowed?’ And he bursts out laughing. If you care about a place, the same stuff that’s going on now was the same stuff that was going on in 1974. All you can do for survival purposes is to keep writing about it. Keep shining a light,” he said.

In his 1993 Times book review of Striptease , genre god Donald Westlake wrote of Hiaasen: “He may be God's way of telling Florida it's gone too far.”

He’s also telling America the same thing.

The Year China Discovered America

Gavin Menzies | 4.05 | 13,610 ratings and reviews

Ranked #16 in China History , Ranked #31 in Chinese History — see more rankings .

The incredible true story of the discovery of America before Columbus was even born.Gavin Menzies's extraordinary findings rewrite history.

Reviews and Recommendations

We've comprehensively compiled reviews of 1421 from the world's leading experts.

Simon Sinek Author This is another book that trains us to keep an open mind. It offers a theory of how the Chinese discovered America 70 years before Columbus. The practice of being open to new ways of seeing things makes a leader open to the ideas of others — an essential characteristic of great leadership. (Source)

Rankings by Category

1421 is ranked in the following categories:

• #51 in China
• #48 in Exploration

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Book review: 1421

1421: The Year China Discovered America by Gavin Menzies Hardcover, US edition: New York: Morrow, 2003. ISBN 0-06-053763-9 Trade paperback, US edition, revised: New York: Perennial, 2004. ISBN 0-06-054094-X

As much as this says about the vagaries of book reviews, it also suggests how to popularize history profitably.  Make a splash, bring history to life, don't disappoint the reader, and you'll have a best-seller on your hands.  The line between fact and fiction is increasingly blurred in the world of Da Vinci Code-style bestsellers.

Menzies, a retired Royal Navy submarine captain, claims that four separate Chinese fleets under the overall aegis of the great eunuch admiral Zheng He sailed on great voyages of discovery about the year 1421.  During these voyages, they discovered the Americas, Antarctica, Oceania, various Pacific islands, and longitude — basically, every continent except Europe.  The Zhu Di emperor's death, however, put an end to the great voyages of discovery.  China turned her energies inwards, and records of the Zheng He voyages were destroyed.  Within a century, though, Europeans picked up the mantle of discovery. These great explorers thus bravely set forth into the (not-quite) unknown, ultimately handing Europe the mantle of world dominance on the back of Chinese maps.

But Menzies is the boldest of the adherents, claiming to prove such speculation as fact.  The evidence for this claim is helpfully summarized in an appendix in outline form.  Menzies’ quest originated with examination of pre-Columbian European maps showing lands that they should not have been aware of, and through a series of maps he sees the line of transmission from Chinese sources.  Why the Chinese?  Because only they were advanced enough to have undertaken such a journey.  What’s proof that it was the Chinese?  Various artifacts left behind in the Americas, Africa, and Oceania, and the genealogical imprint of Chinese sailors and concubines left behind in the New World.

It's all very interesting, but hardly conclusive.  Menzies traces the voyages chronologically, spreading the evidence out and mixing maps and artifacts with speculation on the routes they took, borne out by his experience as a submarine commander sailing the same seas.  Yet he consistently uses terminology such as "the only logical evidence," "incontrovertible," "certain."  Clearly his claims are not incontrovertible, considering how many academics have disputed his claims.

Also, constantly throughout the book, he refers to his website www.1421.tv , on which, he promises, more incontrovertible evidence will be put up.  After reading the book, I went there expecting some voluminous material and some detailed rebuttals of his critics.  But it turns out to be just more of the same.  Even on the web site, citations are murky.  "A professor" says this. Who? "More than 200 experts" in China were consulted, 85% of whom agree and 15% of whom disagree, and "details will be provided to any researcher who requests them."  Why not just tell us?  Even more questionable are some of the institutions listed as having been consulted on accuracy.  The Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council of the People's Republic of China is doubtlessly filled with history experts, but would one rely on the US State Department to endorse a book on American history?

The postscript to the second edition of the book, which fixes some obvious errors that were criticized in the first edition but doesn't really address the more substantive and general, closes with: "The great bulk of the new evidence that has enabled me to make such startling claims has come from readers of my book. It is you, not historians or academics, who have rewritten history." As dashing as it may seem to be the lone voice of reason in a maddening crowd, ignoring the academic concepts of peer review and standards of proof is a very dangerous attitude to take. Secrecy is essential for some fields such as warfare and technology — generals must keep plans secret from the enemy, and inventors from their competitors. But on the battlefield of ideas, holding back your sources simply generates suspicion about your (un)willingness to engage in discussion.

Chronological accounts do wonders for accounts of history, and Menzies is no exception. He was born in China during the period of Western domination, fondly recalls his Chinese amah, and has great respect for Chinese culture and history.  His spectacular (and partly conjectural) description of the ceremonies surrounding the Forbidden City's opening bring to life the majesty, the pageantry, and the far-reaching influence of Imperial China at its peak.  The reopening of the silted-up Grand Canal, the repair of the run-down Great Wall — all speak to the massive outlays of manpower and national effort that was made possible by the centralized administration that has characterized China for thousands of years.

His historical detective work and accounts of the Chinese fleet sailings are likewise absorbing. Here is where his credentials are strongest.  His Navy background in astronavigation, currents, and wind are used to great effect.  His theory of the Chinese discovery of longitude, explained in detail in an appendix, is a absorbing reconstruction of the technologies then available. That it was actually tested during a lunar eclipse make it all the more compelling.  His reconstruction of coast lines before global warming has raised the sea to present-day levels is also thought-provoking.

As interesting as individual elements of his book may be, Menzies doesn't really prove that China discovered America.  Before hearing of this book I gave no thought to the matter, leaving off at Zheng He's voyages to Africa.  When I saw it on The Times' bestseller list, I thought, "Well, it's possible."  After reading the book, I still think, "Well, it's possible."  But that’s all it is.  The book hasn’t really changed my opinion one way or another.

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In Rumaan Alam’s new novel, “Entitlement,” giving away a fortune isn’t as easy as it sounds.

By Joseph O’Neill

The Mother of a Transgender Child Faces Her Hometown’s Hatred

In “One Day I’ll Grow Up and Be a Beautiful Woman,” Abi Maxwell struggles to raise her daughter in a New Hampshire community that refuses to accept her.

By Alexandra Fuller

Tony Robbins: Motivational Speaker, Author … Hotelier?

The self-help guru is joining the hotel mogul Sam Nazarian to open a chain of luxury preventive-medicine resorts, aiming for a slice of the $5.6 trillion wellness industry.

By Nora Walsh

Academic Plagiarism Complaint Against the Author of ‘White Fragility’ Dismissed

In a letter, the University of Washington stated that the evidence presented in the confidential complaint failed to meet the institution’s criteria for plagiarism.

By Alexandra Alter

Books by Rachel Kushner and Percival Everett Make Booker Prize Shortlist

For the first time in the award’s 55-year history, five of the six nominated titles are by female authors.

By Alex Marshall

Do You Know Where in the World These Novels Are Set?

Try this short literary geography quiz on books with settings around the globe.

By J. D. Biersdorfer

Even Losers Get Lucky Sometimes. Not in This Book.

Tony Tulathimutte’s new stories center on the young, alienated, unloved people you can’t stop watching.

By Dwight Garner

First He Went After Anita Hill. Now He’s Coming for Clarence Thomas.

As a young conservative, David Brock smeared Hill, who accused the Supreme Court justice of sexual harassment. Now, in a new book, Brock is denouncing Thomas and the court’s rightward tilt — and contending with his own complicated past.

By Jennifer Szalai

Looking for a Woman in Finance? After 200 Years, There Still Aren’t Many

In “She-Wolves,” the historian Paulina Bren recounts the uphill — and ongoing — battle of women to break into the finance industry.

By Sheelah Kolhatkar