“This summer I’m reading Stalingrad by Antony Beevor, to better understand the battle that perhaps did more than any other to shape the second half of the 20th century. The book I have been recommending lately is Tony Earley’s Jim the Boy, a simple novel about a complex subject: the moral awakening of a boy on the cusp of becoming a young man.”
— Von Drehle is an editor-at-large at TIME and the author of 1862: Abraham Lincoln and the Making of America (due this winter)