A miniseries beginning Aug. 12 recalls the calamity, but you can read the article and book that inspired it now — What medical disaster has brought the most heartbreaking scenes to 21st-century TV screens? You might think of the exhausted doctors and nurses working in overflowing intensive care units early in the Covid-19 pandemic, or the medics in underground shelters treating Ukrainian victims of Russian bombs.

What’s on your list? Post it with the tag Desert Island Books — Desert Island Discs — the world’s longest-running radio-interview show — first aired on the BBC in a bomb-damaged building in 1942. Producers have tweaked but not abandoned its crowd-pleasing premise: Each celebrity guest discusses eight recordings he or she would take if banished to a desert island. But lately critics…

The scary facts an award-winning reporter learned from a doctor who escaped from North Korea — Books about dictatorship are booming. After the election of Donald Trump, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarian began selling at 16 times the usual rate, and a torrent of books about tyrants has followed. The standouts include Those Who Forget: My Family’s Story in Nazi Europe (Scribner, 2020). A European…

What is life like for women in a Russian penal colony? No one knows what awaits the American basketball star Brittney Griner in the Russian penal colony she’s been sentenced to after being convicted of smuggling and drug possession. …

Authors who try explain tragedies like Uvalde and Sandy Hook to preschoolers face a risky task — It has come to this: picture books for 4-and 5-year-olds about school shootings. As the carnage in American classrooms goes on, authors keep trying to find words to explain the inexplicable to children. …