John Muir, a young Scottish immigrant, had not yet become a famed conservationist when he first trekked into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, not long after the Civil War. He was so captivated by what he saw that he decided to devote his life to the glorification and preservation of this magnificent wilderness. "My First Summer in the Sierra," whose heart is the diary Muir kept while tending sheep in Yosemite country, enticed thousands of Americans to visit this magical place, and resounds with Muir's regard for the "divine, enduring, unwasteable wealth" of the natural world. A classic of environmental literature, "My First Summer in the Sierra" continues to inspire readers to seek out such places for themselves and make them their own.

A probing reading of leftist Jewish poets who, during the interwar period, drew on the trauma of pogroms to depict the suffering of other marginalized peoples. Between the world wars, a generation of Jewish leftist poets reached out to other embattled peoples of the earth—Palestinian Arabs, African Americans, Spanish Republicans—in Yiddish verse. Songs in Dark Times examines the richly layered meanings of this project, grounded in Jewish collective trauma but embracing a global community of the oppressed. The long 1930s, Amelia M. Glaser proposes, gave rise to a genre of internationalist modernism in which tropes of national collective memory were rewritten as the shared experiences of many national groups. The utopian Jews of Songs in Dark Times effectively globalized the pogroms in a bold and sometimes fraught literary move that asserted continuity with anti-Arab violence and black lynching. As communists and fellow travelers, the writers also sought to integrate particular experiences of suffering into a borderless narrative of class struggle. Glaser resurrects their poems from the pages of forgotten Yiddish communist periodicals, particularly the New York–based Morgn Frayhayt (Morning Freedom) and the Soviet literary journal Royte Velt (Red World). Alongside compelling analysis, Glaser includes her own translations of ten poems previously unavailable in English, including Malka Lee’s “God’s Black Lamb,” Moyshe Nadir’s “Closer,” and Esther Shumiatsher’s “At the Border of China.” These poets dreamed of a moment when “we” could mean “we workers” rather than “we Jews.” Songs in Dark Times takes on the beauty and difficulty of that dream, in the minds of Yiddish writers who sought to heal the world by translating pain.

We are beginning to realize that the Civil War marks a dividing line in American history as sharp and definitive as that burned across French history by the Revolution. That the South had been vastly affected by the war was manifest from the first. The widespread destruction of property, the collapse of the labor system, and the fall of the social régime founded on negro slavery, had been so dramatic and so revolutionary in their results that they had created everywhere a feeling that the ultimate effects of the war were confined to the conquered territory. Grady's phrase, "the new South," and later the phrase, "the end of an era," passing everywhere current, served to strengthen the impression. That the North had been equally affected, that there also an old régime had perished and a new era been inaugurated, was not so quickly realized. The change there had been undramatic; it had been devoid of all those picturesque accompaniments that had been so romantic and even sensational in the South; but with the perspective of half a century we can see now that it had been no less thoroughgoing and revolutionary. The first effect of the war had come from the sudden shifting of vast numbers of the population from a position of productiveness to one of dependence. A people who knew only peace and who were totally untrained even in the idea of war were called upon suddenly to furnish one of the largest armies of modern times and to fight to an end the most bitterly contested conflict of a century. First and last, upwards of two millions of men, the most of them citizen volunteers, drawn all of them from the most efficient productive class, were mustered into the federal service alone. It changed in a moment the entire equilibrium of American industrial life. This great unproductive army had to be fed and clothed and armed and kept in an enormously wasteful occupation. But the farms and the mills and the great transportation systems had been drained of laborers to supply men for the regiments. The wheatfields had no harvesters; the Mississippi the great commercial outlet of the West, had been closed by the war, and the railroads were insufficient to handle the burden.

Apple's latest operating system, macOS Sierra, brings the Siri voice assistant to the Mac-- among other things. What it doesn't offer, though, is printed instructions. Pogue tells you the information you need to know, from enhancements and storage to shortcuts and file sharing with Windows.