Of the many pleasures to be found in Thomas Powers’s The Killing of Crazy Horse, the most basic for me was filling a lacuna in my knowledge of American history, situated vaguely between the Louisiana Purchase and the Oklahoma Land Rush. Little of my formal education dealt with Native American history, and of the Great Sioux Wars of the 1860s and 1870s, not much was taught beyond an obligatory mention of George Custer’s Last Stand. But Powers vividly brings the entire era to life, from the dusty frontier cavalry posts of the northern Plains to the gritty gold mining in the Black Hills, and he navigates effortlessly through a dizzying array of characters. 

I spend a lot of time worrying about how magazines—and one magazine in particular—will fare in a world of ubiquitous WiFi and e-readers, and recently I got the chance to put some of those thoughts into words as a panelist at the Association of Writers and Writer’s Programs big annual convention here in Washington:

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While she was a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in 2007, Christina Asquith was working on her book Sisters in War: A Story of Love, Family, and Survival in the New Iraq. The two years that Asquith had spent in Iraq as a foreign correspondent after the American-led invasion in 2003 gave her a window into the fragile opportunities for women in Iraq, and the risks they ran to seize them. In conversation, she often worried about doing justice to the stories of the women she profiles in the book: two Iraqi sisters, a U.S. soldier, and a U.S. aid worker.

To judge by the reactions of two of the women she featured, she need not have worried. Zia Groosh Flossman, one of the Iraqi sisters who worked for Americans in Iraq and eventually had to flee the country, and Manal Omar, a Muslim activist who strives to promote women’s rights as a program officer at the U.S. Institute for Peace, appeared on a panel at the Center to launch the book last fall. Both Flossman and Omar stressed—sometimes emotionally—the importance of the stories that Asquith tells. The women’s rights agenda that was touted in the early days of the occupation has been sidelined as the war drags on, but the need for change remains.

In the current issue of the WQ, Asquith reviews Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women Are Transforming the Middle East, Isobel Coleman’s book about how women in the region are employing Islam—which many Westerners see as a force for