Adam Hochschild, "Haiti's Tragic History," NYT, 29 December, reviews Laurent Dubois' Haiti: The Aftershocks of History.

Joyce E. Chaplin, "Roger Williams: The Great Separationist," NYT, 30 December, reviews John M. Barry's Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty. See also: Barry, "God, Government and Roger Williams' Big Idea," Smithsonian, January.

MelodiousMsM, "The Rule of Thumb: Vagina Types and Variability of Female Orgasm," MoSex:Blog, 18 November, identifies "A. E. Narjani," the author of an important 1924 paper on female orgasm as "Princess Marie Bonapart, great-grandniece of Emperor Napoleon I of France and daughter of Prince Roland Bonaparte." After marrying Prince George of Greece and Denmark in 1907, her official title became Her Royal Highness, Princess George of Greece and Denmark. Experiencing orgasm only through masterbation, HRH exhausted a husband and four male lovers before her study of the distance between the clitoris and the vagina in 243 women as determinative of the possibility of orgasm from penetrative sex.

Gary J. Bass, "How They Learned to Hate the Bomb," NYT, 30 December, reviews Philip Taubman's The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb. Lionel Barber for the Financial Times, 18 December, and Jacob Heilbrunn, "Remembering Richard Holbrooke," NYT, 30 December, review Derek Chollet and Samantha Power, eds., The Unquiet American: Richard Holbrooke in the World.

Finally, congratulations to the winners of Christianity Today's 2012 awards for the best books in history and biography: Paul C. Gutjahr for Charles Hodge: Guardian of American Orthodoxy and Thomas Albert Howard for God and the Atlantic: America, Europe, and the Religious Divide. Gary Scott Smith won an Award of Merit for Heaven in the American Imagination.