Recalling Small Wars At Start Of ‘our’ Time

Regardless of the loaded subjects Hanif Kureishi has addressed in his work — from the interracial, homosexual love story in “My Beautiful Laundrette’’ to the emotional brutality of a man’s extramarital affair in “Intimacy’’ — his tone always remains cool and measured.

Like many young people in the 1970s, Stephen Batchelor turned to the East in search of some deeper truth than what was available to him in suburban London. Unlike many of his contemporaries’ journeys, however, his was literal, and when he reached the East, he stayed.

Francis Galton, the Englishman who coined the phrase “nature versus nurture,’’ believed smart people were born smart and dumb people were born dumb.

Race, Nell Irvin Painter writes, “is an idea, not a fact.’’ Painter, a professor of history at Princeton, has written several books chronicling African-American history, but the story she tells here mostly sidesteps the dichotomy of black and white.

There is a family in Germany that is connected to my family in the Boston suburbs. We don’t know each other’s names or addresses. This family doesn’t even know we exist.