Tim Kaine on 'Showdown'

My reading highlights are a new book, a recent book and an old classic. Wil Haygood’s“Showdown” is a fast-paced telling of how President Lyndon B. Johnson schemed to nominate Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court—running straight into the teeth of the segregationists running the Senate Judiciary Committee. Expect deft portraits of Marshall and all the major players. Orlando Figes’s “The Crimean War” is a masterly argument that this 1850s conflict was the first truly modern war with global superpower politics, industrialized killing, religious tension and intense coverage by international journalists. This book was especially enlightening given Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea and rising tensions between Russia and Turkey. Finally, Martin Scorsese has filmed Shusaku Endo’s “Silence”: This 1966 novel about the Jesuit missionaries who first evangelized Japan is one of my all-time favorites—combining a moving presentation of a vanished world with a hard, postnuclear attitude toward faith and doubt, cruelty and suffering.