Aleppo has essentially fallen. The images have been unignorable, calamitous: of residents wandering numbly through burning city streets; of parents sobbing over dead children; of the strong wheeling away the weak. On Tuesday, a United Nations official described the massacre of fleeing civilians as “a complete meltdown of humanity.” Residents have been tweeting out their goodbyes. Tens of thousands have already been displaced or perished.

A once-thriving metropolis of wealth, power and culture is now in ruins.

Khaled Khalifa writes about his native city with sensuality and an almost feral intensity in his new novel, “No Knives in the Kitchens of This City.” The book focuses on just one family, and it stops several years short of the Syrian civil war. But it offers a glimpse into how terrified andintimately connected to one’s nature as a human being that they cannot be transferred to another even if one consents to do so. This is powerful stuff.

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By 1776, the Atlantic Ocean had become what one historian has called “an information highway” across which poured books, magazines, newspapers and copies of the debates in Parliament. The latter were read by John Adams, George Washington, Robert Morris and other politically minded men. They concluded that the British were planning to tax the Americans into the kind of humiliation that Great Britain had inflicted on Ireland.

History confirmed his intuition. In the next hundred years, other nations and peoples would issue 200 similar declarations.

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But then came the late 1960s, and over the next two decades American individualism was fully unleashed. A kind