David Margolick

As peripatetic​ as he was, Fred Sparks, who was then a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, didn’t cover the Arab-Israeli War in 1948. He was too busy reporting on the civil war in Greece. But on repeated trips over the next decade to what reporters and cartographers still called the Levant, one thing Sparks always came back to was the plight of the Palestinian refugees....

When people try to capture the time warp in which modern Havana exists, they usually point to its cars, those Eisenhower-era Buicks and Oldsmobiles and Plymouths, held together by Cuban ingenuity and powered by Russian engines and other improvised innards. But on the Malecón, the grand boulevard along the Caribbean at the city’s northern edge, stands a row of other remnants from...