Volume 69, Issue 5 (2022-03-24)

Peter Brooks

Visions of Waste

The American Scene is Henry James’s indictment of what Americans had made of their land.

The American Scene

by Henry James, edited by Peter Collister

Jenny Uglow

A Master of Ambiguity

Hans Holbein evoked his subjects with uncanny verisimilitude, but leaves us to guess at his opinions of them.

The King’s Painter: The Life and Times of Hans Holbein

by Franny Moyle

Holbein: Capturing Character

an exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, October 19, 2021–January 9, 2022; and the Morgan Library and Museum, New York City, February 11–May 15, 2022

Jerry Brown

Washington’s Crackpot Realism

Framing the China threat as irredeemably antagonistic misses the reality that in order to survive, both countries must cooperate as well as compete.

The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict

by Elbridge A. Colby

The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order

by Rush Doshi

China Unbound: A New World Disorder

by Joanna Chiu

The Avoidable War: The Dangers of a Catastrophic Conflict Between the US and Xi Jinping’s China

by Kevin Rudd

Limit, Leverage, and Compete: A New Strategy on China

a report by Melanie Hart and Kelly Magsamen

The United States vs. China: The Quest for Global Economic Leadership

by C. Fred Bergsten

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Jorie Graham

Cultivating the reader’s sympathy for her characters is not what Lena Andersson is after; she is more interested in tracking their mistakes of deduction, which lead them deeper into painful predicaments.

Willful Disregard: A Novel About Love

by Lena Andersson, translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death

Acts of Infidelity

by Lena Andersson, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel

Son of Svea: A Tale of the People’s Home

by Lena Andersson, translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death

J. Hoberman

Romanian Masquerades

In Radu Jude’s ‘Bad Luck Banging, or Loony Porn,’ Bucharest is half built and half derelict—a semiotic jungle and a ruin waiting to happen.

Bad Luck Banging, or Loony Porn

a film written and directed by Radu Jude

The New Romanian Cinema

edited by Christina Stojanova, with the participation of Dana Duma

The Romanian Cinema of Nationalism: Historical Films as Propaganda and Spectacle

by Onoriu Colăcel

William Logan

Burke on Principle

a poem

Madeleine Schwartz

Bike Lane to the Élysée

The environmentalist policies of Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist mayor of Paris, have transformed the capital. Why is her presidential campaign faltering?

Une femme française

by Anne Hidalgo

Jed Perl

Proud of His Conundrums

The midcentury art critic Harold Rosenberg skewered his fellow New York intellectuals as a “herd of independent minds,” but his own work has more striking provocations than deep conclusions.

Harold Rosenberg: A Critic’s Life

by Debra Bricker Balken

The Loft Generation: From the de Koonings to Twombly, Portraits and Sketches, 1942–2011

by Edith Schloss, edited by Mary Venturini, with photo editing by Jacob Burckhardt

Anahid Nersessian

Knife Skills

Winter Recipes from the Collective, Louise Glück’s first collection since winning the Nobel, is a work of extreme concision, in which complicated feelings have been pared down to their minimum.

Winter Recipes from the Collective

by Louise Glück

Christopher R. Browning

When Did They Decide?

The Wannsee Conference was only one step in the Nazis’ protracted and incremental process of determining the fate of the Jews of Europe.

Wannsee: The Road to the Final Solution

by Peter Longerich, translated from the German by Lesley Sharpe and Jeremy Noakes

Michelle Nijhuis

The Downward Slope

In A Cure for Darkness, Alex Riley responds to his depression by turning outward, placing his experience and its purported remedies alongside the experiences of fellow sufferers past and present.

A Cure for Darkness: The Story of Depression and How We Treat It

by Alex Riley

Tim Parks