October 6, 2022 issue

Bill McKibben

Where Will We Live?

Three books on the movement, of both humans and wildlife, spurred by climate change illustrate the magnitude of the challenge before us.

Nowhere Left to Go: How Climate Change Is Driving Species to the Ends of the Earth

by Benjamin von Brackel, translated from the German by Ayça Türkoğlu

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World

by Gaia Vince

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

by Harsha Walia

Vona Groarke

Joseph Roth was unwavering in his passion for the vanished Austro-Hungarian Empire, which inspired his greatest novel, his hatred of nationalism, and his prophetic and courageous loathing for the Nazis. About everything else, as a new biography shows, he had violently mixed feelings.

Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth

by Keiron Pim

Linda Greenhouse

A Powerful, Forgotten Dissent

Stephen Breyer’s dissent in the Supreme Court’s Parents Involved case has proved prophetic about the decision’s consequences for racial integration in public schools.

Breaking the Promise of Brown: The Resegregation of America’s Schools

by Stephen Breyer, with an introduction by Thiru Vignarajah

Michael Gorra

Corrections of Taste

Terry Eagleton’s Critical Revolutionaries traces a shift in English studies in which close attention to language, rather than literary history, became the paradigm for criticism.

Critical Revolutionaries: Five Critics Who Changed the Way We Read

by Terry Eagleton

Jerome Groopman

Understanding Diabetes—and Paying for It

Advances in our knowledge of the causes of diabetes, and in our ability to treat the disease, have long been hampered by racial prejudice and exorbitant drug prices.

Insulin—the Crooked Timber: A History from Thick Brown Muck to Wall Street Gold

by Kersten T. Hall

Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease

by Arleen Marcia Tuchman

James Walton

Doomed to Lucidity

Though Andrew Miller is a master of traditional narrative, he has struggled to escape the formulas of his fiction.

The Slowworm’s Song

by Andrew Miller

Leslie T. Chang

Little Town on the Prairie

Liang Hong’s best-selling account of returning to her home village inspired an outpouring of Chinese nonfiction about the country’s immense social changes.

China in One Village: The Story of One Town and the Changing World

by Liang Hong, translated from the Chinese by Emily Goedde

Ange Mlinko

Timeless Correspondences

The great salutary effect of reading H.D.’s novels and memoirs— many brought out late in life or posthumously— is to restore her to her era.

HERmione

by H.D., with an afterword by Francesca Wade

Winged Words: The Life and Work of the Poet H.D.

by Donna Krolik Hollenberg

David S. Reynolds

Throngs of Unseen People

In the Houses of Their Dead, Terry Alford’s history of spiritualism during the Civil War era, suggests an unexpected link between the Lincoln family and that of John Wilkes Booth.

In the Houses of Their Dead: The Lincolns, the Booths, and the Spirits

by Terry Alford

Verlyn Klinkenborg

Endless Summer

Brian Wilson’s songs still have the power to astonish on their own terms, from their own time.

Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road

a PBS American Masters documentary film directed by Brent Wilson

Erin Maglaque

Rome Was His Laboratory

By the time of his death in 1729, the astronomer, historian, and archaeologist Francesco Bianchini had been an aide to three popes and confidant to one Polish princess and an exiled king.

The Incomparable Monsignor: Francesco Bianchini’s World of Science, History, and Court Intrigue

by J.L. Heilbron

David Shulman