November 21, 2024 issue

Coco Fusco

The Crime of Human Movement

Two recent books about our immigration system reveal its long history of exploiting vulnerable individuals for financial gain.

Welcome the Wretched: In Defense of the “Criminal Alien”

by César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández

In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States

by Ana Raquel Minian

John Kinsella

Pie-Dish Beetle Pursues Longer Life

a poem

Elaine Blair

Toward a New Realism

Rachel Cusk’s latest experiment with the novel seems too influenced by a style of abstraction she deployed more successfully in her Outline trilogy.

Parade

by Rachel Cusk

Fintan O’Toole

The Protection Racket

For his supporters, Donald Trump’s misogynist attacks against Kamala Harris turn his own history as a predator into an asset.

Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Friend of the Family

Jean Strouse’s Family Romance explores the relationship between the Anglo-Jewish Wertheimers and John Singer Sargent, who painted twelve portraits of them.

Michelle Nijhuis

Life in the Ruins

Two new books consider the delusion of the human quest to be free from the constraints of nature.

The Burning Earth: A History

by Sunil Amrith

A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places

by Christopher Brown

Langdon Hammer

‘The Kingdom of Ends’

Though he began writing near the end of the twentieth century, the poet Reginald Shepherd remained an unapologetic modernist who believed firmly in the autonomy of art.

The Selected Shepherd

by Reginald Shepherd, selected and with an introduction by Jericho Brown

Christopher de Bellaigue

Iran Exposed

The Islamic Republic’s sordid proxy war with the West may now be leaving it open to an all-out attack as Israel attempts to eliminate its enemies throughout the region.

Clair Wills

A Mind Cast Out

The New Zealand writer Janet Frame insisted on the distinction between her fiction and her autobiography, yet it was the fiction that crystallized her own isolation in psychiatric wards.

The Edge of the Alphabet

by Janet Frame

Andrew Raftery

Rescuing the People’s Parchment

Fifty years after its signing, the Declaration of Independence had deteriorated distressingly. A new book traces its subsequent graphic elaborations and the commissioning of the iconic facsimile we know today.

The Declaration in Script and Print: A Visual History of America’s Founding Document

by John Bidwell

Rozina Ali

God’s Directive

After the September 11 attacks, evangelical American missionaries followed military tanks into Afghanistan and Iraq to convert Muslims as part of a holy war.

Soul by Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread the Gospel to Muslims

by Adriana Carranca

Emily Berry

The Room

a poem

A. S. Hamrah

You’re Brutal, I’m Brutal

With its sympathetic portraits of Donald Trump and Roy Cohn, The Apprentice is, in the end, yet another bland Hollywood biopic.

The Apprentice

a film directed by Ali Abbasi

Jenny Uglow

The Legacy of Red Vienna

From 1919 to 1934, socialist Vienna was guided by the “critical rationalism” and the pluralist, collaborative ethos of its thinkers and planners, whose influence endured long after they lost power.

Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World

by Richard Cockett

Carl Elliott

The Horrors of Hepatitis Research

Sydney Halpern’s Dangerous Medicine shows that the abusive experiments on mentally disabled children at Willowbrook State School were only one part of a much larger unethical research program.

Dangerous Medicine: The Story Behind Human Experiments with Hepatitis

by Sydney A. Halpern

Tim Parks

Hawthorne’s Mood Swings

Just as he was given to periods of melancholy and cheer, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s stories offer a constant back-and-forth between light and dark, town and wilderness, loneliness and society.

The Life of the Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne

by Dale Salwak

Timothy Garton Ash