Volume 63, Number 19 (2016-12-08)

People who have spent time in solitary confinement describe being shackled to bunks by their feet and hands, being fed slop or left without food in a state of extreme hunger, and being beaten by hooded guards armed with tasers and bats. Once you see—and smell—a solitary cell, you will never forget it.

Hell Is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement

edited by Jean Casella, James Ridgeway, and Sarah Shourd, with an afterword by Juan E. Méndez

Anne Carson

Laps for Fat Wal

a poem

Robert Gottlieb

‘A Monstrous Prodigy’

Genius

a film directed by Michael Grandage

Father to Daughter: The Family Letters of Maxwell Perkins

by Maxwell Perkins, edited by Louise Perkins King, Ruth King Porter, and Bertha Perkins Frothingham

Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe

by David Herbert Donald

Aline: The First Biography of Aline Bernstein, Famed Stage Designer and Mistress of Thomas Wolfe

by Carole Klein

David Kaiser,
Lee Wasserman

The Rockefeller Family Fund vs. Exxon

For decades the company deceived the public about climate change.

Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power

by Steve Coll

Exxon: The Road Not Taken

by Neela Banerjee, John H. Cushman Jr., David Hasemyer, and Lisa Song

What Exxon Knew About the Earth’s Melting Arctic

an article by Sara Jerving, Katie Jennings, Masako Melissa Hirsch, and Susanne Rust

How Exxon Went from Leader to Skeptic on Climate Change Research

an article by Katie Jennings, Dino Grandoni, and Susanne Rust

Big Oil Braced for Global Warming While It Fought Regulations

an article by Amy Lieberman and Susanne Rust

Archival Documents on Exxon’s Climate History

available at www.climatefiles.com

Smoke, Mirrors and Hot Air: How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco’s Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science

a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, January 2007, available at www.ucsusa.org

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Noel Malcolm

Passions for the Past: The Aubrey Story

John Aubrey, My Own Life

by Ruth Scurr

James Walton

Shake Those Dice Again

A Gambler’s Anatomy

by Jonathan Lethem

Orlando Figes

A Very Close Friend of the Family

Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs

by Douglas Smith

Christian Caryl

The Kurds Are Nearly There

The dream of a national homeland is one that all Kurds share, wherever they currently live.

From Tribe to Nation: Iraqi Kurdistan on the Cusp of Statehood

a report by Amberin Zaman

The Kurds: A Modern History

by Michael M. Gunter

Invisible Nation: How the Kurds’ Quest for Statehood Is Shaping Iraq and the Middle East

by Quil Lawrence

Kurdistan Rising? Considerations for Kurds, Their Neighbors, and the Region

by Michael Rubin

Thomas Pakenham

What the Trees Say

“If you look up at those mossy, fern-encrusted branches, you may well find redstarts and robins and wood warblers searching for insects, while woodpeckers and little owls build their nests in hollows in the trunk.”

The Long, Long Life of Trees

by Fiona Stafford

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World

by Peter Wohlleben, translated from the German by Jane Billinghurst

Alan Rusbridger