Volume 68, Number 3 (2021-02-25)

Fintan O’Toole

The Trump Inheritance

Trumpism has always been here, it was waiting only to be named. What does this mean for the Biden presidency?

Clair Wills

Bildungsonline

Patricia Lockwood descends into Internet hell in her debut novel and winds up confronting America’s very real religious zealotry.

No One Is Talking About This

by Patricia Lockwood

Jed Perl

Cubism’s Poet

Writer, painter, and a close friend of Picasso, Max Jacob was part of the glory of interwar bohemian Paris.

Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters

by Rosanna Warren

Hermione Lee

The Wanderer

Jan Morris wrote that her constant travels were ‘an outer expression of my inner journey,’ ‘fired by patriotism, inhibited by upbringing, inexhaustibly in love.’

Thinking Again

by Jan Morris

Paul Franz

The Stench of American Neglect

In her new book, the activist Catherine Coleman Flowers chronicles her efforts to expose criminally deficient sanitation in her home county of Lowndes, Alabama and around the US.

Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret

by Catherine Coleman Flowers, with a foreword by Bryan Stevenson

Ben Lerner

Erica Hunt’s Jump the Clock is eerily appropriate for a time when a pandemic has suspended the normal temporal rhythms for so many of us, while laying bare our mortally uneven relationship to those rhythms.

Jump the Clock: New and Selected Poems

by Erica Hunt

Christopher Benfey

Pranksters and Puritans

Peter Mancall’s biography of Thomas Morton discusses Morton’s attempts to provoke the Pilgrims and undercut the Puritans.

The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England

by Peter C. Mancall

Coco Fusco

Deaccessioning Empire

A few daring curators are confronting the imperial histories of their museums.

The Metabolic Museum

by Clémentine Deliss

The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution

by Dan Hicks

Jim Holt

The Power of Catastrophic Thinking

Should we value human lives in the distant future as much as present ones?

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity

by Toby Ord

David Cole

A Rush to Execute

In six months, the Trump administration put to death over three times as many people as the federal government had executed in the previous six decades.

Frances Wilson

A Family Romance

While Sybille Bedford’s books were autobiographical, her life was novelistic.

Sybille Bedford: A Life

by Selina Hastings

Robert O. Paxton

Intrepid Navigators

Migration’s demands on birds are as daunting mentally as they are physically.

What It’s Like to Be a Bird: From Flying to Nesting, Eating to Singing—What Birds Are Doing, and Why

by David Allen Sibley

The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think

by Jennifer Ackerman

Flights of Passage: An Illustrated Natural History of Bird Migration

by Mike Unwin and David Tipling

Miranda Seymour

Promethean Women

Both Mary Wollstonecraft, darling of twentieth-century feminists, and her visionary daughter Mary Shelley continue to influence us today.

Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics

by Sylvana Tomaselli

Artificial Life After Frankenstein

by Eileen Hunt Botting

Frankenstein: The 1818 Edition with Related Texts

by Mary Shelley, edited and with an introduction and notes by David Wootton

Laura Kolbe

Intensive Care

a poem

Eamon Duffy

Why Was There a Reformation?

Though Steven Ozment’s The Age of Reform appeared amid a wave of critical thought about the Reformation, it rejected the new histories in favor of polemic.

The Age of Reform, 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe

by Steven Ozment, with forewords by Carlos Eire and Ronald K. Rittgers

Brandon M. Terry

Malcolm’s Ministry

Malcolm X’s dramatic life, and his insistence that the most disadvantaged play a part in their own emancipation, exert a strong pull on his many biographers.

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X

by Les Payne and Tamara Payne