Volume 68, Number 14 (2021-09-23)

James Gleick

The Toll of the Clock

The clocks David Rooney studies in About Time are more than measuring devices; they are instruments of power, money, and faith.

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks

by David Rooney

Frederick Seidel

The Ballad of Ban the Bomb

a poem

Anna Louie Sussman

Conceiving the Future

The argument that reducing human populations will help curb climate change has obvious appeal, but it overlooks several inconvenient facts.

Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World

by Daniel Sherrell

On Infertile Ground: Population Control and Women’s Rights in the Era of Climate Change

by Jade S. Sasser

Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race

by Shanna H. Swan with Stacey Colino

Sophie Pinkham

Designs for Living

Svetlana Kana Radević’s architecture adapted modernism to the peculiarities of history and politics in Communist Yugoslavia.

Skirting the Center: Svetlana Kana Radević on the Periphery of Postwar Architecture

an exhibition at the Venice Biennale, Palazzo Palumbo Fossati, May 22–November 21, 2021

Mike Jay

The Well-Blown Mind

In two new books, Carl Hart and Michael Pollan look beyond the narrow rhetoric of the war on drugs.

Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear

by Dr. Carl L. Hart

This Is Your Mind on Plants

by Michael Pollan

Aminatta Forna

A Document of Losses

Véronique Tadjo’s chronicle of the West African Ebola outbreak illuminates the link between disease and environmental destruction.

In the Company of Men

by Véronique Tadjo, translated from the French by the author and John Cullen

Stephen Kinzer

Ortega in His Labyrinth

Nicaragua’s president has created an insular dynastic tyranny that eerily resembles the one against which he fought decades ago.

Déjà Vu: Somoza-Ortega

by Avil A. Ramírez

El Preso 198: Un Perfil de Daniel Ortega [Prisoner 198: A Portrait of Daniel Ortega]

by Fabián Medina Sánchez

Linda Colley

How British Is It?

The Met’s reinstalled British Galleries take a new approach to the question: What is British art and design?

The British Galleries

at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

The New British Galleries

by Wolf Burchard, Max Bryant, and Elizabeth St. George

Benjamin Nathans

Stalin’s Lawyers at Nuremberg

The Soviets were not just part of the prosecution team at Nuremberg; they were instrumental in defining the crimes of which the Nazi leaders were accused.

Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II

by Francine Hirsch

Ange Mlinko

Ashbery’s Cliffhangers

John Ashbery’s first posthumous collection is a reminder that collage and other formal experiments have always been central to his work.

Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works

by John Ashbery, edited by Emily Skillings and with a foreword by Ben Lerner

David A. Bell

Whose Freedom?

Tyler Stovall demonstrates the potent and noxious ways that people have conflated freedom with whiteness but pays too little attention to the force of freedom as a concept.

White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea

by Tyler Stovall

Adam Kirsch

Turbulent Music, Turbulent Life

Lewis Lockwood’s survey of the history of Beethoven biography shows that our understanding of the music has always been profoundly shaped by the stories we tell about the man.

Beethoven’s Lives: The Biographical Tradition

by Lewis Lockwood

Nancy F. Cott

A Work in Progress

Two new books on the history of feminism emphasize global grassroots efforts and the influence of American women labor leaders on international agreements.

Feminisms: A Global History

by Lucy Delap

For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality

by Dorothy Sue Cobble

James Romm

A Journey into Homer’s World

The classicist Milman Parry’s quest for the sources of Homeric epic led him in the 1930s to the Yugoslavian bards who sang in coffeehouses and bars much as he imagined Homer did.

Hearing Homer’s Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry

by Robert Kanigel

Tongo Eisen-Martin

Clocked In Still Starving

a poem

Sara Lipton

Seven Centuries of Slander

Two recent books concerning the blood libel offer hope and a warning. The triumph of myth is not inevitable, but the well of gullibility is easily primed.

Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth

by Magda Teter

The Accusation: Blood Libel in an American Town

by Edward Berenson

John Banville

An Affair to Remember

Julia Parry has mined a trove of inherited letters to write her marvelous, gently elegiac book about the love affair between Elizabeth Bowen and Humphry House.

The Shadowy Third: Love, Letters, and Elizabeth Bowen

by Julia Parry

Gavin Francis

Scrolling

Even tech optimists admit that human capacities are limited in comparison with the digital edifice we have built, with potentially grave implications for our health.

Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid: Changing Feelings About Technology, from the Telegraph to Twitter

by Luke Fernandez and Susan J. Matt

Fragments of an Infinite Memory: My Life with the Internet

by Maël Renouard, translated from the French by Peter Behrman de Sinéty

The Stars in Our Pockets: Getting Lost and Sometimes Found in the Digital Age

by Howard Axelrod

Ruth Margalit

The Mystical Realist

Jon Fosse’s Septology is suffused with religious symbolism, taking on, in its incantatory language and repetitions, the rhythm of the rosary.

The Other Name: Septology I–II

by Jon Fosse, translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls

I Is Another: Septology III–V

by Jon Fosse, translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls

Dan Chiasson

Larger Than Life

Nearly sixty years after its founding, Bread and Puppet Theater still has the power to unsettle, despite evoking old battles, old adversaries, and perhaps even lost causes.

Our Domestic Resurrection Circus

created and performed by Bread and Puppet Theater, Glover, Vermont, July 10–August 29, 2021

Geoffrey Brock

Our Emissary of Italian Prose

Frederika Randall’s translations introduced English readers to novels that expand our sense of Italian history and literature.

Dissipatio H.G.: The Vanishing

by Guido Morselli, translated from the Italian and with an introduction by Frederika Randall

Bug

by Giacomo Sartori, translated from the Italian by Frederika Randall

Xan Smiley

No Regrets

George Blake was perhaps the most effective yet the most enigmatic of the many British and American spies who served the Soviet Union.

Spies, Lies, and Exile: The Extraordinary Story of Russian Double Agent George Blake

by Simon Kuper

Elaine Blair

Hemingway’s Consolations

It’s preposterous to think of Hemingway, with his best sellers and personal celebrity, as a writer’s writer. But is it possible that this might be the best description of his status today?

The Sun Also Rises and Other Writings, 1918–1926

by Ernest Hemingway, edited by Robert W. Trogdon

Hemingway

a documentary film directed and produced by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick