Volume 68, Number 17 (2021-11-04)

Natalie Angier

Claw & Order

What do we owe nature, and how might we do a better job of coexisting with species that do not exist for our pleasure and sustenance?

Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law

by Mary Roach

Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World

by Emma Marris

Jed Perl

Colors in Conversation

Joan Mitchell was a Romantic whose paintings join nature and feelings with an operatic lyricism.

Joan Mitchell

an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, September 4, 2021–January 17, 2022; the Baltimore Museum of Art, March 6–August 14, 2022; and the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, October 5, 2022–February 27, 2023

Susan Barba

For the Growers and the Grocers

a poem

David Cole

Let the Decision Stand

Every argument against Roe was squarely rejected in the Supreme Court’s 1992 Casey decision, and nothing has changed since then except the composition of the Court.

Jane Hu

Portrait of the Robot as a Young Woman

From his first novel to his latest, Kazuo Ishiguro has considered what it means to care for and attend to others.

Klara and the Sun

by Kazuo Ishiguro

Tim Flannery

Out of Savannastan

A new book provides convincing evidence that our earliest direct ancestors evolved in Europe, and that they were walking upright as early as six million years ago. But it is overly confident in its challenge to the idea that the genus Homo arose in Africa.

Ancient Bones: Unearthing the Astonishing New Story of How We Became Human

by Madelaine Böhme, Rüdiger Braun, and Florian Breier, translated from the German by Jane Billinghurst and with a foreword by David R. Begun

Clair Wills

The Wages of Virtue

Chastity seems like a simple concept, but a new history proposes that it has always been a shifting and malleable virtue.

The Chastity Plot

by Lisabeth During

Richie Hofmann

At the Rustic Hamlet Built in 1783 for Marie Antoinette, Last Queen of France

a poem

Ian Johnson

Chinese Medicine in the Covid Wards

One doctor’s mission to show that traditional healing arts could help in a national crisis.

Classical Chinese Medicine

by Liu Lihong, translated from the Chinese by Gabriel Weiss and Henry Buchtel with Sabine Wilms, and edited by Heiner Fruehauf

Pankaj Mishra

Writing the Other America

Class divisions inflict lifelong scars in Elizabeth Strout’s fiction, especially when the psychic damage is not acknowledged.

Oh William!

by Elizabeth Strout

Yasmine El Rashidi

Egypt: Lost Possibilities

What the revolution opened up in our lives—beyond activism—and then eventually took away.

Larry Wolff

A Halo of Nostalgia

The frivolous charms of Viennese operetta helped preserve a sense of Habsburg identity after the breakup of the empire.

The Operetta Empire: Music Theater in Early Twentieth-Century Vienna

by Micaela Baranello

Geoffrey O’Brien

‘Magic Sayings by the Thousands’

At the heart of the Kalevala is the shamanistic power of words to transform, lead astray, destroy, create, or bring back to life.

Kalevala: The Epic of the Finnish People

translated from the Finnish by Eino Friberg and with an introduction by Jukka Korpela

The Kalevala: An Epic Poem After Oral Tradition

by Elias Lönnrot, translated from the Finnish with an introduction and notes by Keith Bosley, and with a foreword by Albert B. Lord

The Kalevala, or Poems of the Kaleva District

compiled by Elias Lönnrot and translated from the Finnish with a foreword and appendices by Francis Peabody Magoun Jr.

Audrey Wollen

Not to Be

A Matter of Death and Life presents the closing scenes of a long marriage as both an informal diary and an instructive text.

A Matter of Death and Life

by Irvin D. Yalom and Marilyn Yalom

Bill McKibben

The Future Is Electric

Because electricity is so much more efficient than combustion, totally electrifying our country would cut primary energy use about in half.

Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future

by Saul Griffith

Declan Ryan

‘I Work and I Remember’

In Lawrence Joseph’s poetry there’s no escape from the memories of his formative, difficult years in Detroit.

A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems

by Lawrence Joseph

Assaf Sharon

‘This Obstinate Little Man’

Tom Segev’s biography of David Ben-Gurion depicts a man who intended to become a Zionist Lenin but ended up “an Israeli King Lear.”

A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion

by Tom Segev, translated from the Hebrew by Haim Watzman

Frances Wilson

The Double Bookkeeper

A new biography of Patricia Highsmith and a new edition of her journals give us a personal history of twentieth-century sexual control, of lives lived not in the closet but in the cellar.

Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks, 1941–1995

edited by Anna von Planta and with an afterword by Joan Schenkar

Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith

by Richard Bradford