April 20, 2023 issue

Cathleen Schine

‘Binding and Building’ America

Maxine Hong Kingston’s best work has a timeless quality, fresh, beautiful, horrifying, bursting with myth and fantasy and nagging reality.

Maxine Hong Kingston: The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, Hawai‘i One Summer, Other Writings

edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Jameel Jaffer

Judging in Secret

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel was once known as the “constitutional conscience” of the executive branch, but in recent years it has been known principally for green-lighting torture, mass surveillance, and extrajudicial killings.

Rumaan Alam

A Formative Loss

In her novel The Furrows, Namwali Serpell’s pyrotechnics convey the madness, repetition, disruption, and shock of grief.

The Furrows

by Namwali Serpell

Matt Seaton

The British Broadcasting Conundrum

World War II was the BBC’s finest hour, but its history since then reflects the corporation’s gradual loss of primacy in British life.

The BBC: A Century on Air

by David Hendy

This Is the BBC: Entertaining the Nation, Speaking for Britain? 1922–2022

by Simon J. Potter

Geoffrey O’Brien

Joe Brainard’s Communal Intimacy

While Brainard’s recurring subject was himself, he somehow kept himself at a distance, an object in a world of other bodies.

Joe Brainard: The Art of the Personal

by John Yau

Robert Kuttner

300 Years of ‘Too Big to Jail’

In Impunity and Capitalism, Trevor Jackson shows how, between about 1690 and 1830, financial crises stopped being crimes and were treated as everyone’s fault and no one’s.

Impunity and Capitalism: The Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690–1830

by Trevor Jackson

Daniel Mendelsohn,
Homer

Odysseus Saved from the Sea

a poem

Ruth Margalit

Writing the Nakba in Hebrew

Arabesques is Anton Shammas’s lament for the catastrophe of 1948 and his paean to Hebrew and Arabic, languages he has spent a lifetime navigating between.

Arabesques

by Anton Shammas, translated from the Hebrew by Vivian Eden, with an afterword by Elias Khoury

Michelle Nijhuis

Refill the Swamp!

Two recent books show that the concept of ecological restoration is a fuzzy one: even practitioners rarely agree on what is being restored, or to what end.

Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis

by Annie Proulx

Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration

by Laura J. Martin

E. Tammy Kim

The Safe Harbor

The longshoreman labor leader Harry Bridges may no longer be widely known, but his philosophy of inclusive, democratic unionism imbues much of today’s most ambitious organizing campaigns.

Harry Bridges: Labor Radical, Labor Legend

by Robert W. Cherny

John Banville

Special Correspondent

As a public man, John le Carré was a model of probity and rectitude; in his private life, he was not above double-dealing.

The Secret Heart: John le Carré: An Intimate Memoir

by Suleika Dawson

A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré

edited by Tim Cornwell

Miranda Seymour

Consider the Publisher

Behind Mary Wollstonecraft was a courageous publisher and his network of eighteenth-century London’s most radical minds.

Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age

by Daisy Hay

Mark O’Connell

Hastening the End

Adam Kirsch’s Revolt Against Humanity is a survey of transhumanist thought, a diverse field united by cosmic pessimism.

The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us

by Adam Kirsch

Isabel Galleymore

Interior Design

a poem

William Dalrymple

Garum Masala

Dramatic archaeological discoveries—including a marble Buddha in Egypt and jars of Mediterranean garum (fish sauce) and olive oil in India—have led scholars to radically reassess the size and importance of the trade between ancient Rome and India.

The Indian Ocean Trade in Antiquity: Political, Cultural and Economic Impacts

edited by Matthew Adam Cobb

Globalization and Transculturality from Antiquity to the Pre-Modern World

edited by Serena Autiero and Matthew Adam Cobb

Rome and the Indian Ocean Trade from Augustus to the Early Third Century CE

by Matthew Adam Cobb

Manisha Sinha

The Beautiful Struggle

Several scholars have been recovering the lives and ideas of antebellum Black activists by studying their involvement in early Black newspapers and conventions.

Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship

by Christopher James Bonner

The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States

by Derrick R. Spires

Educated for Freedom: The Incredible Story of Two Fugitive Schoolboys Who Grew Up to Change a Nation

by Anna Mae Duane

Negar Azimi

Wilder, Riskier, More Generous

A new collection demonstrates that Cookie Mueller was not just another avant-garde It Girl of the downtown scene, but a writer of rare voice and imagination.

Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black: Collected Stories

by Cookie Mueller, edited by Hedi El Kholti, Chris Kraus, and Amy Scholder, and with an introduction by Olivia Laing

Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller

by Chloé Griffin

Matthew Desmond