May 25, 2023 issue

Michael Hofmann

Bewitched by Goethe

In Johann Eckermann, Goethe found an amanuensis made in heaven.

Conversations with Goethe: In the Last Years of His Life

by Johann Peter Eckermann, translated from the German by Allan Blunden, with an introduction and notes by Ritchie Robertson

Eugene Ostashevsky

Saving Lives and Making a Killing

A new book reveals the split personality of the biotech industry: an altruistic enterprise that creates breakthrough treatments for patients in need, and a bare-knuckle business that seeks to generate astronomic profits and stop competitors from developing better treatments.

For Blood and Money: Billionaires, Biotech, and the Quest for a Blockbuster Drug

by Nathan Vardi

Joan Acocella

From Russia, with Love

In her monumental new biography of Balanchine, Jennifer Homans tells the story of the choreographer whose modernist extension of classicism forever altered American dance.

Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century

by Jennifer Homans

Daisy Hildyard

Seeing Through It All

In Sara Baume’s novel Seven Steeples, two people and two dogs retreat to a rural cottage while the novel itself experiments with a nonhuman narrative voice.

Seven Steeples

by Sara Baume

Jed S. Rakoff

The Frontier Justice

William O. Douglas was a strong advocate of conservation and environmentalism, but as a Supreme Court justice his involvement in such issues was often ethically questionable.

Citizen Justice: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas—Public Advocate and Conservation Champion

by M. Margaret McKeown

Adam Hochschild

History Bright and Dark

Hillsdale College’s 1776 Curriculum and the documentary series based on the 1619 Project reflect deep divisions in how we recount our nation’s past.

The Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum

The 1619 Project

a six-part Hulu documentary series hosted by Nikole Hannah-Jones

Larry Rohter

The Inventor of Magical Realism

It remains a mystery why Miguel Ángel Asturias’s brilliant novel Mr. President remains less well known in the English-speaking world than the many novels it inspired.

Mr. President

by Miguel Ángel Asturias, translated from the Spanish by David Unger, with a foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa and an introduction by Gerald Martin

Willa Glickman

The Fight for Fair Wages

America’s lowest-paid workers are at a breaking point, and grassroots labor organizing may offer the only way out.

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice

by Jamie K. McCallum

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane

by Emily Guendelsberger

On the Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women’s Epic Fight to Build a Union

by Daisy Pitkin

Class Struggle Unionism

by Joe Burns

One Fair Wage: Ending Subminimum Pay in America

by Saru Jayaraman

D. Nurkse

The Extinct

a poem

Brenda Wineapple

At Odds with Two Worlds

Susanna Moore writes of the past with quiet insight, through the eyes of women who frequently move from a form of innocence to some collision with history.

The Lost Wife

by Susanna Moore

Ian Johnson

Loot Under the Lindens

The museums in Berlin’s new Humboldt Forum fall short in their efforts to explain that many of the objects on display were plundered.

Empty Showcases?: About the Handling of Objects from Tanzania

an ongoing exhibition at the Humboldt Forum, Berlin

A Modern History of China’s Art Market

by Kejia Wu

Edward Ball

‘Tell Your Story, Omar’

A new, Pulitzer Prize–winning opera adapts the memoir of Omar ibn Said, an African Muslim who spent much of his life enslaved in North Carolina.

Omar

an opera by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels, at the Spoleto Festival, Charleston, May 27–June 12, 2022; the Los Angeles Opera, October 22–November 13, 2022; Carolina Performing Arts, Chapel Hill, February 25–26, 2023; the Boston Lyric Opera, May 4–7, 2023; and the San Francisco Opera, November 5–21, 2023

Ama Codjoe

The Deer

a poem

Jenny Uglow

Shifting Sands

Who was responsible for the wrecking of the Royal Navy warship Gloucester in 1682, and why did it provoke so much political controversy?

Samuel Pepys and the Strange Wrecking of the Gloucester: The Shipwreck That Shocked Restoration Britain

by Nigel Pickford

Andrew Martin

The Documentarian

Zachary Lazar so convincingly blurs real and imaginary characters that his novels avoid objective truth altogether, even though their prose is written like a journalist’s.

The Apartment on Calle Uruguay

by Zachary Lazar

Nicholas Guyatt

Blues, Grays & Greenbacks

Two new books argue that the innovations the Lincoln administration used to finance the Civil War transformed the nation from a modest and decentralized economy into the global juggernaut of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War

by Roger Lowenstein

Bonds of War: How Civil War Financial Agents Sold the World on the Union

by David K. Thomson

Elaine Blair