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Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest

September 19, 2024

Current Issue

Culpability and the Culture

In Francine Prose’s memoir  1974 , she recounts a brief, intense relationship with one of the men behind the leak of the Pentagon Papers.

September 19, 2024 issue

Venture-Backed Trumpism

Why have right-wing ideas found such an eager audience among tech elites during Biden’s presidency?

The Secret Agent

Rachel Kushner’s fourth novel tells the story of a spy-for-hire who infiltrates the ranks of a radical French commune.

Monsters Real & Imaginary

In a novel that fuses horror with historical fiction, Victor LaValle explores the lives of African American women who went west around the turn of the twentieth century.

Chavismo’s Chokehold

The party of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro maintains a strong hold on state institutions, but it has lost the people’s mandate. Will there be a transfer of power to the opposition candidate, Edmundo González—the true victor of this summer’s election?

“If she frames her campaign effectively, Harris can make Trump a throwback and herself the embodiment of a future that has already taken shape in American demography.”

Fools in Love

Screwball comedies are among the most beloved films of Hollywood’s golden age, but for decades historians and critics have disagreed over what the genre is and which movies belong to it.

An ‘Unlawful Presence’

The International Court of Justice has ruled that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is illegal, yet this will do little to reduce the settlers’ savage violence against Palestinians or force Israelis to become conscious of it.

Can We Talk!

Can Babel work? An exhilarating new book about preserving the languages of the most linguistically diverse city in history believes it can.

Torrents of Magpies, Spheres of Hope

Throughout Rikki Ducornet’s prolific writing career, she has adhered to a Surrealist commitment to dream knowledge as well as a belief in literature’s ability to confront all of experience.

In Search of Steady Reform

Fareed Zakaria seeks lessons for the present in various European revolutions, but the “liberal” English and Dutch examples he singles out as exemplary barely qualify as revolutionary at all.

Not So Bad Guys

Joseph O’Neill’s new novel, Godwin , is a workplace drama that also manages to animate the forces that are fracturing our politics.

A Terrible Mistake

Steve Coll’s The Achilles Trap recounts the long history of confusions, misconceptions, and miscalculations in the relationship between the US and Iraq, from Saddam Hussein’s rise to power in 1979 to the the American invasion in 2003.

Succumbing to Spectacle

During the last half-century, artists, curators, and scholars have been increasingly preoccupied with the idea of spectacle and with how to embrace, critique, or co-opt the power of work that envelops and overwhelms the viewer.

The Most Conservative Branch

In his new book, Reading the Constitution , Stephen Breyer criticizes recent Supreme Court decisions on issues such as abortion and gun rights as the product of rigid and imperfect reasoning rather than of ideology, and he argues for a more pragmatic jurisprudence.

Writing Out of Annihilation

In the Warsaw Ghetto, the journalist Rokhl Auerbach risked her life to capture the stories of the Jewish community and, by writing about the people she knew, memorialized an entire lost world.

Satire in a Skittish Time

In Lexi Freiman’s The Book of Ayn , a canceled writer never quite makes the case against the imperatives of cultural sensitivity.

Worms’ Work

For five thousand years there has been no shortage of uses for silk, from Genghis Khan’s undershirts to nerve repair.

Mexico: Anatomy of a Mass Murder

Marcela Turati’s account of the massacres in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, is arguably the most thorough piece of investigative journalism yet produced about Mexico’s brutal political economy.

Haunted by Fiction

In Mark O’Connell’s A Thread of Violence , the murderer Malcolm Macarthur lurks in the gray area between life and literature.

Major Details

In Ordinary Human Failings , Megan Nolan works to balance her novel’s ambitious scale and grave themes with an attention to emotional minutiae.

Between a Joke & a Prophecy

Ed Park’s latest book—rich with errant wordplay, historical high jinks, and a fixation on the clandestine and conspiratorial—takes its place in the great tradition of the American systems novel.

82 Sentences, Each Taken from the ‘Last Statement’ of a Person Executed by the State of Texas Since 1984

Imagine the Atlantic as an Actor

August 15, 2024 issue

Thoughtfully chosen gifts for readers and writers

Fear and Joy in Chicago

The excitement that radiated through the Democratic National Convention was the other side of what had until recently been a deep despair.

August 27, 2024

‘An Ass-Backward Sherlock Holmes’

Over seven seasons on NBC, Columbo put a charming, shambolic gloss on the crime show. Now it has a new generation of imitators. 

August 25, 2024

Three Kinds of Sun

I never saw my father as comfortable and relaxed as when he was holding a gun.

August 24, 2024

Pitiless, Restless Brecht

A recent show of Bertolt Brecht’s collages and ephemera suggested that he viewed all his work as forever in progress.

August 22, 2024

Free from the Archives

“It is clear that, just as the style of the Birchers outlasted Welch’s death and the collapse of the Soviet Union, so too the spirit of Trumpism will endure well beyond Trump’s lifetime…. Not long ago, on Fox News, Lara Logan, once a prominent CBS foreign correspondent, compared Anthony Fauci to Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who did experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz.”

Somali and American, a Minnesotan Community

Established by European settlers in the nineteenth century, it was once referred to as “White Cloud.” But today, this town of 68,000 inhabitants has seen a growing number of Somali refugees arrive in the last two decades to work in meat factories or to attend the local campus of the state university.

July 2, 2019

The Power Brokers

A recent history centers the Lakota and the vast territory they controlled in the story of the formation of the United States.

December 3, 2020 issue

The People’s Choice

When Jesse Ventura revealed that he does not wear underwear, Fruit of the Loom sent him 12,000 pairs of undershorts. He donated them to two charities. Even boorishness, in the alchemy of this moment, became a benefaction. The citizens of Minnesota treat Ventura as a sly practical joke they are playing on themselves.

August 12, 1999 issue

The Frog Prince

One of Garrison Keillor’s greatest gifts is his ability to modulate from realism to fantasy, or from low farce to high comedy.

November 24, 1988 issue

The Heights of Charm

“Though all FDR’s medical advice indicated the job might kill him, he had grown into it. It was what he did and who he was. His love for it was so obvious that millions would have cried out in disbelief if told that he was quitting.”

September 29, 2016 issue

The Ages of Jackson

“If the frontier was the force driving the Jacksonian upheaval, how to account for the preoccupation in the pamphlet literature by Jackson’s supporters with problems of a commercial society—with monopoly, with banking, with the business cycle, with the unequal distribution of the fruits of labor, with workingmen, with trade unions, with class conflict?”

December 7, 1989 issue

The Party Isn’t Over

“Carter is criticized for his Georgia mafia, his personal righteousness, his remaining an ‘outsider’ even while in office. But all of these are necessary if he is to retain some claim upon the South. Denied the easy appeal of Wallace and Nixon to repression and veiled racism, he must cling to the distinctive style that links him to the South.”

June 15, 1978 issue

Buchanan Redux

“James Buchanan’s great accomplishment as president was to relieve Lincoln of the burden of provoking the Civil War.”

August 8, 1974 issue

Flaubert’s Planet

Do novelists, and their readers, bear some responsibility for the climate crisis?

July 21, 2022 issue

A Hotter Russia

The cliché, avidly promoted by Moscow, is that Russia will be a relative winner in climate change, but a new book argues that the country will find itself in trouble.

June 23, 2022 issue

Reasons for Concern

The IPCC’s latest report, with warnings for supply chains and food security, may be the most suspense-filled document in human history.

March 9, 2022

A Sort of Buzzing Inside My Head

Whether ChatGPT passes the Turing Test is a less troubling question than what Alan Turing meant by “intelligence.”

June 25, 2023

DeepL Edizioni

As machine translation software grows more sophisticated, could it entirely replace human translators?

March 22, 2023

Court v. Chatbot

In a recent experiment, chatGPT showed a more developed moral sense than the Supreme Court’s current conservative supermajority.

December 26, 2022

Whose Country?

It is impossible to talk about the blues, country, or where the two might overlap without talking about race, authenticity, and contemporary America’s relationship to its past.

November 23, 2023 issue

Bob Dylan, Historian

Across the six decades of his career, the singer-songwriter has mined America’s past for images, characters, and events that speak to the nation’s turbulent present.

June 19, 2021

The Royal Blues

Dinah Washington’s music is fiery, uncompromising, and devoid of self-pity. She was a rarity among singers, male or female, in the popular music of her era: an unflinching, even merciless figure who was also sensual and musically sophisticated.

June 23, 2005 issue

The You and Me that Used to Be

“Looking back, I am aware that much of my life took place to music as if it were a film with a score: phonograph or radio interminably on, conversations held under the sound of music because sometimes when there was no music and we were driving or sitting around or drinking in a bar, an awkward silence hovered. Something necessary was missing. Things did not go on well without music.”

November 4, 1971 issue

A ‘Moral, Strategic, and Diplomatic Abyss’

In the latest round of disputes within Israel’s ruling coalition, the eliminationist, messianic far right seems poised to triumph. 

July 2, 2024

Acts of Language

Amid the actual violence of Israel’s assault on Gaza, why have so many writers treated pro-Palestine speech as a threat?

June 13, 2024

Israel’s Universities: The Crackdown

Last October, Palestinian students and academic staff in Israel faced unprecedented penalties for their speech. Now the repression persists. 

June 5, 2024

A View from Cairo

The Egyptian government’s repression of its citizens and the Israeli government’s occupation of Palestine are inextricably linked.

May 12, 2024

Taking the Joke Further

“What makes for a good piece of written humor is another of the mysteries of art.”

Caribbean Voices

“There’s a kind of earnestness, a kind of humor that is very particular to the Caribbean and its tradition of picong—bold, verbal jousting.”

August 17, 2024

Reporting from an Occupation

“In the international press, I have found broad acceptance of my work, but back home the feeling of danger is heavy on my shoulders.”

August 3, 2024

The Right Fight

“The defense of human rights is a hard-ball endeavor, it is not about holding hands and singing kumbaya but about imposing consequences that shift the cost-benefit analysis behind governmental repression.”

July 27, 2024

Why Do You Do It This Way?

Episode Eleven of “The Critic and Her Publics”

July 9, 2024

The Tuning Fork in the Ear

Episode Ten of “The Critic and Her Publics”

June 25, 2024

The Problem of Other Minds

Episode Nine of “The Critic and Her Publics”

June 11, 2024

Documents of Mundanity

Episode Eight of “The Critic and Her Publics”

May 28, 2024

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

125 years of literary history.

edited by Tina Jordan & Noor Qasim ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 2, 2021

An ebullient celebration of literature.

A capacious history of the influential publication.

To commemorate the 125th anniversary of the New York Times Book Review , current deputy editor Jordan, assisted by Qasim, offers a fascinating selection of reviews, letters, interviews, essays, announcements, book lists, bits of gossip (Colette, on a ship, wore sandals without stockings!), and op-ed pieces published in the supplement since its first appearance on Oct. 10, 1896. Organized chronologically into five sections that comprise around three decades each, and profusely illustrated with author photographs, plates, advertisements, and assorted literary artifacts, the volume amply fulfills the editor’s goal of revealing how the Review “has shaped literary taste, informed arguments and driven the world of ideas in the United States and beyond.” Book critic Parul Sehgal prefaces the selections with an astute essay examining how the Review has covered works by women, writers of color, and writers in the LGBTQ+ community. In its early years, White male perspectives dominated, with reviewers worried about the proliferation and popularity of women writers. Overall, however, the collection amply represents reviewers “contemptuous of anxious gatekeeping,” bringing to their task “nerve, wariness and style.” Anxious gatekeeping, however, as well as wafts of condescension, can be found. For example, in 1904, the reviewer of W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk remarked, “Many passages of the book will be very interesting to the student of the negro character who regards the race ethnologically and not politically, not as a dark cloud threatening the future of the United States.” In 1933, assessing two feminist histories, the Review ’s editor saw the success of the women’s movement as “one of the major tragedies in the history of mankind.” Reviews by acclaimed authors include Eudora Welty on Charlotte’s Web ; W.H. Auden on Tolkein’s The Fellowship of the Ring ; Kurt Vonnegut on Tom Wolfe; and Margaret Atwood on Toni Morrison’s Beloved . A long list of other famous reviewers appends the volume.

Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-593-23461-7

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Clarkson Potter

Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021

HISTORY | UNITED STATES | GENERAL NONFICTION

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2017

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

National Book Award Finalist

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

The osage murders and the birth of the fbi.

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann ( The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession , 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

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BOOK REVIEW

by David Grann

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BOOK TO SCREEN

A WEALTH OF PIGEONS

A cartoon collection.

by Steve Martin illustrated by Harry Bliss ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 17, 2020

A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.

The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.

Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker . So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny .” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.

Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Celadon Books

Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020

ART & PHOTOGRAPHY | GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY

More by Steve Martin

by Steve Martin ; illustrated by Harry Bliss

by Steve Martin

by Steve Martin & illustrated by C.F. Payne

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