Innholdsfortegnelse for November 7, 2024 i The New York Review of Books

Elaine Blair is a regular contributor to The New York Review. Christopher R. Browning is the Frank Porter Graham Professor of History Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942. Mark Danner is the author of Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War and The Massacre at El Mozote, among other books. He holds the Class of 1961 Distinguished Chair in Undergraduate Education at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard. Matthew Desmond is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton. His books include Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, which won the Pulitzer…

The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken. Penguin, 666 pp., $19.00 (paper) The Wolves of Eternity by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken. Penguin, 791 pp., $22.00 (paper) The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aiken. Penguin Press, 493 pp., $32.00 The novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard became famous for paying extraordinarily close attention to the texture of everyday experience, yet he has always been attuned to what might lie beyond it. His first novel, Ute av verden (Out of the World, 1998), was about angels. In A Man in Love (2009), the second volume of his autobiographical opus My Struggle, he described the christening of his first daughter, Vanja. After the ceremony the…

We Choose To: A Memoir of Providing Abortion Care Before, During, and After Roe by Curtis Boyd and Glenna Halvorson-Boyd. Disruption, 219 pp., $19.99 (paper) Abortion in the Age of Unreason: A Doctor’s Account of Caring for Women Before and After Roe v. Wade by Warren M. Hern. Routledge, 362 pp., $24.99 Curtis Boyd was a thirty-year-old doctor not long out of training when, in 1967, a pregnant teenager named Sallie walked through the door of his private practice in Athens, Texas, and told him, “I need you to do me an abortion.” Sallie wasn’t one of his patients, but her sack dress and home-cobbled shoes told him they had “more in common than our appearances would suggest.” Like Sallie, he’d grown up down a dirt road on the rural…

We’ve Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care by Liran Einav and Amy Finkelstein. Portfolio, 275 pp., $29.00 “We take it back,” Liran Einav and Amy Finkelstein, two of America’s most prominent health economists, declare in a new book, We’ve Got You Covered, their blueprint for reforming our health care system. After years of preaching “the gospel” that “patients must pay something for their care,” they’ve now abandoned the message. Instead they propose tax-funded “basic” health coverage—without copayments, deductibles, or other forms of “cost-sharing”—for all Americans. Almost simultaneously, three other leading health economists—Katherine Baicker, the provost of the University of Chicago, who served on George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Amitabh Chandra and Mark Shepard of Harvard—outlined a similar proposal in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. This may…

Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power by Timothy W. Ryback. Knopf, 386 pp., $32.00 Hitler’s First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich by Peter Fritzsche. Basic Books, 421 pp., $32.00; $18.99 (paper) The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic by Benjamin Carter Hett. St. Martin’s Griffin, 280 pp., $18.99 (paper) Historians usually try to maintain two vantage points at the same time. They attempt to perceive and recreate events as contemporaries experienced them. They also utilize the advantages of hindsight and access to a wide array of documentation to try to explain events in a way that contemporaries never could. Sometimes historians also draw upon their knowledge of the past to enhance the understanding of our current situation. The authors…

How many now a thousand I can’t lookAmerica a thousand still I saidI couldn’t then I looked how could I notWhen I imagine Hell I see the dead Together in a lake I see a thousandAbout a thousand in a burning lakeThe only torment most of us rememberBut where we heard of it we don’t remember We us how many children did we takeAnd keep are keeping though we’re better nowHave voted ourselves better good enough To try to give them back and give up slowlyHow many now have most of all their livesBeen trapped with us while we were giving up…

As per the book on desert decor, I’m workingto bring the inside out and the outside in: twill blanketin the hammock, aloe bladeangled in the kitchen in its clay pot. Small stuff,but of course I aspire to more: projectorand screen out back, pebbled shower floor. I want to parkmy car in my bedroom. I want to change clothesin the street. I want an outdoor toothbrushand an indoor billboard PSA for condoms. It’s definitely strikingthat some people believe exposing a partner to illnesswithout their knowledge should constitutea Class A felony, while others view itas rectifiable by bouquet. I’ll neverpublish this; you’ll never know my stance.You’ll never know whether my allegiance belongsto the translation of Matthew in which Christ says SELLWHAT YOU OWN or if it belongs to the arguablymore encompassing SELL…

Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon. Henry Holt, 289 pp., $26.99 In an epigraph to his remarkable debut novel, Glorious Exploits, Ferdia Lennon quotes Gilbert Murray’s translation of Euripides’ play The Trojan Women. Murray, one of the leading Greek scholars of the early twentieth century, was, in the words of the historian Richard Symonds, “haunted by the lessons of Greek history and the memory of how Athens had forsaken democracy, had become corrupted by Imperialism, and gone to its friendless doom.” Murray was comfortably embedded in English society as professor of Greek at Oxford and sufficiently well known to be recognizable as the model for Adolphus Cusins in his friend Bernard Shaw’s 1905 play Major Barbara. But he was also an anti-imperialist born in Australia of Irish rebel stock. While the…

In Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, there is a pub named Grendel’s Den, after the monster in the Old English epic poem Beowulf. It prominently displays a comedic circular crest claiming that it was established in 1271. Long known for its microbrewed beer and convivial atmosphere, the modest bar and grill in fact opened seven hundred years later, in 1971. The story the forthcoming 2024 election brings vividly to mind began at that pub just a few years later, in 1976, when I was teaching a class about the separation of church and state in American law. I was talking about the connection between religion and the federal ban on mailing so-called obscene matter—including, as Congress viewed things a century earlier in 1873 when it passed the Comstock Act, not…

Anne Enright Last year, when I was at home in Ireland and my son was studying in the United States, I found myself sending him a picture from Twitter followed by a warning: “There is a sniper on your university roof, please stay in your room.” I had been keeping a maternal eye on the Gaza protest on campus, bribing him to stay away from it with daily donations to Doctors Without Borders. I realize that, for many Americans, an armed police presence at a campus protest feels normal, so I want to say that nothing about that tiny, global political moment felt ordinary to me. Freedom of speech means people can say anything they like online, but as soon as they bring their bodies along, the guns come out.…

Ralph Ellison: Photographer edited by Michal Raz-Russo and John F. Callahan. Steidl/Gordon Parks Foundation/Ralph and Fanny Ellison Charitable Trust, 239 pp., $60.00 Ralph Ellison’s papers in the Library of Congress include hundreds of photographs that the novelist took over many years, mostly as a serious amateur and also, for a brief period in the late 1940s, as an aspiring professional. They range from the striking black-and-white studies of street life in Harlem that he made when he was in his thirties to elegant Polaroid images of flowers and still lifes from his later years. They aren’t great photographs. But they fascinate nonetheless, as the record of a modern literary giant’s romance with a quintessentially modern visual medium. Now there’s a beautifully produced book, Ralph Ellison: Photographer, which for the first…