Innholdsfortegnelse for January 16, 2025 i The New York Review of Books

This winter in Israel-Palestine is a dark one, and not because the days are shorter. We have war crimes, manmade famine, and ethnic cleansing in both Gaza and the West Bank. Since early October the army has intermittently stopped humanitarian aid—namely food—from entering the northern part of Gaza, which has a population of some 200,000 or more. Much of that population has now been forcibly displaced toward the tent cities farther south, but it seems that tens of thousands of Palestinians are still hanging on in Jabaliya and Beit Lahiya, where the fighting and the bombing continue. Brigadier General Itzik Cohen, who is in command in the Jabaliya arena, has claimed that there are no civilians left in the north of Gaza. Oddly, many of these nonexistent ordinary people are…

Some years ago I visited a publisher of many fine books of photography to propose one of my own that would include both pictures I’d made and essays I was going to write. He was skeptical. “People read lying down on a couch or a bed,” he said, “but books of photographs are for sitting at a table or holding in one’s lap. How are you going to do both?” When it was eventually brought out by someone else, I gave a copy to an eminent professor I’d known in college, and he said he loved the text. “But what about the pictures?” I asked. Oh, those were terrific too, he said mildly—literature was his field—but the writing was what mattered. A bit later a student of mine, a very…

Impossible City: Paris in the 21st Century by Simon Kuper. PublicAffairs, 258 pp., $30.00 Paris in Turmoil: A City Between Past and Future by Éric Hazan, translated from the French by David Fernbach. Verso, 102 pp., $19.95 Paris Is Not Dead: Surviving Hypergentrification in the City of Light by Cole Stangler. New Press, 282 pp., $27.99 V13: Chronicle of a Trial by Emmanuel Carrère, translated from the French by John Lambert, with a postscript by Grégoire Leménager. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pp., $29.00 The Zone: An Alternative History of Paris by Justinien Tribillon. Verso, 204 pp., $29.95 One evening during the Summer Olympics last August, I wandered through central Paris at dusk with a friend. We watched on a café TV as the American sprinter Noah Lyles narrowly won the hundred-meter…

Romeo + Juliet a play by William Shakespeare, directed by Sam Gold, at Circle in the Square, New York City, October 24, 2024–February 16, 2025. At a performance of Romeo and Juliet in Boston in the 1850s starring Charlotte Cushman, the most celebrated Romeo of the day, a spectator fake sneezed loudly and derisively during an intimate scene between the cross-dressed Cushman and her Juliet, Sarah Anderton. Cushman halted the show and gallantly led Anderton offstage, as her early biographer Clara Erskine Clement put it, the way “a cavalier might lead a lady from the place where an insult had been offered her.” Cushman then returned to the footlights and confronted the offender, saying that if some man didn’t throw him out, she would do so herself. As “the fellow…

The Boy from Kyiv: Alexei Ratmansky’s Life in Ballet by Marina Harss. Picador, 482 pp., $20.00 (paper) Ballet dancers, for their whole careers, train exhaustively under the scrutiny of teachers and coaches. Yet choreographers are left to teach themselves. It’s extraordinary when you think about it. Nothing like the structured, formal, centuries-old process for developing dancers exists for the creators of ballet’s lifeblood, the new work upon which this painstaking art depends. Dancers who want to try making a ballet cobble together their own systems of learning. They’re typically able to watch established choreographers at work in the studio by being cast in their new dances; they absorb lessons in composition from the rehearsal process and can find experts to give them feedback on their beginning efforts. It’s a sporadic,…

The Lily in the Valley by Honoré de Balzac, translated from the French by Peter Bush, with an introduction by Geoffrey O’Brien. New York Review Books, 263 pp., $17.95 (paper) Near the start of Félix de Vandenesse’s frustrated passion for the married Henriette de Mortsauf in The Lily in the Valley, she asks him how he is so attuned to the trials she suffers as wife, mother, and subject of sensual temptation: “How can one so young know such things? Were you a woman once?” Félix’s answer only appears beside the point: “‘Oh,’ I answered, enthralled, ‘my childhood was one long illness.’” Being (like) a woman, it seems, resembles an illness; it’s inevitably marked by unhappiness. Félix’s early years were thoroughly deprived of all pleasure by a cold and punishing…

Consent by Vanessa Springora, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer. HarperVia, 194 pp., $16.99 (paper) Consent by Jill Ciment. Pantheon, 145 pp., $27.00 In the past five years two memoirs have come out bearing the title Consent. Both are about sexual relationships between teenage girls and significantly older men, and both titles ring with irony. In 2020 Vanessa Springora, the editorial director of the French publishing house Julliard, published a memoir about a sexual relationship she had at age fourteen with a prominent novelist, Gabriel Matzneff, who was fifty when they met in the late 1980s. During the year of their involvement, Matzneff deceived and manipulated Springora while also having sex with other teenagers and preadolescents, then wrote a novel about their relationship using her real first name. France did…

The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism by Martin Wolf. Penguin Press, 474 pp., $30.00 Something has gone terribly wrong. In his 2004 book Why Globalization Works, the economics journalist Martin Wolf wrote that “liberal democracy is the only political and economic system capable of generating sustained prosperity and political stability.” He was articulating the elite consensus of the time, a belief that liberal democratic capitalism was not only a coherent form of social organization but in fact the best one, as demonstrated by the West’s victory in the cold war. He went on to argue that critics who “complain that markets encourage immorality and have socially immoral consequences, not least gross inequality,” were “largely mistaken,” and he concluded that a market economy was the only means for “giving individual human beings…

Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church by Eliza Griswold. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 337 pp., $30.00 Eliza Griswold, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter, begins her latest book, Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church, by announcing her method as “immersion journalism.” The technique, she suggests, is “unruly,” akin to climbing into a stranger’s car and going along for the ride, wherever it takes her. The term seems relatively new, and nobody seems to agree on examples. Some sources cite Barbara Ehrenreich, working undercover in Nickel and Dimed, or Buzz Bissinger, investigating a season’s worth of high school football for Friday Night Lights. Griswold says she relies on “multiyear observation and direct engagement with primary subjects.” The…