Innholdsfortegnelse for March 27, 2025 i The New York Review of Books

Interwar: British Architecture, 1919–39 by Gavin Stamp, with a foreword by Rosemary Hill. London: Profile, 570 pp., $55.00 In 1944 the British architecture and design writer John Gloag declared, without much fear of contradiction, that “the modern movement does not yet speak English.” Paradoxically, the revolutionary design ethos that flourished on the European continent between the two world wars had yet to make much impact in the country where the Industrial Revolution began and the Crystal Palace affirmed modern architectural prefabrication. That odd disparity was apparent three years later in a survey titled Recent English Architecture, 1920–1940 and illustrated for the most part with moderately modernistic buildings interspersed with a few advanced schemes. Gavin Stamp, the fiercely principled British architectural historian, critic, educator, and preservation activist who died in 2017…

John Soane’s Cabinet of Curiosities: Reflections on an Architect and His Collection by Bruce Boucher. Yale University Press, 224 pp., $45.00 In 1877 the German classicist Adolf Michaelis had almost completed the research for his catalog of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture held in British collections. It was “irksome, mosaic-like work,” he reported—poring over the contents of museums and private houses, trying not to miss something important, at every moment likely to be “disturbed by the impatient noise of the housekeeper’s keys.” One of the final collections on his list was Sir John Soane’s Museum, a former private townhouse in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London. It was not the kind of place to lift his spirits: The collection,…consisting of the most heterogeneous curiosities and objects of art that can be…

How does an artist give timeless values a timely form? This is the essential question that Arlene Croce, the dance critic who died in December at the age of ninety, never stopped asking. I don’t think anybody who cares about the arts hasn’t asked the same question. It doesn’t matter whether your fundamental concern is the musical, visual, literary, or theatrical arts. A frozen academicism is almost inevitably the result when the timeless overtakes the timely. When the timely overwhelms the timeless, all you’re left with is a fad. Croce explored these perilous possibilities with clarity and honesty for some fifty years. She believed that dance, for all its fragility, carried some echo of eternity. In the sparkling reviews of theatrical events that she published in The New Yorker in…

What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost by Orlando Reade. Astra House, 260 pp., $28.00 John Milton wrote The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth in early February 1660, in a final, furious attempt to persuade Parliament not to end England’s turbulent, eleven-year experiment in self-governance. By the time it appeared in print, at month’s end, its failure was all but guaranteed; General George Monck, commander of the English forces in Scotland, had forced the return of Parliament’s deposed Royalist members, and the new assembly was preparing the legislative ground for the return of Charles II, the exiled Stuart heir to the throne. The pamphlet’s opening lines, added just before it went to press, are a master class in understatement. “Although since the…

Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans. Penguin Press, 598 pp., $35.00 We know who they were, these men and women who served Adolf Hitler. We know what they did, because the ashes of so many millions lie under the fields and pavements of Europe, and because the words “Western Civilization” are still too charred to read. The thing we don’t know is what made them capable of doing it. A master historian like Richard Evans, the author of three deservedly famous books on the Third Reich, must turn first to what the Nazis did and what the consequences were.1 But he evidently remains tormented by the simple, nonacademic questions that twenty-first-century people still ask. How could the Nazis, as members of the human species,…

The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence by Matteo Pasquinelli. Verso, 264 pp., $24.95 (paper) Silicon Valley runs on novelty. It is sustained by the pursuit of what Michael Lewis once called the “new new thing.” The Internet, the smartphone, social media: the new new thing cannot be a modest tweak at the edges. It has to transform the human race. The economic incentives are clear: a firm that popularizes a paradigm-shattering invention can make a lot of money. But there is also something larger at stake. If Silicon Valley doesn’t keep delivering new new things, it loses its privileged status as the place where the future is made. In 2022 the industry was having a bad year. After a lucrative pandemic—the five most valuable tech…

Native Nations: A Millennium in North America by Kathleen DuVal. Random House, 718 pp., $38.00 Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America by Pekka Hämäläinen. Liveright, 571 pp., $22.00 (paper) The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History by Ned Blackhawk. Yale University Press, 596 pp., $35.00; $22.00 (paper) When prospectors in California reported finding gold in 1849, hundreds of thousands of people from across the United States frantically traveled there to stake a claim to fortune. In New York, Rufus Porter, an inventor impatient with what was then the fastest way to get from the East Coast to the West Coast—a tedious thirty-day journey by boat down one side of the continent, across the Isthmus of Panama by land, then back up the Pacific—announced…

The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life’s Deepest Secrets by Thomas R. Cech. Norton, 292 pp., $28.99 It is likely to be remembered as the high point of Donald Trump’s tumultuous first presidency. On May 15, 2020, joined by cabinet members, public health experts, and military officials, he announced Operation Warp Speed, a “momentous medical initiative” to develop, manufacture, and distribute a successful coronavirus vaccine by year’s end, if not sooner. The event had all the trappings of a campaign rally. “Your vision,” gushed Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, “will be one of the great scientific and humanitarian accomplishments in human history.” Only four of those flanking Trump in the Rose Garden that day—the physicians Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, Francis Collins, and Moncef Slaoui—wore masks, although…

The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource by Chris Hayes. Penguin Press, 320 pp., $32.00 Thinking, and continuing to think for any length of time, is a peculiarly elusive activity. A vast self-help literature on how to focus and a suite of antidistraction devices, from Pomodoro timers to Freedom software that blocks the Internet, suggest that people would like to think deeply. Yet we largely don’t or won’t: in 2023, 79 percent of respondents to a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey reported that they spent no time just “relaxing or thinking” on the average day—while nearly all, or 93 percent, engaged in some form of diversion, such as watching TV. In 2014 researchers from the University of Virginia published a set of studies of people’s willingness…

Interference: The Inside Story of Trump, Russia, and the Mueller Investigation by Aaron Zebley, James Quarles, and Andrew Goldstein, with a preface by Robert S. Mueller III. Simon and Schuster, 259 pp., $28.99 The scandal involving Russian attempts to help Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election never acquired a catchy nickname or defining detail, and that may be one reason the story faded so quickly from public consciousness. The words “Watergate” and “Monica Lewinsky” immediately summon specific facts and images, but the first scandal of the first Trump presidency, to the extent it’s remembered today, is probably best known for the man who led the investigation of it. For a time, many of Trump’s critics regarded Robert Mueller as a potential savior, but at least as far as the…

The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier by Amy Godine. Three Hills/Cornell University Press, 488 pp., $35.95 A Hudson Valley Reckoning: Discovering the Forgotten History of Slaveholding in My Dutch American Family by Debra Bruno, with an afterword by Eleanor C. Mire. Three Hills/Cornell University Press, 287 pp., $32.95 Leaving home in Essex County, New Jersey, I drive north from the metropolitan region. On the New York State Thruway, I-87, I stop just beyond exit 21B, Coxsackie and Ravena, at the Capital Region Welcome Center. I pee, eat a hulking Taste NY sandwich, and watch a video on a giant screen touting the region’s glories. On-screen I see only White people. Only White people paddling pristine lakes in impressive kayaks. Only White people in appropriate footwear…

Unbreakable by Ronnie O’Sullivan. London: Seven Dials, 262 pp., $19.99 (paper) Ronnie O’Sullivan: The Edge of Everything a documentary film directed by Sam Blair Ask almost any snooker fan to name the greatest player in the history of the sport, and they will tell you it’s Ronnie O’Sullivan. This isn’t really a matter of facts and figures, although O’Sullivan, whose professional career has now spanned over thirty years, does indeed come out on top by almost any statistical measure. If you really want to know why he’s considered the greatest, you have to watch him play the game. Snooker is related to, but distinct from, other cue games like billiards and eight-ball pool. One key difference between snooker and pool is that snooker tables are bigger. A lot bigger. Two…