Innholdsfortegnelse for May 29, 2025 i The New York Review of Books

Christopher de Bellaigue ’s The Golden Throne: The Curse of a King, the second book in his trilogy about Suleyman the Magnificent, was published in the UK earlier this year. 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. Andrew Delbanco is the Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia and the President of the Teagle Foundation. Boris Dralyuk is a translator and the author of My Hollywood and Other Poems. He is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Tulsa, a Tulsa Artist Fellow, and the Editor in Chief of Nimrod International…

The Art Front: The Defense of French Collections, 1939–1945 by Rose Valland, translated from the French by Ophélie Jouan, with a foreword by Robert M. Edsel. Laurel, 370 pp., $45.00 The word “resistance” is in heavy rotation these days, but it’s difficult to pin down its meaning in the current political landscape. For Americans of the last generation, however, it generally referred to the heroic French Resistance, which fought fascism during World War II by means of espionage and sabotage. This Resistance was not a single unified movement. It was more often the work of small cells and in some cases individuals, doing what they could to blunt the effects of authoritarianism for as long as they could. The Art Front: The Defense of French Collections, 1939–1945, a new English translation of…

ARCHITECTURE Almost Nothing Reclaiming Edith Farnsworth Nora Wendl The iconic Edith Farnsworth House is a singular glass home designed by Mies van der Rohe. But the oft-told history of the house overwrites Farnsworth’s role as Mies’s collaborator and antagonist while falsely portraying her as the architect’s angry ex-lover. Wendl’s audacious work of creative nonfiction explodes the sexand-real-estate myth surrounding the Edith Farnsworth House and its two central figures. May 20, 2025. 6 × 9 in. 152 pp. University of Illinois Press 9780252088766 Paper, $19.95 BIOGRAPHY Dr. Koop The Many Lives of the Surgeon General Nigel M. de S. Cameron This first full biography of C. Everett Koop tells the story of “the only surgeon general [who was] a household name,” according to the Associated Press. A celebrated pediatric surgeon before…

Sunday by Olivier Schrauwen. Fantagraphics, 468 pp., $39.99 (paper) Between 1918 and 1920, The Little Review serialized James Joyce’s Ulysses, a work so extraordinary, so experimental, and so exacting in its efforts to render the flow and form of human experience that in literary circles it gained an incandescent notoriety, not only for its capturing of the texture of perception and memory over the course of a single day but also because the book was so fabulously dirty. “God knows I have no objection whatsoever to so-called frankness in novels,” Vladimir Nabokov offered in his college lectures on Ulysses—though he did lightly tweak Joyce for implying that ordinary citizens think about sex as much as does poor Leopold Bloom. Nabokov also criticized Joyce for stressing language too much in his…

The Annotated Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by James L.W. West III, with an introduction by Amor Towles. Library of America, 238 pp., $35.00 Reviewing The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald in these pages forty-five years ago, Gore Vidal called him a “bold chronicler of girls who kissed.”1 Apart from the unwarranted condescension, the point was fair enough. Fitzgerald wrote frequently and fervently about boys dreaming of kissing a girl or recollecting the thrill of it, or relinquishing the hope of it, or, upon achieving it, asking themselves, “Had she been moved?… What measure of enjoyment had she taken in his kisses? And had she at any time lost herself ever so little?” Here, from his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), is the first kiss between…

Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat by Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker. PublicAffairs, 368 pp., $30.00 Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists and the New Order in Wellness by Stewart Home. Pluto, 212 pp., $19.95 (paper; to be published in July) In August 2020 Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is now secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, suggested that Covid-19 could be a “plandemic,” “part of a sinister scheme.” In July 2023 he was recorded telling dinner companions that “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” whereas “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” Vaccine research, he said at a panel discussion, could well be responsible for many major pathogens, including HIV and the Spanish…

The straps on my shoes make an X across my feet.My eyes snap open and shut like a purse. Plink plink. The way we depart from ourselves when the moon comes out.The way a cat shows its claws when picked up and held. If this is the slow kind of hell, I’m used to it—My hands are folded the wrong way, the cat sits on the bed Like a limpet, the sun drops out of the sky, inexorableAs a chandelier earring. I don’t believe in forgiveness Or holding hands or the kind of people who keep treasuredFigurines. Sometimes the truth is impossible as a bodice Spilling over with boobs, it just can’t be contained.What do you have to do to get arrested around here? The pictures on the wall look…

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Tablets: Secrets of the Clay by Dunya Mikhail. New Directions, 133 pp., $16.95 (paper) The earliest trace of the concept of freedom appears on a Sumerian stone tablet unearthed in Iraq and now displayed in the Louvre. Dating to about 2400 BCE, it commemorates how a king, Enmetena, liberated the people of his city-state, Lagash. In ancient Mesopotamia slavery, particularly of prisoners of war or families in debt, was a common practice. The word for freedom, ama-ar-gi, was at once a legal term and a metaphor. Formed from ama, “mother,” and gi, “return, restore, put back,” it had the literal meaning of “returning to the mother.” Freedom was the return of an enslaved child to their parent and also “the restoration of persons and property to their original status,” according to…

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams. Flatiron, 382 pp., $32.99 In early January Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, announced that the companywas ending fact-checking on its social media platforms, Facebook, Threads, and Instagram. The reason, he said—parroting right-wing talking points—was that flagging hate speech and misinformation was a form of censorship. The company’s fact-checking program was instituted after the 2016 US presidential election, when Facebook, as the company was then known, was roundly criticized for allowing Russiangenerated propaganda to tip the scales to Trump; it was canceled shortly after Zuckerberg made a post-election trip to Mar-a-Lago to pay obeisance to the man who had been threatening to jail him for life. (In case allowing falsehoods and hate on its platforms was not…

From the parched courtyards of our pastthey grope toward us in the night,the desperate shades of schnooks, outcastbefore their debts are paid. One mightbe in me as I speak, stuck fast. Excuse my cough. It is the strainall overburdened asses feel—too many souls, like sacks of grainstrapped to my back. I stagger, kneelin pain—not prayerful, pure and plain. Come, brother dybbuk, to my trough.Drink up. I’ll bear our double heapof guilt, before I shuffle offyour half of it and make the leapinto some other poor dummkopf.…