Innholdsfortegnelse for June 26, 2025 i The New York Review of Books

Rozina Ali is a journalist based in New York City. Kwame Anthony Appiah is the author of As If: Idealization and Ideals, The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity, and Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science, which will be published this fall. He teaches in the Philosophy Department at New York University. David A. Bell is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Department of History at Princeton. His most recent book is Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution. Gavin Francis is a primary care physician. His book Maps of the Mind will be published in the UK next year. Michael Greenberg is the author of Hurry Down Sunshine and Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life. Kathryn Hughes is Professor Emerita of…

The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation: Belief Systems, Politics, and Institutions by Taisu Zhang. Cambridge University Press, 421 pp., $127.00 Public Interest and State Legitimation: Early Modern England, Japan, and China by Wenkai He. Cambridge University Press, 308 pp., $34.99 The Qing, China’s last imperial rulers (1644–1912), had doubled the empire’s size by 1800, while its population roughly tripled. Later, however, they were routinely blamed by Westerners, Chinese nationalists, and many modern scholars for stunting Chinese “development” by being too strong—or too weak. During the Cold War the more common complaint was of excessive strength. China, the story said, lacked constitutional checks, so the Qing had ruled despotically, causing intellectual, social, and economic stagnation. That argument fit comfortably with longstanding Orientalist stereotypes and backward projections of Maoist authoritarianism. But it…

Last night I woke to the moonlit fieldstriped with zigzag bars of shadowlike a destroyer’s flanks, althoughit was a hunchback scream that called, a limping clamor, on and on,to which the bole of a broken apple treeturned a dark ear avidly,to what could not will its own oblivion, to a sound before mercy was.I looked and looked and saw a circle,each a smudged gray fumarole,of it must have been coyotes jeering madly at their quarry.But when I woke a few hours lateronly dawn had stained the pasture.There was no crime and no body.…

Popularizing the Past: Historians, Publishers, and Readers in Postwar America by Nick Witham. University of Chicago Press, 220 pp., $99.00; $25.00 (paper) To academic historians in the United States, it feels like the worst of times. The number of undergraduates majoring in the field has been dropping steadily for the past fifteen years. All over the country, departments are cutting faculty positions or not replacing professors who retire. Just a third of the historians who finished their degrees in 2016 or 2017 landed a tenure-track job five years later; some just stop trying. Many college administrators who lavish research funds on biologists and computer scientists expect their colleagues who stick to the past to fend for themselves. Whenever a history-loving student asks me whether to apply to graduate school, I…

I’d called a crusade against my enemy.On the site of my ordeal, no sculptureremembers me. Where my body flared likea window, then smoldered like stone, ivy flickers. Fine then, go to the cathedral.It lies a quarter mile away. The glassof your era shines of six furrow-facedmen who beset me. My halo shines as the seventh. I will not triumph. Yet thoselike me do not depend on monuments.Orphaned, divorced, they approach, they lay plastic cones of flowers. I bless them. Restyour helms! Here walks one who is readyto unclothe herself of her suffering.…

They Were Ordinary Men To the Editors: Neal Ascherson’s review of Richard J. Evans’s Hitler’s People [NYR, March 27] references my book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. Ascherson says that according to Evans, later research “has weakened some of Browning’s conclusions.” He cites Evans’s statement that the German policemen like those I studied were volunteers, not conscripts, and quotes Evans that “they were carefully selected according to ideological crite’ria…. Their training included heavy doses of Nazi ideology and antisemitic indoctrination.” He continues with Evans’s argument that they were not primarily from the working class but rather from the middle class (which was, of course, the social core of the Nazi movement). I am a great admirer of Evans’s voluminous scholarship on German history…

The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls. Yale University Press, 237 pp., $28.00 Speaking in Tongues by J. M. Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos. Liveright, 119 pp., $26.99 For Elizabeth Bishop, a successful translation was, in large part, a matter of luck. As someone who published translations of poetry and supervised the translations of her own poetry, she had definite ideas of what made for a good one. “You really should repeat a line exactly if the original repeats it exactly,” she told her Portuguese translator, urging her to avoid taking liberties. “You shouldn’t put in words that aren’t there. . .. You should pay attention to repeated words and phrases—etc.” Her punctiliousness about formal and semantic equivalence made luck loom all the larger. Yes, you needed skill and sensibility, but…

Proust, a Jewish Way by Antoine Compagnon, translated from the French by Jody Gladding. Columbia University Press, 287 pp., $115.00; $27.00 (paper) Marcel Proust: L’Adieu au monde juif [Marcel Proust: A Farewell to the Jewish World] by Pierre Birnbaum. Paris: Seuil, 263 pp.,€22.00 (paper) At some point in his later years, Marcel Proust wrote to a friend that he had stopped visiting the graves of his maternal ancestors: There is no longer anybody, not even myself, since I cannot leave my bed, who will go along the rue du Repos to visit the little Jewish cemetery where my grandfather, following a custom that he never understood, went for so many years to lay a stone on his parents’ grave. This enigmatic sentence has been cited by dozens of scholars as evidence…

For Bread Alone by Mohamed Choukri, translated from the Arabic and with an introduction by Paul Bowles. London: Telegram, 207 pp., $14.95 (paper) In Tangier by Mohamed Choukri, translated from the Arabic by Paul Bowles, Gretchen Head, and John Garrett, with forewords by William Burroughs and Gavin Lambert. London: Telegram, 314 pp., $15.95 (paper) Tales of Tangier by Mohamed Choukri, translated from the Arabic by Jonas Elbousty, with a foreword by Roger Allen. Yale University Press, 246 pp., $16.00 (paper) Faces by Mohamed Choukri, translated from the Arabic by Jonas Elbousty, with a foreword by Roger Allen. Georgetown University Press, 146 pp., $19.95 (paper) I first saw Tangier in the summer of 2006. I was traveling in northern Morocco with my future husband, who is half Moroccan. On our arrival…