Innholdsfortegnelse for July 24, 2025 i The New York Review of Books

Peter Canby, a former Senior Editor at The New Yorker, is the author of The Heart of the Sky: Travels Among the Maya. Milan Děžinský is a Czech poet and translator. An English translation of his selected poems, Gravitation, will be published next year. Nathan Fields is a translator who lives in Prague and teaches English at the Academy of Fine Arts. Jarrett Earnest’s monographs on the painters Sam McKinniss and Dana Schutz were both published this year. James Gleick’s most recent books are Time Travel and The Information. He is working on a history of the telephone. Ian Johnson is a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. His latest book is Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future. Regina Marler is the author of Bloomsbury Pie:…

Jack Whitten: The Messenger an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, March 23–August 2, 2025. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Michelle Kuo. Museum of Modern Art, 304 pp., $75.00 Jack Whitten: Notes from the Woodshed, Second Edition edited by Katy Siegel. Hauser and Wirth, 589 pp., $35.00 (paper) A bit of apocrypha that’s floated around the art world for the past several years: when Artforum published one of Jack Whitten’s blazingly chromatic “slab” paintings on its cover in 2012, an eminent historian of modern and contemporary art allegedly wanted to know: Who is this second-rate Gerhard Richter? Like all gossip that sticks around, it struck a nerve on a number of levels. The scholar was Richter’s great champion, having made a career of theorizing him…

The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna. Harper, 274 pp., $32.00 The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood by James Boyle. MIT Press, 326 pp., $32.95 The origin of the many so-called artificial intelligences now invading our work lives and swarming our personal devices can be found in an oddball experiment in 1950 by Claude Shannon. Shannon is known now as the creator of information theory, but then he was an obscure mathematician at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York’s West Village. Investigating patterns in writing and speech, he had the idea that we all possess a store of unconscious knowledge of the statistics of our language, and he tried to tease some of…

The car floated up and flew through the snow-laden trees.Later that night when I was coming back by train from that placewhose name I first heard over the telephoneI pressed my wet feet to the heater, in which dust was being burned. Flakes were borne onto the deserted train station and decommissioned cisterns.Darkness and lost scattered light that pressed inside the stomachwere interrupted by the deafening express train to Turnov like a fiery handand in the last window a phantom, tearing off its face. (translated from the Czech by Nathan Fields)…

What to Save and Why: Identity, Authenticity, and the Ethics of Conservation by Erich Hatala Matthes. Oxford University Press, 224 pp., $24.99 Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History by Whitney Barlow Robles. Yale University Press, 301 pp., $40.00 Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures by Katherine Rundell, with illustrations by Talya Baldwin. Doubleday, 208 pp., $26.00 On the evening of January 7, as the sky over the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles heaved with flames, Francois Auroux struggled to mount a bicycle in his front yard. He’d left his home of thirty-nine years with bags of belongings on his shoulders and two framed works of art pinned awkwardly under one arm. A local NBC reporter, Robert Kovacik, saw Auroux through the smoke and embers and ran…

Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto by Kohei Saito, translated from the Japanese by Brian Bergstrom. Astra House, 260 pp., $27.00; $18.00 (paper) Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet by Matthew T. Huber. Verso, 312 pp., $24.95 (paper) Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism by Kohei Saito. Cambridge University Press, 276 pp., $110.00; $24.00 (paper) The economist and statistician E. F. Schumacher did not know what, exactly, would cause “society’s collapse.” But, he said, “I do know that a society which seeks fulfillment only in mindless material expansion does not fit into this world for long. There simply is no place for infinite growth on a finite planet.” He delivered that grim assertion in 1974, as the postwar economic boom was giving…

The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping by Joseph Torigian. Stanford University Press, 704 pp., $50.00 The Conscience of the Party: Hu Yaobang, China’s Communist Reformer by Robert L. Suettinger. Harvard University Press, 479 pp., $39.95 When nineteen-year-old Xi Zhongxun arrived in north-central China’s arid Loess Plateau in 1932, he was in search of a father figure. He found one in Liu Zhidan, a charismatic revolutionary described by the American journalist Edgar Snow as “a modern Robin Hood, with the mountaineer’s hatred of rich men; among the poor he was becoming a name of promise, and among the landlords and moneylenders the scourge of the gods.” Xi had joined the Chinese Communist Party at the age of fourteen while he was in jail…

Open Play The Case for Feminist Sport Sheree Bekker and Stephen Mumford “An articulate and convincing case that the segregation of women’s sports functions less as a benefit to women than a means of propping up patriarchal systems. It’s a trenchant, provocative take on a hot-button issue.”—Publishers Weekly Miracula Weird and Wonderful Stories of Ancient Greece and Rome Paul Chrystal Both humorous and shocking, Miracula is filled with astonishing facts and stories drawn from ancient Greece and Rome that have rarely been retold in English. “Entertaining to dip in and out of.”—Publishers Weekly Illumino A History of Medieval Britain in Twelve Illuminated Manuscripts Michelle P. Brown “Students of book history and general readers alike will find much to ponder and savor in this intriguing work that examines the pivotal role…

Service by John Tottenham. Semiotext(e), 327 pp., $17.95 (paper) On Thursday, August 8, 1929, Virginia Woolf fired her longtime servant Nellie Boxall, or she tried to. Boxall had been with Woolf and her husband, Leonard, for thirteen years, and the relationship between the two women was a roller coaster. In her diaries and letters, Woolf paints Boxall (whose name she persistently misspells as “Nelly”) as an excellent cook, a controlling busybody, and a passive-aggressive hypochondriac. Meanwhile, Woolf finds herself trapped between patrician disdain—she sees in Boxall, she writes, “a human mind wriggling undressed,” a “mongrel” without education who has no idea how to move among her betters—and her own progressive commitments. “Our domestic system is wrong,” she observes, denouncing “the system of keeping two young women chained in a kitchen…

HENRY GUARD theborealisqueen.com THE BOREALIS QUEEN by Henry Guard A survival fantasy set in the Ice Age—savage beasts, raw legend, and a fierce heroine. “Fascinating, compelling, and fun.”—Midwest Book Review “The prose is lyrical yet muscular …offering a hero whose scars become symbols of power.”—Kirkus Reviews 979-8992606508 • Paper, $13.95 • 393 Pages • Young Adult/Action/Adventure Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IngramSpark, and Google Books. ECHINUS PRESS, AN IMPRINT OF MEDITERRA BOOKS www.mediterrabooks.com IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF EPICURUS A Memoir by Christos A. Saccopoulos Greek-born, American-educated, architect and academic, the author presents his life adventure with light touch, including illustrations of his innovative buildings, furniture, and sculptures. 9798305735710 • Paper, $35.00; Hardcover, $75.00; Kindle, $9.99 • 474 Pages • Memoir Available on Amazon. Author’s website: sites.google.com/view/saccopouloskythnos?usp=sharing TELLWELL PUBLISHING www.tellwellpublishing.com;…

The Maverick’s Museum: Albert Barnes and His American Dream by Blake Gopnik. Ecco, 403 pp., $35.00 The House of Barnes: The Man, the Collection, the Controversy by Neil L. Rudenstine, with a new preface by the author and a foreword by Yve-Alain Bois. American Philosophical Society, 229 pp., $60.00; $45.00 (paper) Anyone can be bitten by the collecting bug, but only Albert C. Barnes would compare the bite to that of a mad dog. Though his remarkable art collection had just begun to take shape when he described how “the rabies of pursuit of quality in painting …gets into a man’s system,” his rabid pursuit of such quality never slackened. Nor did his capacity to bite back—and bite hard—whenever he felt himself or his beloved paintings threatened. Barnes also believed…

Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 213 pp., $27.00; $19.00 (paper) In Sheila Heti’s novel How Should a Person Be? (2010), the narrator, a writer from Toronto also named Sheila, recalls once looking “for fifteen minutes at a tiny painting of a single stalk of asparagus” at the Musée d’Orsay: “It was the most moving thing I had ever seen, painted so tenderly and with such a loose hand that it hardly seemed like it had been any work at all.” It turns out to be by Édouard Manet, “one of my favorite painters.” The painting was an impromptu gift: a collector paid more than had been agreed for a still life of a bundle of asparagus, so Manet painted an extra spear for him. (“There was…

By now, we’ve all heard,the worst is overor like a kingdomyet to come, the grammar of terracide and Irishgood-byes rinsing our tongues,which, if we’re being honest, do not wagwith cradle songs the way they used to.So the infinite’s a jaremptied of anecdotes. Sothe stars are a jargondying of well-lit streets. I too am at a lossfor worlds and can let sliponly that I have occurredlike a curse cured finally of itself—orjust a thought. Most places I love aregone, it’s true,but we can still visit themin a sense, in a word. This very spot once lived ona wind-thrown stonethat doubled as a mapof where not to go. It was emptiedof us and, therefore, fullof dunes and demons,bogs and bleeding trees.Did they also fail to leavetheir cryptic mark? To maskwhat granules had…