Innholdsfortegnelse for September 25, 2025 i The New York Review of Books

Sasha Abramsky is a writer and columnist for The Nation. His most recent book is Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World’s First Female Sports Superstar. He teaches writing at the University of California, Davis. 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 and the School of Law at New York University. Joshua Craze is at work on a book about war, bureaucracy, and silence in the Sudans. Martin Filler’s most recent book is Makers of Modern Architecture, Volume III: From Antoni Gaudí to Maya Lin, a collection of his writing on architecture in these…

Pushback: The 2,500-Year Fight to Thwart Women by Restricting Abortion by Mary Fissell. Seal, 277 pp., $30.00 After Dobbs: How the Supreme Court Ended Roe but Not Abortion by David S. Cohen and Carole Joffe. Beacon, 235 pp., $29.95 Personhood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction by Mary Ziegler. Yale University Press, 347 pp., $35.00 Abortion and America’s Churches: A Religious History of Roe v. Wade by Daniel K. Williams. University of Notre Dame Press, 360 pp., $35.00 (to be published in October) “Abortion has long been an option for women, as far back in the historical record as we can see,” Mary Fissell, a historian of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, informs us at the start of Pushback: The 2,500-Year Fight to Thwart Women by Restricting Abortion, her eye-opening…

A crow caws ahead of me,A shadow afflicts my eye,Two foxes and two weaselsCross my way nearby,My horse loses its footing,My groom blacks out and falls,I hear the crack of thunder,A spirit appears,I hear Charon call me nigh,I see the center of the earth,This stream flows back to its source,A steer climbs a belfry,Blood spurts from a rock,An asp couples with a she-bear,Atop an ancient towerA snake rips a vulture apart,The fire burns in the mirror,The sun has gone black,I see the moon about to plunge,This tree has blown its stack. (translated from the French by Richard Sieburth)…

Schattenfroh: A Requiem by Michael Lentz, translated from the German by Max Lawton and edited by Matthias Friedrich. Deep Vellum, 1,001 pp., $29.95 (paper) Only seventy-two pages into Schattenfroh, Michael Lentz’s bleak, confounding, and finally brilliant doorstopper of a novel, the story, which had just seemed to be getting off the ground, cuts short. The type gives way to facsimile pages covered with the handwritten names and ages of the more than 3,100 people who died in the Allied bombing of Düren, a town close to the western border of Germany. Part of an initiative code-named Operation Queen, the bombing lasted from 11:13 AM to 12:48 PM on November 16, 1944. Düren had a population of about 45,000. It was attacked, as Jörg Friedrich points out in his 2006 book…

For ten or so daysI’ve been searching for a loaf,just a loaf.They said it vanished from global warehouses.A child saw it take to the stage,or was it bombed by a plane. The loaf is elusive, and my feet are tired.My little ones don’t understand,they think they’re in the old days,you ate whenever you got hungry,they wonder what they did wrong,why do I punish them with this hunger and this thirst.The last thing my youngest says to me this morning—isn’t this too much punishment, Dad? (translated from the Arabic by Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Bloor)…

A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews. Bloomsbury, 180 pp., $26.99 For those unfamiliar with the Canadian novelist Miriam Toews, her latest work—a fragmented, artfully strewn memoir titled A Truce That Is Not Peace—may seem bewildering. It flies in and out of her career-long autobiographical subjects: the suicide of a father and of a sister; the oppressive Mennonite upbringing in the prairie town of Steinbach, Manitoba (where the family name is so associated with the local sect that a plaque has been placed in front of her childhood home); the escape into boyfriends and moody sojourning; the multi generational households in the Emerald Cities of Winnipeg and then Toronto; the tough, guilt-ridden matriarch, Toews’s mother, who greets anyone she meets in the street with “How goes the battle?”…

Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus. Random House, 1,018 pp., $40.00 An aristocrat who goes in for democracy is irresistible. —Dostoevsky Anyone around and alert during the Long Sixties knows the type. The scion of a wealthy family who gives his fortune to revolutionaries and for his trouble is electrocuted while planting a bomb; the salon maven who arranges a fundraiser for sullen militants sporting sunglasses under her chandeliers; the radicalized valedictorian who inadvertently blows up a townhouse and disappears naked into the streets of Greenwich Village, only to emerge a decade later to rob an armored truck and get a Brink’s guard killed. Figures like these—Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein, Kathy Boudin—were in no way original. Their precursors can be found in any…

Ballerina by Patrick Modiano, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti. Yale University Press, 101 pp., $18.00 (paper) When the novelist Patrick Modiano was a child, he would take the bus on Mondays back to his dreaded boarding school in the outer suburbs of Paris. His father was a French Jew who worked in the black market and sometimes smuggled petroleum. Occasionally he accompanied his son to the station. On their way they would frequent cafés around the Porte d’Orléans, where they held meetings with associates of Modiano aîné. In wintertime it was still dark out. The men spoke in low voices. These were “stall hawkers, men with the ruddy complexion of traveling salesmen or the sly demeanor of provincial clerks,” Modiano writes in his memoir Pedigree (2005, translated by…

A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250 an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York City, June 6–September 14, 2025 Miss Austen a PBS Masterpiece series adapted by Andrea Gibb from the novel by Gill Hornby and directed by Aisling Walsh A Jane Austen Year by Sophie Reynolds. Jane Austen’s House/Pitkin, 207 pp., $34.95 Jane Austen in 41 Objects by Kathryn Sutherland. Jane Austen’s House/Bodleian Library, 209 pp., $40.00 A memorable scene in Jane Austen’s Emma (1816) turns on the tricks of memory. Early in the third volume, Harriet Smith arrives at Hartfield “with a small parcel in her hand” and announces—much to Emma’s surprise—that she wants to make a confession. Though Emma is quick to understand that Harriet is referring to her infatuation with Mr. Elton when…

Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson by Ashley Brown. Oxford University Press, 595 pp., $31.99 Althea: The Life of Tennis Champion Althea Gibson by Sally H. Jacobs. St. Martin’s, 447 pp., $32.00 Althea Gibson was a tall, strong, and exceptionally hard-hitting tennis player. Her serve was a rocket, her volleys forceful, aimed not at continuing a rally but at putting an exclamation point at its end. In a lily-white sport dominated in midcentury America by middle-class athletes, with elite gatekeepers who went out of their way to put up obstacles in the paths of Black players, Gibson, a Black woman, was a whirlwind of energy and determination, shattering the color barrier at one marquee event after the next. In 1956, her breakthrough year, she won the French…