Innholdsfortegnelse for February 12, 2026 i The New York Review of Books

In 2018, two years after Donald Trump was first elected president, Vintage Books reissued Fletcher Knebel’s Night of Camp David, a political thriller published in 1965. Its renewed appeal was summed up in the stark tagline on the cover: “What would happen if the president of the USA went stark-raving mad?” In the novel, a young senator who has been chosen by the incumbent president, Mark Hollenbach, to be his running mate for reelection comes to realize that the man in the Oval Office has gone quietly crazy. In Trump’s first term, the story seemed to resonate with debates about his erratic behavior and the possibility that he could be deposed. What attracted less attention, however, was the particular form the president’s madness takes in the novel. He shows signs…

When she was sentenced to death by a court in Dhaka last November, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, the ousted prime minister of Bangladesh, was typically defiant. From the New Delhi bungalow allotted to her by the government of India, she said she was “very proud” of her “record on human rights and development.” But as Bangladeshis took to the streets to celebrate the verdict, which after all was symbolic, they remembered a very different legacy. Hasina first served as prime minister from 1996 to 2001, then came to power again in 2009. Over the subsequent fifteen years, according to the Bangladeshi human rights organization Ain o Salish Kendra, her security forces carried out two thousand extrajudicial killings. They abducted more than 1,800 people and detained them in a network of secret…

Effingers by Gabriele Tergit, translated from the German by Sophie Duvernoy. New York Review Books, 853 pp., $29.95 (paper) Near the end of Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers, a novel about three generations of a wealthy German Jewish family, Lotte Effinger goes to the Berlin theater where she is a starring actress, under the stage name Angelika Oppen. It is early 1933, shortly after Hitler’s rise to power, and she finds that the theater has been taken over by a former bit player who is an ardent Nazi. Carrying out the regime’s orders, he has fired Lotte and replaced her with an “Aryan leading lady, [who] will embody the German artistic ideal with her blond beauty.” Warned that a “death squad” is heading to the theater, Lotte goes to a café and…

History sometimes repeats itself out of sheer malice. For example, in 1898 the United States stepped in to help Cuba in its long struggle for independence from Spain, and won. Cubans were grateful but not yet free. American troops were in control of the island, and the US refused to remove them until Cuba accepted eight conditions presented to Congress in 1901 by Senator Orville Platt. The most important provisions of what became known as the Platt Amendment were that Cuba was required to lease land indefinitely to the US for naval stations (thus Guantánamo), that it could not make treaties with other nations, and that to preserve Cuban independence or maintain a stable government, the US retained the right to intervene on the island militarily, which it did four…

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade. Scribner, 471 pp., $31.00 As part of her account of how amazingly well-known Gertrude Stein had become in America by the mid-1930s, Francesca Wade refers to, but doesn’t quote, this exchange from Top Hat (1935) in which Ginger Rogers’s dressmaker is reading her a telegram: “Come ahead Stop. Stop being a sap Stop…My husband is stopping at your hotel Stop. When do you start Stop.” I cannot understand who wrote this. Rogers: Sounds like Gertrude Stein. I suspect Wade doesn’t quote this because it is too silly for her purposes. She has written an admirably thoughtful and responsible account of Stein—her life, her work, her relationships, and her shifting reputation. She guides us attentively through all Stein’s writings, though close literary analysis is…

When El-Fasher fell, on October 26 and 27, I was driving between villages scattered across the region of Dar Zaghawa, about a day from the city by car. This semidesert land at the northwest corner of Darfur, marked by rocky hills and sparse acacia trees, is the home of the Zaghawa people, a non-Arab community of herders and farmers. Since the war began in Darfur over two decades ago, Zaghawa fighters have been crucial to the region’s insurgency, and now to its defense; it was mainly Zaghawa rebels and self-defense forces who kept the Rapid Support Forces (RSF)—the mostly Arab paramilitary group that has spent the past two and a half years fighting its former mentors in the regular Sudanese army—from invading El-Fasher over eighteen months of siege. The fall…

House Concert by Igor Levit and Florian Zinnecker, translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside. Polity, 250 pp., $14.95 Beethoven in the Bunker by Fred Brouwers, translated from the Dutch by Eileen J. Stevens. Other Press, 262 pp., $25.99 In 1922, during a performance of Verdi’s Falstaff in Milan, a group of Black-shirts in the audience demanded that the orchestra play the Fascist anthem, “Giovinezza.” The conductor, Arturo Toscanini, refused. “The disrupters became more vociferous,” writes his biographer Harvey Sachs, until Toscanini broke “his baton and exited from the orchestra pit, shouting and cursing.” Nine years later a similar scene occurred in Bologna; this time Toscanini was badly beaten outside the theater. “If I were capable of killing a man,” he once told a friend, “I would kill Mussolini.” It…

The Trump administration’s widening assault on civil society has found its first target in the world of philanthropy: the Open Society Foundations (OSF), established by George Soros and now chaired by his son Alex. 1 Trump has called George Soros a “bad guy” who “should be put in jail,” and he recently suggested that prosecutors charge him under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. In September Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche—one of the president’s former personal lawyers, like a number of his appointees to the Justice Department and the courts—took up his recommendation and instructed more than six US attorneys’ offices to launch investigations of OSF on possible charges ranging from arson to support of terrorism, for which no evidence has been offered. Soros began his philanthropic giving in…

Empty Vessel: The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge by Ian Kumekawa. Knopf, 304 pp., $29.00 Ships, and the oceans they sail, are governed by a confounding tangle of laws. No one state exercises sovereignty over the high seas, so ships are subject to a complex—and easily ignored—combination of international maritime law, treaties, and the national codes of coastal states and flag-granting countries; at times they seem to defy terrestrial rules altogether. Over the past few decades journalists and academics have chronicled the “lawless ocean,” documenting widespread human rights abuses in the shipping and fishing industries and what might be termed “the outlaw sea.”* In Empty Vessel, Ian Kumekawa, a historian at MIT and Harvard, finds that the seas are in fact replete with laws—but that many of…