Top Book News provided by The New York Review of Books©

• The Strange Death of Social-Democratic England
  Far-reaching though the effects of this moment in the Brexit story will be, the 2019 general election may change the landscape of British politics and the fabric of its society in even more profound and decisive ways. With renewed calls for a referendum on independence for Scotland, the specter of “the breakup of Britain” that has long haunted the UK may materialize at last—just at the moment when English nationalists are celebrating their Brexit victory. A fourth successive defeat for the Labour Party and an outright win for a Conservative Party has sharpened dividing lines, squeezed the liberal center, and broken consensus into polarity. At stake after this election, then, is the future of what has made Britain a reasonably civilized country since 1945: social democracy.
• Integration and Its Discontents: Germany’s Bold Experiment
  Since Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government decided in 2015 to temporarily open its border to asylum-seekers and admit close to one million people at the height of what became known as “Europe’s refugee crisis,” Germany has engaged in a series of impassioned and sometimes ferocious arguments over immigration. Foremost among these has been the return of an old “integration debate”—about whether people from non-European countries can successfully become part of German society—even though no one can agree on what exactly German society is. “The question is not who we are, but who we can become,” the late British social theorist Stuart Hall argued, but Germany is poised uneasily in that polarity.
• Cathexis
  When we say the world is haunted we mean untranslated                                     as yet.
• Meaning and Mayhem
  A frequent part of mafia rituals is the kiss. After a Youth of Honor has been baptized, he makes the rounds of the other associates, kissing each twice on the cheeks, except for the capo società (the highest-ranking associate), whom he kisses three times. Kissing the cheeks of the other associates symbolizes the relationship among equals that from that point forward the Youth of Honor will have with the other members of the clan. The kiss, then, becomes the seal on the oath of eternal loyalty to the new family he is now joining. According to mafia grammar, however, there are different types of kisses, each with a different meaning.
• Blood and Brexit
  If I dream, it invariably takes the form of being hunted by men with guns—in a house, in a forest, on a street. Sometimes these dreams end with me being shot, sometimes with me stabbing someone. I only ever stab someone, even though, growing up, we had a gun, illegally, in the house—a double-barreled shotgun that my father kept beneath his bed and that we’d use occasionally for shooting rabbits. In my dreams I never see the face of the man I’m stabbing. I’ve had these dreams all my adult life. Maybe they’re common among people like me, maybe they’re not. By “people like me” I mean people who grew up in Ulster, who from our earliest moments were wary, were used to watching everything for some sign, however small, that things were not quite right.
• Is Another Dose of Peronism the Cure for Macri Economics?
  It is easy to wax apocalyptic about Argentina. The country may indeed be a very “unfinished utopia,” as the political commentator Ignacio Zuleta once called it, but it’s hardly on the brink of collapse—as much as alarmism is a national neurosis in Argentina. Let’s assume the new president, Alberto Fernández, with Cristina Fernández de Kirchner as his vice-president, successfully renegotiates the IMF loan. The four major trade union federations—which are Peronist, after all—as well the social movements led by people like the activist Juan Grabois will surely give Fernández some months’ grace, perhaps even a year. This will be very good news, but what will he do for them, and what will happen after?
• What Were Dinosaurs For?
  As I was reading some recent books on dinosaurs, I kept wondering, “What were dinosaurs for?” It’s a ridiculous question, and I wondered why I was wondering it. After all, dinosaurs were “for” exactly what we are “for,” what every organism has been “for” since life began. Every species that has ever lived is a successful experiment in the enterprise of living, and every species is closely kinned at the genetic level with all other species. This is harder to grasp than it seems, partly because the logic of that Satanic preposition—“for”—is so insidious, so woven through the problem of time. Teleology is the moralizing of chronology, and nowadays science tries to keep watch for even the slightest trace of it, any suggestion that evolution has a direction tending to culminate in us or in what we like to call intelligence or in any other presumably desirable end point.
• The Art of Crossing Borders
  Three exhibitions—one recent, two current—have foregrounded art that addresses perhaps the most pressing moral concern of our times: migration. A risk of pointedly political art is a lack of complexity, and this is an underlying issue with the ICA exhibition. Visitors will ultimately find themselves uplifted—or consoled, depending on your perspective. The scale and rhythm of these two exhibitions are decidedly different: the ICA’s is larger, more doggedly accessible, more pyrotechnic and emotionally affecting, but perhaps less nuanced; the Harvard Art Museums exhibition, smaller and more subtle. In both cases, though, the ensemble unsettles and stirs in equal measure, providing a catalyst for vital conversations in which we are compelled to engage.
• Trump and the Meaning of Impeachment: My Testimony Before Congress
  I will begin by stating my conclusions: The framers provided for impeachment of the president because they wanted the president, unlike the king, to be controlled by law, and because they feared that a president might abuse the power of his office to gain personal advantage, corrupt the electoral process, and keep himself in office. “High crimes and misdemeanors” are abuses of power and public trust connected to the office of the presidency. On the basis of the testimony presented to the House Intelligence Committee, President Trump has committed impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors by corruptly abusing the office of the presidency.
• Portraits: Umberto Eco, Saul Steinberg, and Aldo Buzzi
  Umberto Eco was one of the people I spent the most time with but knew the least. He deserves a lifetime record for never talking about himself, not even in his novels. Not until the very end. Essentially, I think he deprived himself of a pleasure. I mean, who doesn’t like to talk about themselves, and sometimes even whine a little? By not confiding in others, others were not inclined to confide in him. I would never have talked to him about something that saddened me or about a love story that was causing me heartache. He would’ve tried to cheer me up, of course, but probably by telling me a joke. It was easier to understand his mind than his soul. Eco was interested in the mind; he lived for his mind. For him, souls were stupid.
• The Drums of Cyberwar
  In mid-October, a cybersecurity researcher in the Netherlands demonstrated, online, as a warning, the easy availability of the Internet protocol address and open, unsecured access points of the industrial control system of a wastewater treatment plant not far from my home in Vermont. Industrial control systems may sound inconsequential, but as the investigative journalist Andy Greenberg illustrates persuasively in Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers, they have become the preferred target of malicious actors aiming to undermine civil society. A wastewater plant, for example, removes contaminants from the water supply; if its controls were to be compromised, public health would be, too.
• Making Shakespeare Sing
  Giuseppe Verdi’s last two operas, the Shakespearean diptych of Otello and Falstaff, together constitute my favorite case study in what happens when a play is made to stand up and sing. Both the source material and the musical adaptations are works of singular beauty and power. To study these operas alongside their sources is to see what is gained and what is lost, what remains intact and what is transformed, when a complex human drama is adapted from speech into song. Otello is an exceedingly rare breed, practically a unicorn: a masterpiece based on a masterpiece. And Falstaff achieves something rarer still: it is a love letter to Shakespeare that expands on Shakespeare’s work.
• The Gun Violence Epidemic Plaguing Arab-Israeli Society
  The problem of gun violence in Israel’s Arab communities has become a national emergency. Even before the recent general election, a poll conducted among Arab Israelis found that their most important issue, far above every other, was the gun violence plaguing Arab society. “This is our number one emergency issue,” said Ayman Odeh, leader of the Joint List of Arab parties in the Knesset. This murder wave, Arab leaders say, would neither exist nor persist if the victims were Jewish. According to Odeh, in instances of shootings in Arab municipalities, the police opened cases just 5 percent of the time. As a result, Arab citizens have developed such a cynical view of the Israeli authorities that they’ve come to believe the state is perfectly comfortable with the current situation—which another Arab Knesset member has called “a civil war.”
• The Framers’ Answers to Three Myths About Impeachment
  Congress is not a “co-equal” branch of government with the presidency. It is by far the superior branch. James Madison made that clear for all time with his lapidary sentence in Federalist No. 51: “In republican government, the legislative authority, necessarily, predominates.” Necessarily. Discussion over. Congress can, by impeachment and conviction, simply remove members of the other two branches, including its highest members (the president, the chief justice). Neither of those other two can do the same to Congress. Among the many things that show President Trump knows nothing about the Constitution was his October 6, 2019 tweet that said Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi should be “immediately Impeached.” Congress impeaches. Its members cannot be impeached.
• The Lebanese Street Asks: ‘Which Is Stronger, Sect or Hunger?’
  “Sectarian leaders have been keeping voters captive,” Karim Emile Bitar, a political scientist and professor at Lebanon’s renowned Saint Joseph University, told me, when we met for dinner in Beirut in mid-November. “If you are pessimistic you can say that sectarianism will be back with a vengeance. That this [series of protests] is a mirage rather than a miracle,” he said. And if you’re optimistic? “You could argue that we are witnessing the emergence of a post-sectarian Lebanon, and that citizenship has finally prevailed over narrow communal affiliations.” 
• No More Nice Dems
  The likes of Joe Biden and Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer seem actually averse to defeating Republicans. Unlike their opponents, they don’t appear to think that the job of Team Blue is to take on the other side as forcefully as possible. On the contrary: to this day, they apparently believe that Democrats should, whenever possible, bolster the GOP’s standing as a good-faith party with goals and principles as valid as their own. Their core mission is to practice a ceremonial innocence about the unshakable virtue of American conservatism—and to do so even as the worst, full of passionate intensity, are cleaning their clocks.
• The Art of Losing
  In 1970 Robert Lowell was a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and Elizabeth Hardwick was at home in New York with their thirteen-year-old daughter, Harriet. Hardwick felt overwhelmed trying to manage the family’s affairs. “Cal,” she wrote to Lowell, “I can’t cope. I have gotten so that I simply cannot bear it. Each day’s mail and effort grows greater and greater.” Seeing the chance to simplify “a life that has become too weighty, detailed, heavy—for me,” Hardwick undertook to sell Lowell’s papers.
• A Message from Your Candidate
  Friends, what we are proving together in this campaign is that running for president doesn’t need to involve sucking up to deep pockets and taking under-the-table selfies with fat-cat donors. It can involve nothing more than simple email bludgeoning of people holding down two/three jobs, folks on fixed incomes—people like yourself, Purdence, whose average contribution is actually below some of the most frugal donations we’ve received—and yet we’re just so grateful for your generosity.
• Michael Jang’s American Portraits
  For most of the twentieth century, the day-to-day lives of Asian Americans were barely depicted in mainstream art and media. While European immigrant groups like Italian Americans assimilated to become white—shaping their own representation along the way—and black Americans fought for civil rights and the control of their own narrative, Asian-American stories were left largely untold. Or perhaps they were simply unheard. I had never seen a really great photo of a family like mine until I saw the ones made by Michael Jang. Jang’s recent “rediscovery” has a lot to do with his talent, but it also has to do with a more hospitable cultural moment.
• It Was Mary and Paul
  To the Editors: In my otherwise enthusiastic review of Christopher de Hamel’s Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, I queried his interpretation of the upper register of the calendar illustrations in the Hours of Jeanne de Navarre. A kindly colleague has drawn my attention to the “Exposition” that accompanies the closely related calendar in the Belleville Breviary, in the French Bibliothèque Nationale.
• No Second Thoughts
  To the Editors: I am very grateful to Nick Laird for his generous review of my anthology, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem. There is, however, one mistake in his roll call of missing American poets.
• ‘This Sense of Somebody-ness’
  We think about race in America in glimpses. Multiple lenses are needed to illuminate the long histories of injustice, oppression, and cruelty in this country. Colson Whitehead’s latest novel The Nickel Boys takes place in the Jim Crow era but has definite resonance now. Its particular look back is like a jazz riff on contemporary inequity. It’s a tale well told about our society’s lack of concern for those who are poor, those lacking caring guardians, those lacking adequate education.
• Who Are Turkey’s Proxy Fighters in Syria?
  When US President Donald Trump announced the withdrawal from Syria of the US forces that had been working with the Kurdish-led SDF, Turkey sought to capitalize on the Kurds’ loss of American protection by beginning a military operation in northeastern Syria. After the Turkish-led invasion began, its Turkish-backed militias rapidly gained notoriety after their members were filmed in a series of videos that showed them chanting extremist slogans and carrying out field executions. One US official labeled them “thugs and bandits.” The latest Turkish operation compelled the SDF’s leadership to invite Syrian regime forces into large swaths of northeastern Syria. Thus these fighters, who present themselves as revolutionaries fighting the regime, helped Assad regain a foothold of vast territory without firing a single bullet. But who exactly are the roughly 35,000 Syrian men fighting on Turkey’s behalf in Syria?
• How China’s Rise Has Forced Hong Kong’s Decline
  Journalists expecting to cover Tiananmen II flew in for the most promising global story of the year, its allure bolstered by the protesters’ ability to speak English and the easily digestible narrative of David vs. Goliath, democracy vs. authoritarianism, right vs. might. Beijing, though, will spin recent events as another staging post in its policy of “strategic patience”: that despite protesters’ having launched Molotov cocktails and set up petrol-bomb production lines, China hasn’t sent in the People’s Liberation Army. But these arguments obscure a bleaker fact: while the activists have made their mistakes, the Hong Kong protests are mostly an epic failure of China’s soft power—and we are witnessing Hong Kong’s descent from leading international city to collateral damage in Beijing’s rise to a strident superpower.
• What the ‘Danish Lawrence’ Learned in Libya
  Holmboe has long weighed on my mind in my own travels across Libya over the past decade, at times even retracing his journey. It was only on a trip this summer, though, that I finally packed Desert Encounter in my bag, dipping into its pages during languid afternoons in Tripoli and at night on the front lines during lulls in the fighting between militia groups. A blend of travelogue, spiritual musing, social critique, and journalistic exposé, Desert Encounter eschews the operatic prose and Homeric pretensions of Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Holmboe’s account of his Libyan adventure made him one of the few Western witnesses to the savagery of the Italian colonial regime’s counter-insurgency campaign, and it became a bestseller in the United States and in Europe. Reviewing the book in November 1936, George Orwell wrote: “Mussolini’s large body of English worshippers would do well to have a look at it.”
• An Unfinished Revolution
  When Henry Louis Gates Jr. set out to produce a documentary series on Reconstruction for PBS, he wisely invited Eric Foner to serve as his senior scholarly adviser. Together they assembled many of the very best historians working in the field to guide viewers through four superb hours on the history and significance of Reconstruction. With Gates narrating, the documentary takes us from the origins of Reconstruction as slavery was destroyed during the Civil War all the way to the early twentieth century, with the repudiation—both popular and scholarly—of Reconstruction.
• The Heroines of America’s Black Press
  The African-American press of the nineteenth century was a lively, dynamic, insistently visible force for change. Crucial to many of these publications was the exceptional work of black women. These journalists were of the black elite and the working class, the free-born and the formerly enslaved. They were a mix of wives and mothers and widows, and women who never married at all. They were civic workers and religious leaders and educators—and many of them were active clubwomen. Together with the leading women thinkers, leaders, and activists of the race, they offered black women powerful tools to advocate for themselves—and gave us language, ideas, and strategies for political engagement that we are still influenced by today. And yet, their names are largely forgotten.
• Beauty in Ingenuity: The Art of Science
  The complex, sometimes conflictual, relationship of man and machine is a constant thread in “The Art of Innovation,” at London's Science Museum. Recalling how the mechanical telling of time itself became contested during the Industrial Revolution, as the historian E.P. Thompson described in a famous 1967 Past & Present article, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” here is a handsome double-dialled clock from a Macclesfield mill, dating from 1810. In the catalog, the curators tell us that while the lower dial showed the actual time, the upper dial was connected to the silk mill’s waterwheel: if the waterwheel ran slowly, or stopped, "mill time" was slowed or suspended, and the workers would have to make up the lost production time, "ruled by the pace of their machines." Paradoxically, machines could also make men and women feel free as never before.
• The Rise and Fall of Evo Morales
  The end of Morales’s historic presidency has the quality of one of those inkblot tests in which everyone sees what they want to see. The global left, from British Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn to an assortment of foreign intellectuals, immediately denounced what had happened as a military coup, linking it in the public mind to the old, familiar scenes of tanks rolling into South American capitals. Those who have long hated Evo declared it a blow against the evils of socialist dictatorship. But if I learned anything in my time in the country, it is this: nothing is simple in Bolivia, and such was the case with the turbulent political career of Evo Morales.
• Women’s Business
  “You go home now and attend to your work, the loom and the spindle, and tell the waiting-women to get on with theirs,” says Hector to his wife, Andromache, in the Iliad. “War is men’s business.” The eight-year-long conflict in Syria gives the lie to that age-old view. The twin burdens of responsibility for children and for family “honor” may still fall disproportionately on women, but their role has not been limited to keeping the home fires burning and preparing sons for battle. In Syria, women are journalists, filmmakers, and fighters.
• Band of Outsiders
  There are two stories, one might say, being told at the American Folk Art Museum’s current show “Memory Palaces: Inside the Collection of Audrey B. Heckler.” The first and more clear-cut is that the exhibition gives us a chance to see what must be one of the most discerning and wide-ranging collections of self-taught, or outsider, art in this country. There are top-notch works here by artists of varying degrees of recognition, many of whom were active in the middle and later years of the last century. The second and somewhat buried story in “Memory Palaces” revolves around the nature of the artists we are seeing. They come from notably different places, both geographically and in the kind of work they make.
• A Tale of Two Churches
  It is an enduring fact of American life that church worship remains deeply segregated. It was something that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed, just days before he was assassinated in 1968. As recently as 2012, a survey found that eight in ten American congregants still worship at a place where a single racial group makes up at least 80 percent of the congregation. But in 2016, a very unusual experiment began in North Carolina. Pastor Jay and Pastor Derrick announced that their two churches, one white, the other black, would be merging. Could their model for The Refuge be one that heals our nation, I asked Pastor Derrick. “It doesn’t mean we have to agree on everything,” he said. “But it means that we have to embrace and accept and walk in love. That’s what a healed America looks like.” 
• American Slavery and ‘the Relentless Unforeseen’
  A fixture and force in Western culture, time out of mind, slavery, and more specifically racial slavery, had been essential to the European settlement of the New World ever since the Portuguese pioneered the plantation system with enslaved African labor in the sixteenth century. Apart from sporadic protests, the spread of slavery went virtually unchallenged by European and British settlers let alone their governments; periodic slave revolts and insurrectionary plots did not appreciably slow the rise of the plantation complex that at its height stretched from Brazil to the Caribbean to British North America. Yet few things if any in modern history were more unexpected than the eradication of human bondage in the Atlantic world. 
• The Secret Feminist History of Shakespeare and Company
  “Certain people are meant to be midwives—not mothers of invention. Sylvia was one,” wrote Noël Riley Fitch, author of Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation (1983), in the most recent introduction to a collection of Beach’s letters. Yet to characterize Beach as merely a “midwife” and to remember her primarily for bringing into being the work of Great Men is to misrepresent her and the everyday work of her shop. Revisiting the story behind Shakespeare and Company’s creation reveals that its roots lie in early twentieth-century feminist activism and, in particular, Beach’s own deep-rooted conviction that women had a right to an intellectual life. 
• ‘I Just Look, and Paint’
  Vija Celmins has been an admired artist for more than fifty years, and for most of that time critics have struggled to explain the elusive poignancy and staying power of her work. In an art world that rewards noisy assertion and the avid annexation of wall space, her work is thoughtful, modest in scale, mostly black-and-white. And while much contemporary art prides itself on being difficult, even opaque, Celmins’s paintings and drawings of night skies and oceans are eye-pleasing and generous in a way that keeps them broadly appealing, even as they contend with weighty questions about the mechanics and consequences of representation. All this makes her work hard to encompass in the current language of art. Looking at her pairings of apparently identical rocks, the word that floats to mind is not “simulacrum” but “sublime.”
• The Medium Is the Mistake
  James Poniewozik is the chief television critic of The New York Times, and his new book, Audience of One, tells a double story: the rise of Donald Trump and the rise of television. Poniewozik wants to show us that TV has everything to do with the formation of Trump’s character—his manners, his place in the commercial culture, his ability to track and manipulate popular sentiment and opinion. It seems a reasonable hypothesis. How good is the evidence?
• ‘Not Waiting for Inspiration’: An Interview with Tommy Pico
  Joseph Osmundson: Are you mourning the potential loss of the world order, or is there something like possibility rising from the ashes of everything we’ve known? Tommy Pico: Absolutely, yes. There was an expectation for the kinds of things that we would be able to afford at our age, the kinds of lives that we would be living. What other generations had on lock is not as easy anymore. I’m also letting go of a romantic idea of a future: children and relationships. There is still a future to be made, but I have to live it to know what it looks like.
• The Ceaseless Innovation of Duane Michals
  Months before he turns eighty-eight, the photographer Duane Michals is in the full throes of a remarkable old-age efflorescence. Evidence to that effect fairly leaps off the brightly colored walls of his fascinating new exhibition, “Illusions of the Photographer,” at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. Michals has long been renowned for three great innovations: his hauntingly atmospheric, teasingly Surrealistic, almost cinematic sequences of pictorial narratives; his use of handwritten texts on small-scale black-and-white silver gelatin prints; and his celebratory normalization of homoerotic male beauty, years before Robert Mapplethorpe’s freak-show fetishism and Bruce Weber’s consumer-culture beefcake. Yet, unlike artists who hit upon a commercially lucrative formula and then crank out endless fungible reiterations, Michals is something of a superannuated Huck Finn, an incorrigibly subversive and inimitably American scamp always lighting out for new creative territories.
• Query
  To the Editors: For a biography of the educator Isabelle Palms Buckley (1900–1986), founder in the early 1930s of the Buckley School in Los Angeles, I would be glad and grateful to hear from any of her former students, teachers, employees, neighbors, friends, or anyone with reminiscences, or with whom she corresponded.
• Violence & the Inuit
  To the Editors: In “The Highest Suicide Rate in the World” Helen Epstein concluded that “traditional Inuit society was remarkably peaceful and free of discord among them.” This is a mischaracterization of Inuit ethnography.
• Megalo-MoMA
  Among the plethora of disturbingly disproportionate, super-tall, super-thin condominium towers that have spiked the New York City skyline since the turn of the millennium and that graphically symbolize America’s concomitant surge in income inequality, the most recently completed of them marks the spot of the Museum of Modern Art, which inaugurated its latest building project in October, two weeks before its ninetieth anniversary.
• Against Economics
  Mainstream economists nowadays might not be particularly good at predicting financial crashes, facilitating general prosperity, or coming up with models for preventing climate change, but when it comes to establishing themselves in positions of intellectual authority, unaffected by such failings, their success is unparalleled. One would have to look at the history of religions to find anything like it. To this day, economics continues to be taught not as a story of arguments—not, like any other social science, as a welter of often warring theoretical perspectives—but rather as something more like physics, the gradual realization of universal, unimpeachable mathematical truths.

New York Times Books©

• Emmanuel Carrère’s Disconcertingly Personal and Utterly Gripping Prose
  “97,196 Words,” a new collection of essays by the celebrated French author, encapsulates his novel approach to nonfiction.
• Could Politics Be Fairer? Two New Books Say Yes
  Lawrence Lessig’s “They Don’t Represent Us” and Ganesh Sitaraman’s “The Great Democracy” urge major reforms to reclaim American democracy.
• Times Critics’ Top Books of 2019
  The Times’s staff critics give their choices of the best fiction and nonfiction works of the year.
• The 10 Best Books of 2019
  The editors of The Times Book Review choose the best fiction and nonfiction titles this year.
• ‘The Man Without Qualities’ Acquires a New Volume
  Combining material from Robert Musil’s great unfinished novel and from his archives, “Agathe, or the Forgotten Sister” focuses on the twinlike siblings at the book’s heart.
• Poems About the Challenges of Life After Prison
  Reginald Dwayne Betts talks about “Felon,” and Jung Chang discusses “Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister.”
• William McFeely, Pulitzer-Winning Historian, Dies as 89
  The author of acclaimed biographies of Ulysses S. Grant and Frederick Douglass, he also helped establish Yale’s black studies department.
• Don McDonagh, Dance Critic and Author, Dies at 87
  In his reviews in The New York Times, he championed experimental choreographers emerging in the 1960s and ’70s.
• Elisabeth Sifton, Editor and Tamer of Literary Lions, Dies at 80
  She was also a publisher and an author whose memoir affirmed that her father, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, had popularized the Serenity Prayer.
• Jimmy Kimmel Has a New Favorite Crowd: Kids
  The new author has so enjoyed the warm reception to his book, “sometimes I wish I had nothing but children in my audience at the show.”
• Awe-Inspiring Libraries
  It’s hard to whisper when you’re in the presence of so many books. A cartoonist sounds his praise with a visual celebration.
• How Should 21st-Century Readers Approach the Bible?
  Readers respond to recent issues of the Sunday Book Review.
• Revisiting André Aciman’s Eccentric Family
  This week, Josh Duboff reviews André Aciman’s “Find Me,” the sequel to his 2007 novel “Call Me by Your Name.” In 1995, Barry Unsworth wrote for the Book Review about “Out of Egypt,” Aciman’s memoir chronicling the family that shaped his life.
• New in Paperback: ‘Invisible’ and ‘Little Faith.’
  Six new paperbacks to check out this week.
• His Novels of Planetary Devastation Will Make You Want to Survive
  Jeff VanderMeer, the author of “Annihilation,” brings us fresh horrors with each new book. So why does he remain an optimist?
• William Luce, Playwright, Dies at 88; Wrote ‘Belle of Amherst’
  He specialized in one-character dramas, portraying luminaries like Emily Dickinson, John Barrymore, Lillian Hellman, Zelda Fitzgerald and Isak Dinesen.
• The Caldecott Medal Needs an International Makeover
  In a global world, why is the oldest and most prestigious award in picture books still limited to American illustrators?
• 11 New Books We Recommend This Week
  Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.
• With Walking Dead Behind Him, Comics Creator to Debut Fire Power
  A man on an identity quest finds powers instead in Robert Kirkman’s new comic coming in May.
• Her Francophilia Saved Her From the Death Camps, but Not From Great Danger
  In “A Bookshop in Berlin,” Françoise Frenkel describes a life devoted to French literature and her escape from the Nazis across occupied France.
• ‘Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947,’ by Norman Lebrecht: An Excerpt
  An excerpt from “Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947,” by Norman Lebrecht
• Poem: The Still Life
  To engage the concept of a “still life” painting, this tender poem pauses and holds.
• How Jews Have Made an Impact on the Modern World
  Norman Lebrecht’s “Genius & Anxiety” looks at Jewish achievement from 1847 to 1947.
• Deborah Levy Would Like to Drink With Virginia Woolf
  “I suspect she would not be that interested in food.”
• The Decorous Surfaces and Fraught Subtexts of Alice Adams’s Life and Work
  “Alice Adams,” a new biography by Carol Sklenicka, recounts the career of the elegant novelist and short story writer who specialized in the disappointments of romance.
• Up for Sale: Pop Culture Mementos
  Three auctions this month will give fans a chance to own collectibles from the world of comic books, television and film.
• Genius, Genocide Denier or Both?
  Peter Handke, the Austrian author who was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, has been accused of falsifying history and praising war criminals.
• The Military’s Illusions About Donald Trump
  Peter Bergen’s “Trump and His Generals” explains how so many members of the armed forces could work for a president who lacks all of the virtues they embody.
• These Books Are Ready for Their Close-Up
  From the big screen to the page, the lore of Hollywood movies and movie stars makes an entertaining leap.
• They Were the Renaissance Men of Roman Antiquity
  Daisy Dunn’s “The Shadow of Vesuvius” is a lively dual biography of the polymath Pliny the Elder and his nephew (and adopted son), Pliny the Younger.
• New & Noteworthy Poetry From Sharon Olds, Paul Muldoon and More
  A selection of recent poetry books of note; plus, a peek at what our colleagues around the newsroom are reading.
• Writing, and Cooking, Across Borders
  In “Of Morsels and Marvels,” the Guadeloupean novelist Maryse Condé writes about the links between her culinary and literary passions.
• ‘The Ferrante Effect’: In Italy, Women Writers Are Ascendant
  “My Brilliant Friend” and Elena Ferrante’s other best-selling books are inspiring female novelists and shaking up the country’s male-dominated literary establishment.

The Chronicle of Higher Education©

• ‘The Administration Is Assuming That We Are Going to Do Their Dirty Work’
  Graduate workers at Harvard are striking. Here’s what they want, and how they plan to get it.
• In Defense of Plagiarism, Sort Of
  Is stealing ideas immoral?
• The Free-College Fantasy
  The proposals floated by presidential candidates are nonsensical. There’s a better way.
• I Told My Mentor I Was a Dominatrix
  She rescinded her letters of recommendation.
• How Elitism Marginalizes Academics
  When applying for grant money is a ritual of rejection.
• The Unbearable Virtue-Mongering of Academics
  Stanley Fish is skeptical of free speech, and dismayed by the ubiquity of Subarus.
• Why Are Campuses So Tense?
  Identity, stereotypes, and the fraying of the college experience.
• Can a University Save the World?
  A new movement is underway to find out.
• The New Humanities
  Once-robust fields are being broken up and stripped for parts.
• The Philosopher of #MeToo
  Has Kate Manne become a prisoner of her own activism? The Cornell University philosopher’s book on misogyny catapulted her into public life. But her battle against patriarchy has taken a personal toll.
• From Low Wage to No Wage
  Think adjuncts are underpaid now? Soon, they might not get paid at all.
• How Ed Schools Became a Bastion of Bad Ideas
  A tale of assessment, learning styles, and other notorious concepts.
• Why Diversity Initiatives Fail
  Symbolic gestures and millions of dollars can’t overcome apathy.
• The Enrollment Crash Goes Deeper Than Demographics
  Colleges can’t stop what’s coming, but they can be better prepared.
• An Elitist Finger in the Public’s Eye
  The failure of wealthy private colleges to reflect the nation’s demographic transformation has reached a crisis point.
• What Tenured Faculty Could Do, if They Cared About Adjuncts
  Here are 11 things they can do right now that would make a difference.
• Napoleon Chagnon Is Dead
  What academe’s shameful treatment of him tells us about truth and ethics now.
• How a Rotten System Enabled Rick Singer’s Fraud
  Colleges have portrayed themselves as helpless victims of his scheme, unmasked by the Operation Varsity Blues investigation. In reality, they have no one to blame but themselves.
• Dipping Our Knives Into Harold Bloom’s Body
  What the responses to the eminent critic’s death tell us about academe today.
• Trump’s ‘China Muse’ Has an Imaginary Friend
  Who is Ron Vara? He seems to exist only in the books of Peter Navarro.