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

• Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 1933–2020
  She entered the law at a time when men wielded virtually all political and economic power, women were barely taken seriously in the legal profession or by the law itself, and the statute books were shot through with sex-based laws. She used her skills to elevate the status of women in the United States forever. The world she has left behind was transformed by her work. But at every turn, she pursued change methodically, with care and attention to her own imperative that one must always seek to bring others along.
• Deportation Nation
  The deportation system held sway over immigrant communities long before Trump became president, but under his direction it has become even more far-reaching, arbitrary, and cruel. Immigrants have regularly been arrested at home and work, sometimes as “collateral” when ICE has come looking for someone else. They’ve been handed off to ICE after being arrested by local police, often for minor offenses. They’ve been picked up from county jails and courthouses and detained at highway checkpoints. Some were abruptly deported after appearing at ICE offices for routine check-ins. At times these enforcement actions made news, as when ICE swept into chicken-processing plants in Mississippi on August 7, 2019, in a blitz that yielded 680 arrests. But in general, they have attracted little attention.
• The Desk and the Daring
  Vivian Gornick has long enjoyed an audience of literary depressives and feminists. Now, a late-career revival is expanding her readership. In 2020 four Gornick titles have given occasion for a backward glance. The timing of their publication could be chalked up to the return of American socialism, or to the tendency to rediscover women artists in old age. But the lasting value of her work lies in her commitment to the question of what it means to feel “expressive”: to experience the feeling that tells a person “not approximately, but precisely” who they are.
• ‘Electric, Like Time Travel’: An Interview with Chantal Joffe
  Imogen Greenhalgh: Aspects of lockdown behaved a bit like art does, in that they altered our sense of time and our attention to what is right in front of us. Chantal Joffe: I’ve been painting my own mum a lot during lockdown, pictures of her now and when she was young. I love thinking that all of that isn’t lost—her youth, us little. It’s still present. You can hold on to the person she was. When I was painting it, I was there, in the picture: it was electric, like time travel.
• In Place of Police: The Oregon Experiment
  Well before this summer’s historic protests against police brutality, the CAHOOTS program of crisis response teams had been advising similar projects and pilot programs in cities such as Denver, Oakland, Portland, and Olympia, Washington, which voted to create an unarmed Crisis Response Unit in 2017. But the experiences of CAHOOTS and its spinoffs have gained a new instructive pertinency as municipalities nationwide look to divest parts of their public safety apparatus from police departments. The idea is that armed police officers are simply called to address too many situations, often ones in which trained mental health or social workers would be more effective and more humane.
• The Big Smoke
  The beach, a scintillating embodiment of the California Dream just hours earlier, now looked more like the landing pad for Charon, the ferryman of Hades, with wisps of yellow smoke hovering above leaden waves and pebbles. It is hard not to think of California’s wildfire plight as a metaphor for America’s decline. “Just come to the state of California,” Governor Newsom said. “This is a climate damn emergency. This is real.” When the president finally visited the state, for a mere two hours this past Monday, he told its suffocating residents to be patient: “It’ll start getting cooler. You just watch.” It felt like an inverted déjà vu of what Trump had said about the coronavirus in February, when he told Americans to wait till “when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”
• A Poetry Manual
  a poem
• Dems Must Play Offense
  To the Editors: Joseph O’Neill’s two excellent essays on contemporary American politics should be essential reading by every Democratic candidate as well as the advisers and organizers behind them. My concern, however, is that many may interpret his prescriptions in “Brand New Dems?” too literally.
• Conquest and Agency
  To the Editors: I applaud both Jeffrey Ostler’s fine book Surviving Genocide and Peter Nabokov’s insightful review of it. Framing Ostler’s work as reflective of contemporary interest in settler colonial studies and genocide studies is apt. But missing in that framework is some recognition of the connection these two viewpoints share with the “new” Indian history of the past generation.
• Dream
  a poem
• Simulating Democracy
  Jill Lepore is a brilliant and prolific historian with an eye for unusual and revealing stories, and her new book If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future is a remarkable saga, sometimes comical, sometimes ominous: a “shadow history of the 1960s,” as she writes, because Simulmatics stumbled through the decade as a bit player, onstage for the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the Great Society, the riots and protests. It began with grand ambitions to invent a new kind of predictive behavioral science, in a research environment increasingly tied to a rising defense establishment amid the anxiety of the cold war. It ended ignominiously, in embarrassment and bankruptcy.
• Confinement and Contagion
  The coronavirus has made those in women’s prisons still more vulnerable. “The world at large has forgotten us,” one woman wrote from Texas. “We are the most disempowered and despised population,” another wrote from Arizona. A woman in Kansas reported that within weeks of the declaration of a pandemic, ten body bags were delivered to the prison: “Guess we will not be going to the hospital if it comes here.”
• An ‘Invaluable’ Source
  To the Editors: Zadie Smith’s interesting review of the artwork of Kara Walker contains a large section on the life and diaries of Thomas Thistlewood, a slave owner in Jamaica between 1750 and 1786. It is clear to me, however, from the details in her review, that her information about Thistlewood is derived from my 2004 book, Mastery, Tyranny and Desire.
• America’s Eviction Epidemic
  Renters who enjoyed some measure of protection are now at risk of eviction since the moratoriums on eviction are coming to an end at both federal and local levels. In the coming months, up to 28 million people could be thrown out of their homes, according to a researcher with the Eviction Lab. “While eviction is a threat for people with resources, the risk of homelessness is much bigger for people at the bottom of the ladder,” the journalist Brian Goldstone told me. “For low-income people of color, the scale and scope and magnitude of the crisis in this country in the coming months is likely to be something we’ve never seen before.”
• This Soldier’s Witness to the Iraq War Lie
  There at the Baghdad hospital, I joined an FBI agent in questioning the bedridden Ahmed al-Ani about his time in the Czech Republic. A diminutive man with a grizzled face creased by bouts of pain, he epitomized the type of drab regime functionary I’d come to know in Iraq all too well. Al-Ani had never met the 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta or even heard of him until he saw news reports after September 11. It is a cruel irony that this Iraqi man was first used as a prop for an American invasion and then subjected to disfiguring violence by soldiers who had carried out that invasion. But his story weighs on me in other ways.
• Sharmila, the Chaiwalla, and Me
  When I first moved to America, I had been aware of the Basti, or slum, as it’s known in English, just behind my parents’ home. No more than a five-minute walk. But I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere near. Not even to pass through in a car. Now, I would venture into this no-mans-land that my family all knew of but never discussed. I started taking pictures along these walks—of broken windows and dilapidated houses and barber shops. Soon, the local boys would run up to me, parents holding their little ones in their arms, a shopkeeper hugging his one precious belonging—a broken blender—“Didi, Didi,” Sister, Sister, “One photo, please.”
• Maine’s Sublime Canvas of Contradictions
  Every August, the public library in my hometown of Blue Hill, Maine holds a wet paint auction. Local artists, some seasoned, some aspiring, go out in the early morning to find their subjects: the dawn on the mudflats; blue islands slouching across the horizon; the nostalgic white pentagon of the post office. The landscape of Maine—glacially gouged, furred with pines—precludes other muses, offering up endless variations on its theme with every change of the light, season, and tide. It is relentlessly consumed, reproduced, and sold, albeit in a less extractive way than the mining and lumber industries once used it.
• Our Most Vulnerable Election
  The United States has had fifty-eight presidential elections since George Washington won a unanimous electoral vote in 1788–1789. Few of them have been as obviously consequential as the election of 2020. That would be true even if it were only about the issues: how America will handle Covid-19, racial inequality, immigration, climate change, foreign relations, economic policy, and judicial appointments depends on whom we choose to lead us next. On each of these questions, there are sharp differences between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. But although we have had many critical elections, none of them since the end of Reconstruction has occurred under anything like the cloud hanging over this quadriennial choosing.
• ‘Zohar Studios’: An Invented Artist’s Lively Inventions
  Two decades in the making, Stephen Berkman’s huge new book, Predicting the Past: Zohar Studios the Lost Years invents, creates, and explicates an artistic oeuvre—in this case, one that purportedly belonging to a nineteenth-century studio photographer named Shimmel Zohar. According to Berkman’s introductory narrative, Shimmel Zohar immigrated to New York City from Lithuania in the mid-nineteenth century and briefly established a photography studio on the Lower East Side before vanishing from history.
• Mourning in Place
  It’s hard to figure out how to mourn during a pandemic. Our mourning rituals have all been disrupted or taken away.
• When Monuments Fall
  There is nothing wrong in principle in removing statues: icons are created, icons are torn down—this has happened throughout history. Moral complexity may be an argument against unthinking iconoclasm. It is not, however, an argument for never taking down statues. Statues are rarely about history as such; they are about memory. That is, they are part of the process of shaping perceptions of history. That is why they have long been sites of contestation, and not just in the present.
• Bramleys, Not Grenadiers
  a poem
• All Souls
  a poem
• The Hunger Strikers of Pine Prairie Protesting Indefinite Detention by ICE
  Over the last couple of years, Louisiana has become a national hub of immigrant detention, with eleven facilities that hold more than 15 percent of the total population in ICE custody. Normally, an average stay for an asylum-seeker held at Pine Prairie would be forty-five days, but the detentions of many of the African immigrants seeking refugee status now range from eleven months to two years. To protest these extraordinarily prolonged detentions, forty-eight African detainees began refusing food on August 10. “We are like slaves, and the master is ICE,” one detainee told me. “We are begging you to help us in here. We are dying, for real.”
• Finding a Path Through the Odyssey
  The phrase “find a way” allowed me, first of all, to understand retroactively the nature of the creative and spiritual crisis I had undergone after finishing my previous book. I was suffering from what the Greeks called aporia: a helpless, immobilized confusion, a lack of resources to find one’s way out of a problem. The literal meaning of aporia is “a lack of a path,” or “no-way.” I hadn’t been able to leave my apartment; I couldn’t think of a new project. I was, in the Greek way of thinking, pathless.
• Trumps on the Couch
  When it comes to Donald Trump, even the few new stories and bits of perspective his niece Mary’s book can provide add little—it’s not that she doesn’t know him well, it’s that anyone who has followed him with a mild interest already knows him too well to be surprised by revelations of kind or of degree, or to be particularly enlightened by expert opinions on his well-documented traits and tendencies.
• David Graeber, 1961–2020
  David Graeber, the anthropologist and activist, died aged fifty-nine on September 2, 2020. The New York Review, to which he began contributing last year, is collecting tributes from his friends and colleagues.
• Making Order of the Breakdown
  Elena Ferrante’s novels, whatever else they’re about, are always describing the distance between two points: working-class Naples and the putatively better neighborhoods and cities and social worlds in which her narrators now move. It’s not simply that Ferrante has written about Naples, but that over the course of her work—now eight novels—she has so often sent her characters back and forth along the route between the impoverished old neighborhood and the new life that we know the landmarks well: the raucous and violent family of birth, the childhood wish for a way out, the scholarships, the flight, the studied assumption of middle-class manners.
• A Very American Zombie Virus in ‘Blood Quantum’
  Blood Quantum is an old-school zombie film, as opposed to the recent onslaught of AMC Walking Dead wannabes. Like George Romero’s 1968 classic, Night of the Living Dead, the blood and guts add up to a social critique. What makes Blood Quantum a credit to its genre is the way it honors indigenous filmmaking, in particular the work of Alanis Obomsawin, the renowned eighty-eight-year-old Abenaki filmmaker who has, in more than fifty films, chronicled the modern liberal governments of the US and Canada laying siege to North American indigenous communities.
• The Revolutionary Thoreau
  Generations of critics and readers have chosen to emphasize the spiritual communion with Nature described by Thoreau and, of course, this was important to him. But Walden begins with trenchant critique of “progress.” He was attempting to extract himself from a society that he found deeply troubling. The idea of our own private Walden is less a desire to be “in nature” than a desperate longing to get out of this awful place. Read in this way, Walden is not primarily a record of the so-called “natural” world but a social commentary. Enter John Brown.
• The Wages of Whiteness
  “White privilege” is a protean concept that has found its way into conversations about political power, material prosperity, social status, and even cognition.
• What Ails America
  Our system of commercial medicine, dominated by private insurance, regional groups of private hospitals, and other powerful interests, looks more and more like a numbers racket. We would like to think we have health care that incidentally involves some wealth transfer; what we actually have is wealth transfer that incidentally involves some health care. In America today, malady is physical illness and the political evil that surrounds it. We are ill in a way that costs us freedom, and unfree in a way that costs us health.
• A Second Chance
  In an afterword to The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), I wrote about Jeffrey Masson’s lawsuit, taking a very high tone. I put myself above the fray; I looked at things from a glacial distance. My aim wasn’t to persuade anyone of my innocence. It was to show off what a good writer I was. Reading the piece now, I am full of admiration for its irony and detachment—and appalled by the stupidity of the approach.
• Failures of Diplomacy
  To the Editors: Steve Coll’s well-informed and insightful review of Samantha Power’s The Education of an Idealist gives, rightly, large play to the Obama administration’s decisions about Libya and Syria, and how Power’s own views about “idealism” and “realism” align with those decisions. But more attention should have been paid, I believe, to the decision to abandon the non-Arab people of Darfur.
• Appropriate Appropriation?
  To the Editors: I was grateful for Esther Allen’s review of my novel The Gringa, which raises a number of ethical questions that were major concerns of mine in writing the book. That she comes to different conclusions is, of course, her prerogative, but her propensity for smears-by-association undermines the important discussions her review might otherwise have raised.
• How Covid-19 Amplifies the Failures of Family Court
  Knowing that courts and law enforcement are understaffed and scrambling during the pandemic, many abusers are emboldened, social workers, mental health counselors, and lawyers report, to violate orders of protection and harass or abuse their ex-partners and children—both physically and virtually. Failures of the courts to deal swiftly and appropriately with domestic violence pre-dates the pandemic, but the coronavirus has revealed how systemic shortfalls can further endanger survivors and their families.
• My Eighty-Six Jobs
  My father worked as a pipe fitter in the local paper mill for over forty years without complaint. Hard work pays off, my parents always said. The cash in the pocket of my Jordache jeans proved it. And, as far as I knew, hard work was the only way up and out of working at the mill, where my parents, my grandparents, and my great-grandparents had all worked. But as the 1986 mill strike taught me, those simple rules of work hard, don’t be late, you earn what you deserve mean little today, if they ever meant anything at all.
• ‘A Dictatorship Is Being Created’: An Interview with Lech Wałęsa
  Michał Matlak: How do you account for the Law and Justice leader Jarosław Kaczyński’s political effectiveness? Lech Wałęsa: Jarosław Kaczyński wants to liquidate what does not suit him. And after he takes care of the courts, for example, then he notices that not everything is perfect, and that something else does not suit him, so he must conquer other institutions. That way, a dictatorship is being created. As a colleague, he could be useful. As a leader, Kaczyński is dangerous.
• The Jim Crow South in Faulkner’s Fiction
  There is a deep congruity between the movements of Faulkner’s mind, with its sense of an inescapable family trauma, and the history and culture of his region, so deep that it hardly seems possible to distinguish between them. So many of the ills he describes are with us still. He was born into an understanding of the way white supremacy works, and a part of him never stopped believing in the racial hierarchy that shaped his boyhood, even as the writer grew increasingly critical of it. He told inconvenient truths, and even some of his relatives saw him as writing “dirty books for Yankees.”
• Ball Don’t Lie
  For its non-Black, liberal fans, basketball exists in a sort of triple consciousness. They love basketball in part because it allows them access to Blackness. This, however, comes with guilt and discomfort, which gets processed into a monolithic and easily accessible politics of what these days is called “allyship,” which then needs to be codified and rubberstamped by the esteemed white men who know the players the best. Gregg Popovich and Steve Kerr serve as models for white allies. Underlying all this is a pressing need to understand Black people.
• Night and Day
  The grammar of American presidential elections is, for obvious reasons, Christian. The other party’s candidate is mired in sin and error; ours will bring redemption and salvation. But not this time. Joe Biden is a devout Catholic, yet the shape of his speech accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination at its virtual convention was based on the cosmogony of one of Christianity’s great early rivals, Manichaeanism.
• ‘Hansel and Gretel’ in LA County
  Over the last five years, I’ve studied all of the child fatalities in Los Angeles County with open Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) investigations. To some, this research might seem grim, but I’ve found comfort in unpacking these redacted files. If I can find a match with enough details from corroborating sources, I feel I have put the child back in the story. Their stories remind me of fairy tales from another dark time.
• Missed Steps
  Ancient and regal, Martha Graham glided into the Art Deco Palmer Auditorium, her wheelchair a throne. Her hands, arthritic and beautiful, gestured imperiously, as though she was still directing her dancers. Hadn’t she essentially invented modern dance? I tried to get Graham technique right. But my hips were unyielding. No turnout. No give. I went to extra classes in the evenings, sitting on the floor, pushing down my knees as far as they would go. One night, the teacher, taking pity on me, chided the women in the class for not trying hard enough. “Look at him,” she said, pointing at me. “His hips are so tight, but look how hard he’s trying.”
• To Recover Mother
  In my brooding, it occurred to me that much of the knowledge I’d lost of my mother had nothing to do with any particular excursion we’d had or pastime we’d shared. Instead, it was exactly those myriad daily interactions, all of them physical, many preverbal, that I was missing. The feel of her hands, the scent of her skin, the sound of her laughter were sensations I’d absorbed without words, and they were buried in my body. And so I decided to try to unearth what I could of its secret knowledge.
• ‘History Is Corrected’: An Interview with Jerry Mitchell
  Claudia Dreifus: Do you think the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination was part of the Klan’s portfolio? Jerry Mitchell: It’s a good question. The evidence obviously appears to point to James Earl Ray. A number of people believe he was set up. Who knows? There’s plenty of evidence that Ray pulled the trigger. He may have killed with the belief that the Klan or others would reward him. I wouldn’t doubt there was some kind of conspiracy to kill King.

New York Times Books©

• National Book Awards Names 2020 Nominees
  Fiction contenders include Brit Bennett, the author of “The Vanishing Half”; Randall Kenan, a beloved writer who died in August; and Douglas Stuart, a debut novelist who is also a Booker Prize finalist.
• Obama’s Memoir ‘A Promised Land’ To Release in November
  The former president’s publisher plans to release the book after the 2020 election and has ordered a first U.S. printing of 3 million copies.
• Macmillan C.E.O. John Sargent Is Departing
  The longtime publishing executive is leaving the company, which has faced months of turmoil, because of disagreements over its direction.
• Rubik’s Cube Inventor Opens Up About His Creation in New Book 'Cubed'
  Erno Rubik, who devised one of the world’s most popular and enduring puzzles, opens up about his creation in his new book, “Cubed.”
• How to Judge the Booker Prize in a Pandemic
  Five judges, each with 162 books to read, are determining one of the world’s best-known literary awards in an unusual year.
• Ayad Akhtar on Truth and Fiction
  Akhtar discusses “Homeland Elegies” and Marc Lacey talks about “Cry Havoc,” by Michael Signer, and “The Violence Inside Us,” by Chris Murphy.
• 8 Picture Books About Ordinary Kids’ Everyday Activism
  From making soup to creating a butterfly garden, everyone can do something.
• Best Sellers Sell the Best Because They’re Best Sellers
  Publishing is becoming a winner-take-all game. Nobody dominates it like Madeline McIntosh and Penguin Random House.
• Young Adult Dystopian Fiction That Feels Pretty Real
  These four thrillers may be gussied up with future settings, but the problems they confront are rooted in today’s world.
• Stephen F. Cohen, Influential Historian of Russia, Dies at 81
  He chronicled Stalin’s tyrannies and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he was an enthusiastic admirer of Mikhail Gorbachev.
• Winston Groom, Author of ‘Forrest Gump,’ Dies at 77
  He wrote the 1986 novel that inspired the Oscar-winning film starring Tom Hanks. Another book was a finalist for a Pulitzer.
• Letters to the Editor
  Readers respond to recent issues of the Sunday Book Review.
• How to Start Making Collages
  Turn the news of the day into a time capsule with some scissors and some glue.
• All-American Stories by Walter Mosley, Matthew Baker and Ron Rash
  Three new collections explore the abuses, hypocrisies and awkwardnesses of living in this country today.
• New in Paperback: ‘Speaking American’ and ‘The Seine’
  Six new paperbacks to check out this week.
• The Nigerian-British Writer Putting Black Joy on Stage and Screen
  “There’s so much more that comes with being Black apart from dealing with racism,” says Theresa Ikoko, a Londoner whose movie “Rocks” opened this week.
• Can a Book Capture the Magic of Birding?
  Delving into the many tomes that try to distill the fascination that makes so many want to stare up through their binoculars.
• Ann Getty, Publisher and Bicoastal Arts Patron, Is Dead at 79
  She married into one of the world’s richest families but refused to let herself be marginalized as a socialite.
• 11 New Books We Recommend This Week
  Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.
• Claudia Rankine on the Ways Race Haunts Her Imagination, and America’s
  In her new book, “Just Us,” the poet and essayist repeatedly asks how race is understood and manifested in American culture.
• In 'The United States of Cocktails,’ Reports on America's Drinking Culture
  For his new book, “The United States of Cocktails,” Brian Bartels roamed the country to report on local tastes, traditions and quirks.
• Poem: Late
  A poem that reminds us there is so much in our nation that still needs to change.
• The Back Story Behind ‘Transcendent Kingdom’: Yaa Gyasi Is a Solid Friend
  Loyalty spurred the best-selling author to visit a neuroscientist’s lab. What she saw there inspired her next narrator.
• Revisiting the ‘Violent Ballets’ of Jack Kirby
  In his Graphic Content column, Ed Park explores books capturing Kirby’s life and work, including a new biography by Tom Scioli.
• Why Michael Ian Black Doesn’t Like Mystery Novels
  “Just tell me who did it.”
• Stanley Crouch, Critic Who Saw American Democracy in Jazz, Dies at 74
  A prolific author, essayist, columnist and social critic, he challenged conventional thinking on race and helped found Jazz at Lincoln Center.
• Black Boyhood and Its Superpowers
  Isaiah Dunn has a superhero alter ego who gets his powers from eating beans and rice. Nnamdi is transformed by his anger into a seven-foot-tall hulk.
• The Harsh Realities of Being Indigenous in North America
  Two new memoirs, Alicia Elliott’s “A Mind Spread Out on the Ground” and Toni Jensen’s “Carry,” sketch harrowing portraits of Native life today.
• From George Eliot to Neo-Nazi Skinheads: The Chaotic Cult of Richard Wagner
  Alex Ross’s “Wagnerism” is “a book about a musician’s influence on non-musicians — resonances and reverberations of one art form into others.” Reviewed by John Adams.
• The Man Who Made Us Feel for the Animals
  In “A Traitor to His Species,” Ernest Freeberg tells the story of Henry Bergh, the 19th-century eccentric who founded the A.S.P.C.A.
• Randall Kenan, Southern Writer of Magical Realism, Dies at 57
  His upbringing in North Carolina helped him create a fictional hamlet, Tims Creek, where a 3-year-old clairvoyant scares the neighbors and a pig talks.
• In This Novel of Exile, Sulaiman Addonia Writes From Experience
  “Silence Is My Mother Tongue” witnesses a young brother and sister coming of age in a Sudanese refugee camp.
• ‘Agent Sonya,’ by Ben Macintyre: An Excerpt
  An excerpt from “Agent Sonya,” by Ben Macintyre
• ‘The Abstainer,’ by Ian McGuire: An Excerpt
  An excerpt from “The Abstainer,” by Ian McGuire
• Booker Prize Shortlist: Hilary Mantel and Anne Tyler Miss the Cut
  Some literary heavy hitters missed out, including Hilary Mantel, whose latest work, “The Mirror and the Light,” did not make the cut.
• The Best Post Office Novel You Will Read Before the Election
  Vigdis Hjorth’s “Long Live the Post Horn!” follows a 35-year-old woman through an identity crisis — and a campaign in support of postal workers.
• Why Government Is Failing the People It Is Supposed to Serve
  “The Wake-Up Call,” by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, criticizes the performance of Western governments and suggests ways to improve it.
• The Future of Energy
  Daniel Yergin’s “The New Map” is a comprehensive look at the world of energy, its past, present and future.
• The Bumbling 1960s Data Scientists Who Anticipated Facebook and Google
  In “If Then,” the historian Jill Lepore recounts the story of the Simulmatics Corporation, which tried to use primitive computing power to shape Americans’ behavior.
• The Rebel, the Policeman and a Chase Through Britain and Beyond
  Ian McGuire’s historical novel “The Abstainer” pits an Irish separatist against a police constable in 19th-century England.
• A Separate and Unequal System of College Admissions
  “Who Gets In and Why” and “Unacceptable” detail how admissions is rigged in favor of the privileged and how it was gamed even further.
• In Memoirs, Two Reporters Plumb Their Latina Identity and Heritage
  Ilia Calderón (“My Time to Speak”) and Maria Hinojosa (“Once I Was You”) tell different stories with a common theme: the need for a deeper, more nuanced conversation about race.
• One of the Most Perilous Jobs in Government
  As Chris Whipple shows in “The Spymasters,” the heads of the Central Intelligence Agency have often been more beleaguered than omnipotent.
• What It Means to Be the ‘Token’ Black Kid in a Rich, White World
  In “Greyboy,” Cole Brown recounts the lives of privileged outsiders, himself among them.
• How a Million Refugees Became Postwar Pawns of the Allies
  David Nasaw’s “The Last Million” tells the painful story of displaced persons after World War II who had nowhere to go.
• What’s Wrong With the Meritocracy
  Michael J. Sandel’s “The Tyranny of Merit” examines the damage our current meritocratic system is doing to the country.
• New & Noteworthy Audiobooks, From Dan Rather to Black Lives Matter
  A selection of recent audiobooks of interest; plus, a peek at what our colleagues around the newsroom are reading.
• Matthew Yglesias Thinks There Should Be ‘One Billion Americans’
  In his new book, the journalist and co-founder of Vox argues that dramatic population growth could revitalize the nation.
• Michael Ian Black Has Some Wisdom for His Son (and Maybe for Yours)
  In “A Better Man,” the comedian proposes a sincere vision for modern masculinity.
• The Housewife Who Was a Spy
  Ben Macintyre’s “Agent Sonya” recounts the story of a woman who passed along atomic secrets when she wasn’t raising her family in the Cotswolds.
• An Unflinching Child’s-Eye View of Sexual Abuse
  The 10-year-old narrator of Kimberly Brubaker Bradley’s “Fighting Words” eases her way into sharing the awful truth of what she and her sister survived.
• In Jorie Graham’s Poetry, the End of Days and the Pleasures of the Flow
  “Runaway,” Graham’s 15th collection, considers the apocalypse, beautifully.
• Walt Whitman, Poet of a Contradictory America
  During the Civil War era, the writer emerged as an emblem of the country’s dissonance. Now, in the midst of another all-consuming national crisis, his work feels uncannily relevant.

The Chronicle of Higher Education©

• Ed-Tech Mania Is Back
  Utopia-minded tech gurus promise they'll solve all of academe's problems. They won't.
• Is Academe Awash in Liberal Bias?
  Most people think so. They're wrong.
• Slouching Toward Equity
  The lonely task of the chief diversity officer.
• 'You Need to Leave Now, Ma'am'
  I was mistaken for a prostitute at my job interview.
• New Black Intellectual Histories
  The scholar Brandon Byrd discusses a field that has been "marginalized for too long."
• What Were the Humanities, Anyway?
  This dangerous moment demands that we give an elusive concept its history.
• The Future of the Academic Work Force
  How will the pandemic change the way higher education works?
• Some Students Are Smarter Than Others (and That's OK)
  We should admit that not all students have the talent to flourish in college.
• Blame Pollyanna Presidents When Covid-19 Plans Fail
  Too many college leaders aren’t doing enough to prevent outbreaks, and trying to shift responsibility to students.
• Colleges Lost the Moral Authority to Blame Students
  Institutions have always profited off risky social behavior. Complaints now ring hollow.