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

• Multitude
  It’s not strange for me to dream about crowds; on the contrary, my dreams tend to be full of extras who turn into secondary characters, and these secondary characters suddenly take on primary importance, but I wonder if this dream is new, if this crowd is new.I think of my friends in Chile, who, two months ago, were occupying the streets and now, momentarily alone, are revisiting our collective dreams. I think about the arguable beauty of the word multitude. About what that word shows and what it hides.
• The Novels of Tension Between Freedom and Disaster
  With all these authors, the imprisoning apprehension of the dangers lurking behind every action only heightens the yearning for a free, full life. “The tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences,” we hear in Philip Roth’s Indignation; “A brief glance in the wrong direction… could toss his existence over a cliff,” we are told in Jhumpa Lahiri’s story “A Choice of Accommodations.” Perhaps this is why these authors are unbeatable for erotic intensity. Nobody hears the sirens sing so sweetly and ruinously.
• How to Fix Child Poverty
  It’s been three decades since the Annie E. Casey Foundation published its first Kids Count report, an annual collection of statistics on child well-being attractively packaged and broken up by state to maximize local coverage. After the presidency of Ronald Reagan had filled the airwaves with images of crack houses and tales of welfare queens, Kids Count was part of an advocacy effort to reframe the poverty debate around children. The reasons were clear: “kids” were sympathetic in a way that “poor people” were not.
• Putin’s Constitutional Tsarism
  Russia being a strongman’s domain, Vladimir Putin could have achieved his goals, as he always has, simply by pulling on the various levers of his power vertical. There is no organized resistance to the current order; the country is stable and the military is loyal. Why engage in this lengthy political spectacle of rewriting the Constitution? The answer may lie in Putin’s ambition: only a truly great leader, by his reckoning, can succeed in enshrining his personal whims as the “law of the land.” Propped up by the God he has now plugged into the Constitution, Putin wants to reign supreme over his vast domain, a father to a “nation of victors,” a tsar in all but the name.
• The Pro-Privatization Shock Therapy of the UK’s Covid Response
  There is a larger game afoot in the UK government’s privatization-friendly Covid-19 response. The outsourcing bonanza has coincided with Britain’s tense talks with the European Union over the terms of a new, non-member relationship. For Leave.EU hardliners, a no-deal Brexit is not unwelcome: it would, as they see it, set the nation free to forge ahead as Global Britain, a sort of deregulated “Singapore-on-Thames,” as some Brexiteers have enthused. Others see this as a dangerous new “shock doctrine.” Coupled with rolling back the welfare state through a handout of pandemic contracts to the private sector, this bonfire of regulations represents an extension of Thatcherism, a chance to finish what she started.
• One Small Vote for Lockport, NY, One Giant Lesson for 2020 America
  As we face the unprecedented circumstance of a presidential election during a pandemic, the right to vote by mail has a new urgency in protecting Americans’ fundamental right to cast a ballot. But as the disappointed candidates for school reform learned in June’s vote-by-mail test drive in Lockport, New York, safeguarding voting and winning elections are not the same thing. Letting people vote from the comfort and safety of their homes may well entice the participation of a good number of those 100 million Americans who sat it out four years ago. But for those determined to use that vote to pry Donald Trump from the White House, it may only mean that the job of persuading those new voters will become all the more urgent. 
• The Magic Mountains of the Acoma Pueblo and Thomas Mann
  In January, not long before the pandemic arrived, I traveled to the Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, some sixty miles from Albuquerque. Acoma is maybe the oldest continuously inhabited city in North America—the Acoma people have been living atop their mountain, a 357-foot mesa, for over a thousand years. It put me in mind of another magic mountain, that of Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel of that name. Set in the years before the war, this strange fantasy treats the tuberculosis sanitarium as a microcosm for Europe’s spiritual and moral sickness. At one point, its protagonist, Hans Castorp, has a vision: “For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts. And with that I shall awaken…”
• The Scandal of Our Drug Supply
  Katherine Eban’s disquieting, often unnerving, and at times infuriating new book Bottle of Lies ranges across the pharmaceutical industry in several countries, but its chief concern is the generic drug industry in India and the inconsistent vetting by the FDA of the industry’s products for the American market. The FDA’s lack of rigorous, uniform scrutiny of imported pharmaceuticals has put the prescription drug supply in the United States at risk from contaminated, ineffective, and even fraudulent medications—products that not only might fail to control disease but might themselves be life-threatening.
• France: After Lockdown, the Street
  When the lockdown—le confinement—finally began to lift on May 11, giving way to a tenuous period of reopening—le déconfinement—Paris looked the same. And yet it wasn’t. Over the course of that long, strange April—during which France recorded nearly 20,000 Covid-19 deaths—something had shifted. The coronavirus has caused a reckoning here, one of the most profound the country has undergone since World War II. It was already in the throes of upheaval when the virus hit, after the Yellow Vest street protests and strikes against Macron’s efforts to cut back state services and restructure pensions. The situation in France today is born of a combustive collision between theory and practice, ideal and real, that stems largely from the country’s persistent sense of itself as an exemplary nation, which may or may not withstand the test of reality.
• Days in the Life of Tetsuya Noda
  Born in 1940, Tetsuya Noda, one of Japan’s foremost print artists, began keeping illustrated diaries as a young boy, drawing and writing about growing up in the small town of Uki, on Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s main islands. Spurred by a friend’s discovery that mimeograph machines, largely consigned to secretarial tasks, could be used to turn photographs into stencils for printmaking, Noda returned to his childhood practice of making art about his life.
• Fiction and Responsibility
  The Gringa, a recent novel by Andrew Altschul, raises an important question: Does fiction, particularly fiction that claims to be based on history, have any responsibilities at all vis-à-vis real people and their lives, places they inhabit, truth? At a time when systematic disinformation campaigns are abetting the rise of authoritarian governments the world over, might it be unwise to discard all concepts of boundaries or dividing lines between the imaginative freedom of literary fiction and distortion or falsehood?
• ‘The Most Ignorant and Unfit’: What Made America’s Worst Ever Leader?
  Alexander Hamilton observed that “the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion.” Trump is a sign that we as a nation have lost our way. A confusion of celebrity for leadership, fame for accomplishment, and popularity for genius has given us, just as Hamilton warned, “a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune.” November’s election is a judgment day for this nation’s form of republican government. Else, only “civil commotion” awaits us.
• It is a Choice (because Kanye)
  The rapper chooses his vacancies. Room does not choose the rapper. The rapper walked into rooms. or were dragged into rooms. were dragged into rooms. Or we walked into rooms. The seating charts of airplanes look like the Middle Passage. Then we boarded the plane. were dragged onto the plane. The plane was dragged from […]
• Wanting Wrong
  The narrator of Miranda Popkey’s first novel, Topics of Conversation, is the daughter of an old Hollywood family, now in gentle decline. Her nice, white life “was going to be suburban, it was going to be upper-middle-class,” but she throws all that into disarray when she decides to leave her husband, John, who loves her. She does this despite the fact that he was “so kind and so supportive and emotionally generous and a good listener...everything a liberated woman is supposed to want.” Her remorse is partly political: How can a woman refuse all that for herself, when it is exactly what she wants for women in general? Her regret is also, in part, simply human—she does not love a man who loves her, and the pain he feels when she leaves him makes her feel badly about herself.
• The Rose
  At some point I realized the questions were the same questions.
• Israel’s Annexation Plan, a New Era in Palestinian Resistance
  Disenchanted with their official leadership, Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, Israel, and the diaspora are increasingly redefining their struggle away from what they believe is the two-state mirage and toward resisting the one-state reality. Rather than settling for symbols of statehood and pockets of Palestinian autonomy, their starting point is Israel’s exclusive sovereignty over all the land from the river to the sea, and their focus is the Israeli government: the fact that it provides civil and political rights to Jews that are withheld from Palestinians, in varying degrees depending on their location.
• A Shuttered Garage, a Devastated Trade
  The taxi industry has been brutally crunched on two sides—from skyrocketing operating costs, on the one hand, and a sharp decline in business, on the other. When the bubble burst in late 2014, the value of medallions crashed, leaving drivers with no savings and deep in debt. A rash of suicides among them has followed. At the same time, those already struggling to repay loans found their income drastically reduced by competition from Uber and other ridesharing companies. Erick Castro is left shaking his head, wondering why one of the city’s most faithful and enduring modes of transportation has been the one to go.
• He Made Stone Speak
  Because all creative people start out as young people, we have a tendency to ascribe creativity to youth itself, but mature masters like Michelangelo remind us that the urge to create has nothing to do with age or the lack of it, but rather with that inventive spirit both he and Vasari called ingegno—inborn wit, cleverness, genius. The spirit often manifests young, but like wine and wood, it depends on age to reveal its full complexity. When Michelangelo turned seventy, as he does at the beginning of William Wallace’s Michelangelo, God’s Architect, he had nineteen more years to live, every one of them spent at work.
• The Films of Women’s Liberation
  An exceptional series currently streaming on the Criterion Channel, “Tell Me: Women Filmmakers, Women’s Stories,” is an occasion to reconsider the ranging paths of feminist media production stoked by women’s liberation in the early 1970s. Originally curated by Nellie Killian for a Metrograph run in 2018, the series spans four decades of documentaries made by women, many of which were distributed by feminist and leftist collectives during the 1970s and 1980s.
• Pulling Down ‘the Wall of No’ on Police Reform in Minneapolis
  Lena K. Gardner, a co-founder of the Black Visions Collective, found her early engagements with city politicians, including her councilman, Jacob Frey, who is now the city’s beleaguered mayor, were deeply frustrating. “I called it ‘the Wall of No,’” she recalled, of their categorical resistance to reforms. “They were so constrained by ideas of scarcity, of what’s possible, that they failed to realize how bad the police really were,” she said. “So it’s mind-boggling to hear the same city council leaders saying that the things that were ‘impossible’ four years ago are now possible.”
• Richard Wright, Masaoka Shiki, and the Haiku of Confinement
  Bedridden in his Odéon apartment, Richard Wright—author of the 1940 novel Native Son and the autobiographical Black Boy (1945), his searing account of growing up in the Jim Crow South—spent the last year and a half of his life, before his death in 1960 at the age of fifty-two, writing haiku: “The sound of the rain / Blotted out now and then / By a sticky cough.”
• Indulging with Control in Fiction
  Characters dream of solving their problems by becoming more controlled and many have delusions of “election”—the sense of oneself as “chosen,” “special,” a celebrity perhaps. “For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well,” Coetzee opens his great novel Disgrace. The aspiration is to indulge always with control, without being overwhelmed. The reader knows that is not going to happen.
• Britain’s Colonial Legacy on Trial at The Hague
  This legacy—of Britain's slavery and colonialism, racism and empire—that had been delicately skipped over in my classes soon came ever more sharply into focus for me, not least through the legal cases in which I became professionally involved. The world as it was taught to me and the world as I experienced it were, I came to see, miles apart. British exceptionalism was, well, just part of the natural order.
• American Fascism: It Has Happened Here
  “When Americans think of dictators they always think of some foreign model,” wrote the anti-fascist journalist Dorothy Thompson in the mid-1930s, but an American dictator would be “one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.” And the American people, Thompson added, “will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of ‘O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief!’” A few years later, Thompson said she was reminded of what the Louisiana populist Huey Long had once explained to her: “American Fascism would never emerge as a Fascist but as a 100 percent American movement.”
• Searching for Freedom in ‘Cane River’ and the Black Outdoors
  Two black households, not alike in dignity, in fair Louisiana, where we lay our scene: the Metoyers, “high yellow” Catholics, propertied Creoles with a good-looking son; and the Mathises, darker-skinned, poor, Baptist churchgoers with an equally good-looking daughter. In the newly restored Cane River, directed by Horace B. Jenkins and first released in 1982, boy meets girl and they fall in love, but not without the intrusion of history.
• Ah Toy, Pioneering Prostitute of Gold Rush California
  Ah Toy had arrived in San Francisco just as California was becoming a state, in that interstitial time before the introduction of laws that would establish structural bias against women and people of color, and before the traditional order, religious and social, that pertained elsewhere in the US could assert itself. (The first clergyman of the Bay Area, Timothy Dwight Hunt, did not arrive until October 1848 from Honolulu.) Though their power would diminish with the closing of the frontier, women, and women of color, prospered—for a time.
• Trey’s Rage: An African’s Education in Being Black in America
  When my family first immigrated to the US from Somalia, we were placed by a refugee agency in Buffalo, New York, in one of the city’s seedier neighborhoods. Our neighbor Trey, a hulking giant of a man and a trainer at a local boxing club, had quickly come to befriend and watch over this strange family from this strange country he’d never heard of. One day, he took my brother and me shopping for school supplies. I remember walking alongside him on the crumbling sidewalk, amid a forest of run-down houses, and Trey nodding his head toward a police car idling across the street. “Look at that motherfucker over there. Just waiting to pounce.”
• ‘Ghosts of Sugar Land’: A Journey of Loss
  Mark, the subject of Bassam Tariq’s Ghosts of Sugar Land, was an outsider in high school, being one of the only black students in his class, but as his South Asian Muslim friends tell it, they always tried to make him feel welcome in their culture. Converting to Islam seemed like an inevitable act of friendship. Over time, Mark committed himself to Islam much more strongly than his friends did, driving them apart. He posted increasingly conservative views online. One day, Mark’s friends woke up to a Facebook post from him location-tagged in Turkey. A few days later, there was a new post: “I am now currently living in the Islamic State [in Syria].”
• How Defund and Disband Became the Demands
  Although calls for defunding and dissolution, rather than reform, may feel new to many, abolitionist organizing against the “prison industrial complex”—which includes prisons, police, and surveillance—goes back more than two decades. There is no delusion among abolitionists that we will ever live in a world without conflict or interpersonal violence. Right now our go-to response to all manner of social, political, and economic conflict—whether it is homelessness, domestic violence, migration—is prisons and police. The abolitionist invitation is to investigate these problems with care and particularity, and collectively craft responses that do not rely on violence and punishment.
• The Problem of Police Powers for People Living While Black
  I handed him my identification. He did a warrant check. A few minutes passed. Then he let us go. Nothing violent occurred. Unlike Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others whose names are known because of tragic encounters with the police, I walked—or, rather, was driven—away from the event with no visible impairment. This whole episode could be seen as trivial, given that I came to no physical harm. But the moment was deeply instructive.
• New York’s Rising Tides: Climate Inequality and Sandy’s Legacy
  It is easy to think of New York as more of a concept, an easily traversable, cosmopolitan hub, than a place, a part of the natural world. Covid-19 has clarified that our health and lifespan is tied to a zip code. Climate change will make the consequences of the environmental history of the land, of both overdevelopment and neglect of the coasts, of environmental racism and displacement, and of our economic and cultural reliance on our coasts and waterways terribly apparent as the city’s water returns like a recovered memory. 
• Unpresidented
  The US has engaged in many armed conflicts, but three of them have never ended: the Civil War, the Vietnam War, and the so-called war on terror. Their toxic residues flow from different directions into the current breakdown of the American polity.
• Hervé Guibert: Living Without a Vaccine
  In 1988 the French novelist and photographer Hervé Guibert was diagnosed with HIV. Two years later, Éditions Gallimard published To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, a stark autobiographical book about his desperate effort to gain access to an experimental “AIDS vaccine.” To the Friend comprises a series of portraits of friends and lovers whom illness and its specters torment throughout its one hundred chapters.
• Bad Diet & Bad Hair Destroy Human Civilization
  Would you buy a used car from a man with a hair-do like that? It arouses immediate suspicion and distrust. How long must it take to construct that look every morning? Do other people have to work on it? Who are they? How can we find them?

New York Times Books©

• All in the Family Dynamics: Donald Trump’s Niece on the President’s Clan
  In “Too Much and Never Enough,” Mary L. Trump says her uncle is turning this country “into a macro version of my malignantly dysfunctional family.”
• With Stores Closed, Barnes & Noble Does Some Redecorating
  Retail locations shuttered during lockdowns, so the company spruced up hundreds of its stores as the first step in a bigger plan.
• Colin Jost Knows What He Has: ‘A Very Punchable Face’
  In a new memoir, the “Saturday Night Live” star and Weekend Update anchor contemplates a life and career that are still in flux.
• David Mitchell Brings His Novelistic High Jinks to the Swinging ’60s
  “Utopia Avenue,” by the British master of intricate literary puzzles, features a band on the make, lots of inside jokes and references to the author’s previous works.
• The Very Sweet Way Sarah Broom’s Mother Showed Her Love With Books
  “My mother used to buy me any and every book with the word ‘Sarah’ in the title.”
• A Zombie Novel for Our Virus-Stricken Times
  Paul Tremblay’s “Survivor Song” follows a pregnant woman navigating an anarchic Massachusetts in the midst of an epidemic.
• David Mitchell’s Vast and Tangled Universe
  Daniel Mendelsohn discusses Mitchell’s career and new novel, “Utopia Avenue,” and Maria Konnikova talks about “The Biggest Bluff.”
• An Open Letter on Free Expression Draws a Counterblast
  A few days after more than 150 cultural luminaries warned of a growing “intolerant climate,” another group responded with a pointed letter of its own.
• Murder, Murder, Everywhere
  In Marilyn Stasio’s new column, the bodies pile up so fast it’s hard to keep count.
• A Novel About 3 Generations of Cherokee Women (and No-Good Men)
  “Crooked Hallelujah,” by Kelli Jo Ford, spans decades and follows hardscrabble lives in Oklahoma.
• Gina Prince-Bythewood Made a Summer Blockbuster. It’s About Time.
  With “The Old Guard” on Netflix, the director of “Love & Basketball” becomes the first Black woman to make a comic-book film: “We don’t get the assumption we can do it, so we have to prove we can.”
• Modern Mothers and Daughters, in Three Novels
  From long-lost friends, to a woman caring for her aging mom, to a biologist struggling with her maternal identity, these protagonists reveal facets of contemporary womanhood.
• New in Paperback: ‘How We Fight for Our Lives’ and ‘Exhalation’
  Six new paperbacks to check out this week.
• Letters to the Editor
  Readers respond to recent issues of the Sunday Book Review.
• Behind the Legend of Butch Cassidy
  Charles Leerhsen’s biography gives readers the real man and not the Hollywood icon.
• Keep Your Friends Close, and Keep Holding Them Closer
  In their new book, “Big Friendship,” Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman make the case that platonic relationships deserve as much effort and tending as romantic ones.
• What Is the Hardest Part of Writing?
  A cartoonist gets down to the crux of what makes putting pen to paper so difficult.
• How Does Anything Go Viral?
  In “The Rules of Contagion” the scientist Adam Kucharski turns to the nonbiological to understand the common features of a virus, whether physical or virtual.
• 9 New Books We Recommend This Week
  Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.
• A Day-by-Day Re-Creation of Truman’s Decision to Use Nuclear Weapons
  Chris Wallace’s “Countdown 1945” recounts in gripping detail the rush to develop the atomic bomb and the debate over whether to use it.
• Elin Hilderbrand Will See You Now, From a Safe Distance
  Coronavirus can’t keep this prolific author from her fans.
• 7 Takeaways From Mary Trump’s Book About Her Uncle Donald
  Growing up Trump wasn’t easy. There were feuds, grudges and spanking with a wooden spoon. Now, there’s the burden of the name.
• ‘The Far Side’ Cartoonist Gary Larson Shares First New Work in 25 Years
  In a note on his website, Mr. Larson thanked a clogged pen for pushing him to create digital cartoons on a tablet. “I’m just exploring, experimenting, and trying stuff,” he said. “New Stuff.”
• In Charlie Kaufman’s Novel, a Comic Hero Is Haunted by a Lost Film
  “Antkind,” Kaufman’s hallucinogenic debut novel, features the madcap effort to reconstruct a masterpiece of outsider cinema.
• Harper's Letter: Artists and Writers Warn of an 'Intolerant Climate.'
  An open letter published by Harper’s, signed by luminaries including Margaret Atwood and Wynton Marsalis, argued for openness to “opposing views.” The debate began immediately.
• Henry Martin, Wry New Yorker Cartoonist, Is Dead at 94
  He defined his artistic mission as finding humor in the mundane and everyday — and he found it for 35 years.
• MacDowell Colony Drops the Word ‘Colony,’ Citing ‘Oppressive Overtones’
  The artists’ retreat, founded in 1907, has hosted the likes of James Baldwin, Leonard Bernstein and Audre Lorde, among others.
• Ellie Goulding Likes Her ’90s Rock Political and Her Social Media Inspiring
  The British pop star, who’s releasing her first album in five years, “Brightest Blue,” also has Kate Bush and an Almodóvar film on her list of cultural must-haves.
• New & Noteworthy, From Craigslist Confessions to Toxic Outrage
  A selection of recent books of note; plus, a peek at what our colleagues around the newsroom are reading.
• ‘Notes on a Silencing,’ by Lacy Crawford: An Excerpt
  An excerpt from “Notes on a Silencing,” by Lacy Crawford
• ‘Burning Down the House,’ by Julian E. Zelizer: An Excerpt
  An excerpt from “Burning Down the House,” by Julian E. Zelizer
• ‘Want,’ by Lynn Steger Strong: An Excerpt
  An excerpt from “Want,” by Lynn Steger Strong
• “The Beauty in Breaking,” by Michele Harper: An Excerpt
  An excerpt from “The Beauty in Breaking,” by Michele Harper
• Book Review: ‘Notes on a Silencing,’ by Lacy Crawford
  Lacy Crawford told her story when she was a student at St. Paul’s School. Few people listened. Now she’s telling it again.
• Cavorting in Hot Springs, Ark., During Its Sin-Soaked Heyday
  “The Vapors,” by David Hill, brings the mobsters, gamblers, drinkers and crooked politicians to life in an exuberant history of a now-forgotten capital of sleaze.
• A Lakeside Family Vacation Goes Awry in This Debut Novel
  David James Poissant’s “Lake Life” tests the limits of a family’s capacity for love and forgiveness.
• After a Copycat Murder, Reopening an Old Case and Old Wounds
  Take bored boys. Add lucid dreaming. Shake vigorously. Welcome to Alex North’s dark thriller, “The Shadows.”
• Who Saves an Emergency Room Doctor? Her Patients
  Michele Harper’s memoir could not be more timely. Also, if you think your job is stressful, take a walk in this author’s white coat.
• In ‘Want,’ a Lost Friendship and the Anxieties of the Modern Family
  Lynn Steger Strong’s new novel follows a Brooklyn wife and mother through professional failure, bankruptcy and the legacy of her past traumas.
• A Novel of Sexual Obsession Has Something to Say About How We Tell Stories
  “22 Minutes of Unconditional Love,” by Daphne Merkin, muses on the process of making up stories while recounting a young woman’s torrid affair with an older man.
• What Happens When Your Baby Isn’t Who You Expected?
  In “Raising a Rare Girl,” Heather Lanier writes about a daughter who has Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome.
• In ‘The Golden Cage,’ a Kept Woman Grabs the Keys to the Kingdom
  Camilla Lackberg shows how stifled ambition never really goes away. It just bides its time.
• What’s Wrong With Men in America?
  Two new story collections reveal the toxicities of (mostly white) masculinity, from the frat house to the Midwestern farm.
• When Bonnie Met Clyde
  Christina Schwarz’s fifth novel tells the life story of half of the famous duo, showing the loneliness of life on the lam.
• How Do You Tell Your Child He Is Undocumented?
  In Lysley Tenorio’s debut novel, “The Son of Good Fortune,” the Filipino-American journey is over before the story even begins.
• The Moral of These Stories? ‘You Are Not as Special as You Think’
  In “Cool for America,” Andrew Martin’s characters are caught in a lingering post-adolescence, stretching for a certainty that eludes them.
• A Sudden Tragedy Leads to Unsinkable Family Secrets
  Set in Atlantic City in the 1930s, Rachel Beanland’s debut novel wades through heartbreak.
• What if You Didn’t Know Who You Were? What if No One Did?
  In Robin Wasserman’s new novel, “Mother Daughter Widow Wife,” a young woman found on a city bus has no identification, no memory, and no one looking for her.
• Who Is Duchess Goldblatt?
  A memoir from a Twitter celebrity doesn’t name names, but it does provide an entertaining back story.
• Jeff VanderMeer’s Young Adult Novel Is a Madcap Magical Mash-Up
  Fans of his Borne trilogy, whether young or old, will find much to enjoy in “A Peculiar Peril.”
• On the Path to Recovery, One Step at a Time Is Easier Said Than Done
  Erica C. Barnett’s memoir, “Quitter,” chronicles her long and winding road to an alcohol-free life.
• Ben Ehrenreich’s Dispatches From the Beginning and End of the World
  In “Desert Notebooks,” a study of arid America reveals the roots of our present calamities.
• When American Politics Turned Toxic
  Julian E. Zelizer’s “Burning Down the House” sees Newt Gingrich’s rise in Congress as a turning point in political history.
• Simon & Schuster Names Dana Canedy New Publisher
  Ms. Canedy, a former journalist at The New York Times and the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, will run the namesake imprint at one of the country’s largest book publishers.
• These Radical Black Thrillers Fantasized About Dismantling the Police
  In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a series of novels by Black authors married revolutionary politics with pulp fiction. Their plotlines remain distressingly relevant.

The Chronicle of Higher Education©

• The Campus Confederate Legacy We’re Not Talking About
  I knew Kappa Alpha had direct ties to the Confederacy and the “Lost Cause” social movement. I wasn’t going to apologize for saying so.
• How Higher Ed Can Stop Affirmative Action for Rich White People
  Fixing academe’s race and class inequality must be at the top of the list.
• The Cruelty of ICE’s Guidance for International Students
  The Trump administration’s mean-spirited policy borders on extortion for colleges.
• The Protesting of a Protest Paper
  Critics conceded that Omar Wasow’s findings might be true, but they still objected.
• This Will Be One of the Worst Months in the History of Higher Education
  Layoffs, declarations of financial exigency, and closures are imminent. Here’s who’s most at risk.
• Elizabeth Alexander on the Mellon Foundation’s New Direction
  The organization’s grant making will “focus entirely on social justice.” What will that mean?
• How University Finances Work in a Crisis
  Mistrust and misconceptions abound, but here’s the playbook colleges are actually putting into practice.
• You Can’t Trust the Businessmen on the Board of Trustees
  A century ago, Thorstein Veblen explained why.
• ‘Who Gets to Speak in Our Intellectual Traditions?’
  Edgar Garcia on the canon, Indigenous studies, and talking with the dead.
• When ‘Academic Solidarity’ Is Sophistry
  Are elite, tenured professors fighting for adjuncts, or for their own light teaching loads?
• The Professor of Gimmicks
  How Sianne Ngai became the most influential literary theorist of her generation.
• Against Adminspeak
  Enough with all the harping on “agility” and “nimbleness.” Faculty are not dogs — we don’t need training.
• The Emptiness of Administrative Statements
  Empathetic gestures and rote affirmations of principle erase the people they’re meant to help.
• Higher Ed Is Not a Zero-Sum Game
  Cutthroat competition is not the way forward.
• How to Stop the Cuts
  Faculty members are used to fighting administrators with theorizing and think pieces. That doesn’t work. Here’s what does.
• The Great Reopening Debate
  Professors, administrators, students, and staff on the most consequential question facing the sector. 
• Higher Ed’s Prickliest Pundit
  Scott Galloway is suddenly everywhere, slaying academe’s sacred cows.
• The Coming Campus Protests
  College leaders will be judged by their actions — not their words.
• Higher Ed’s Toothless Response to the Killing of George Floyd
  Statements by college leaders reflect an unholy alchemy of risk management, legal liability, and trustee anxiety.
• Rise of the Absurdly Demanding Job Ad
  Enough with peculiar obscurantism and unreasonable expectations.