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Recent Reviews
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, trans. Charlotte Mandell
Positive The New Yorker The writing recalls, at a useful time, the necessary truth that war is not some abstract heroic occupation played as a global board game but an unimaginable terror where human beings are consumed by pain only to end in death. But Céline’s reputation is indissoluble from his strange political fate ... Céline’s chief trait, his chief virtue, is that he is systematically horrible, and without a glimmer of hope.
Timothy W Ryback
Positive The New Yorker Timothy W. Ryback’s choice to make his new book... an aggressively specific chronicle of a single year, 1932, seems a wise, even an inspired one ... Ryback’s gift for detail joins with a nice feeling for the black comedy of the period.
Jesse David Fox
Mixed The New Yorker Fox genuinely seems to have zero historical sense of comedy ... What’s curious about this is that Seinfeld, his hero and central figure, has a sharp sense of comedy history, and has devoted himself to producing a documentary tribute to Abbott and Costello ... On the question of the \'magic that makes it work,\' Fox has more interesting things to say, or, at least, to summarize.
Kliph Nesteroff
Mixed The New Yorker Essentially a history of American censorship of all kinds of popular culture ... Though he’s generally cheerfully contemptuous of the censors, he is himself rather censorious about the indulgence back then of what is unacceptable to us now ... Nesteroff’s somewhat censorious study of censorship provides a useful reminder that censorship and censoriousness are significantly different things. Censorship is the actual government interdiction of forbidden speech, and in liberal-democratic countries there’s essentially none of this when it comes to culturally contested zones. It’s just that we’re inclined to voice emphatic disapproval about certain forms of speech, which, though disconcerting for the subject of our disapproval, is not at all what we mean by censorship
Heather Cox Richardson
Mixed The New Yorker Richardson’s pointillist empiricism does very good work in this book ... But, for the most part, she offers in almost storybook prose—one-sentence paragraphs abound—a storybook version of American history. It is not manifestly false, or simpleminded, just simplified ... Though the point of Richardson’s book is plain—liberal democracy is under assault—its purpose is more obscure. To whom is it directed? ... A deeper problem arises from Richardson’s conflation of liberalism in the partisan-political sense, meaning the pursuit of a particular set of desirable social programs, and liberalism in the larger sense, as a way of resolving social violence. Throughout, Richardson suggests that good government is the proof of a thriving democracy ... Praising the people who agree with you is the easy part of democratic government. The hard part is building a superintending architecture that wins the consent even of those you hate.
Chris Van Tulleken
Positive The New Yorker Chris van Tulleken bravely turns himself into a guinea pig to explore the ins and outs of ultra-processed food ... The book isn’t just a chronicle of his diet-induced damage; page after exhausting page is given over to the foundations of nutritional science—beginning with bacteria and slime munching on rocks—along with thickets of pieties so dense that they seem ultra-processed themselves ... Van Tulleken slowly sickens from his food, and the reader sickens with him ... It is not always easy to separate prudence from puritanism ... The questions that van Tulleken raises about \'addiction\' are more profound ... The merely aesthetic argument against bad food may be the strongest argument of all: as van Tulleken rightly insists, there is simply something creepy about eating things whose composition we can’t comprehend.
Henry Grabar
Rave The New Yorker An anti-parking polemic, with many bits of mordant social history related in a good-natured and at times puckish vein ... Entertaining in the specificity of its indignation ... Grabar is earnest in his view that parking is a grave social problem, but his book is of necessity consistently entertaining and often downright funny. Although it is possible to make parking into a serious subject, it is impossible to make it a solemn one ... Grabar has a journalist’s essential gift for making a story out of people, not propositions. He fills his book with engaging eccentrics.
Daniel Knowles
Positive The New Yorker A serious diatribe against cars as agents of social oppression, international inequality, and ecological disaster ... His book reads like a series of Economist pieces: briskly written, well researched, and with a knack for landing the significant statistic right after the crisply summarized argument. Though he has a few horse-and-buggy narrative mannerisms—he insists on ending a chapter with a paragraph foreshadowing the contents of the next—he is passionate about his subject.
Jonathan Healey
Rave The New Yorker The point of Jonathan Healey’s new book...is to acknowledge all the complexities of the episode but still to see it as a real revolution of political thought—to recapture a lost moment when a radically democratic commonwealth seemed possible. Such an account, as Healey recognizes, confronts formidable difficulties ... He writes with pace and fire and an unusually sharp sense of character and humor ... With the eclectic, wide-angle vision of the new social history, Healey shows that ideas and attitudes, rhetoric and revelations, rising from the ground up, can drive social transformation.
Johan Eklöf, trans. Elizabeth DeNoma
Positive The New Yorker Agreeably in love with darkness, Eklöf is not entirely a sentimentalist about it ... Eklöf’s book is made most memorable by the sometimes wild eccentricities of the life-forms it chronicles ... The Darkness Manifesto has, beyond its ecological arguments, a particular moral temperament. Eklöf does not merely think that too much artificial light is bad for our ecology, which it doubtless is; he thinks that light, and our preference for amplifying it, is in itself morally dubious ... We can wonder if what human beings mainly experience as improvements must, in every instance, be subordinated to the \'welfare of the planet,\' a concept that is itself available only to humans. Nor are Eklöf’s examples always exemplary ... Inevitably, what presents itself as empirical inquiry reflects a cultural mood.
Eri Hotta
Positive The New Yorker Tokyo-born historian Eri Hotta takes on the life story of the man who made the mini-masters. But, as often happens with books pointing to big questions, the most interesting stuff points back at smaller or, anyway, more particular ones ... A fascinating study.
Barbara Bloemink
Positive The New Yorker One particular gift of Bloemink’s biography is that it presents the vers-libre poetry that Stettheimer wrote alongside her paintings, and shows that her verse, though produced without the immense technical care that she poured into her visual art, is in its way just as remarkable ... Bloemink also does the necessary work of putting pictorial circumstance into social context: she discovers, for instance, that an ice-skating picture long thought to depict Rockefeller Center actually shows a forgotten rink in Central Park, near Columbus Circle, and she explains what this urban space looked like and meant to New Yorkers at that time. Bloemink can’t resist some panicky pieties, to be sure ... To represent her as a model contemporary is to miss exactly what was courageous in her life and work.
James Curtis
Rave The New Yorker Excellent ... An immense year-by-year, sometimes week-by-week, account of Keaton as an artist and a man. Every detail of his life and work is here, starting with his birth ... Curtis is particularly good on the early years.
Dana Stevens
Rave The New Yorker Excellent ... Stevens, in Camera Man takes an original and, in a way, more distanced approach to Keaton ... Stevens offers a series of pas de deux between Keaton and other personages of his time, who shared one or another of his preoccupations or projects. It’s a new kind of history, making more of overlapping horizontal \'frames\' than of direct chronological history, and Stevens does it extraordinarily well. Some of these pairings, to be sure, are more graceful than others ... A chapter on Robert Sherwood and Keaton is genuinely illuminating ... Stevens takes up the really big question: What made Keaton’s solo work seem so modern?
Paul Auster
Positive The New Yorker ... a labor of love of a kind rare in contemporary letters. A detailed, nearly eight-hundred-page account...it seems motivated purely by a devotion to Crane’s writing ... Auster plainly loves Crane—and wants the reader to—for Crane’s own far-from-sweet sake. And Auster is right: Crane counts ... The book comes fully to life when it evokes the fabric of the Crane family in New Jersey ... Auster is often sharp-eyed and revealing about the details of Crane’s writing, as when he points out how much Crane’s tone of serene omniscience depends on the passive construction of his sentences. But when he implies that Crane is original because he summons up interior experience in the guise of exterior experience—makes a psychology by inspecting a perceptual field—he is a little wide of the mark ... Auster...is very good at picking out superb stuff from Crane’s mostly submerged journalism ... Crane...emerges from this book, as from his own, as the least phony great American writer who ever lived.
John Sedgwick
Positive The New Yorker ... a book perfectly suited, in its manageable length and rich incidental detail, for the return of mass air and rail travel ... The book has so many outlandish characters—tycoons who fall in love with women named Queenie and Baby Doe; murder among the Wall Street predators—that it seems to demand a big-screen treatment ... Beneath its adventurous surface, Sedgwick’s account is of hair-raising, ethics-free capitalism ... Sedgwick is particularly good on the perceptual and psychological transformations that the railroads wrought. He has revelatory pages on the way that the speed of trains altered the understanding of American space, and on the way that the view from trains—the near distance racing past, the farther distance proceeding in spacious slowness—became a poetic obsession. Equally revelatory is his discussion of the relation between the railroads’ need for straight tracks and the geometrical design of the settlements built near, and shaped by, the tracks ... Yet Sedgwick’s story is hard to follow in places, simply because it gets so crazily complicated ... One might almost call it the tragedy of infrastructure.
John Birdsall
Mixed The New Yorker Birdsall has a good story to tell, and tells it well, but he is one of those authors who would amuse others more if he amused himself a little less ... Birdsall is at his best when he relaxes and tells rather than judges.
David S. Reynolds
Positive The New Yorker Reynolds’s Lincoln is very much an Honest Abe, but he is an updated Abe, fully woke and finely radical ... Reynolds updates Lincoln by doing what scholars do now: he makes biography secondary to the cultural history of the country. Lincoln is seen as a man whose skin bears the tattoos of his time. Cultural patterns are explicated in Abe, and Lincoln is picked up and positioned against them, taking on the coloring of his surroundings, rather like a taxidermied animal being placed in a reconstructed habitat in a nineteenth-century diorama at a natural-history museum. Instead of rising from one episode of strenuous self-making to another, he passes from one frame to the next, a man subsumed ... Reynolds’s cultural history illuminates Lincoln—and particularly his transformation from self-made lawyer into American Abe. Even readers long marinated in the Lincoln literature will find revelation in the way Abe re-situates familiar episodes ... Reynolds’s cultural frames become more arresting as Lincoln’s role grows more public; public people are always cultural objects ... As the war begins, Reynolds’s lens widens in ways that are less appealingly whimsical than in the Barnum case but still more genuinely illuminating ... Sometimes Reynolds’s kind of cultural history demands more suppleness of mind than he displays. When, for instance, he proposes a parallel between Mary Lincoln locked up in the White House and Emily Dickinson isolated in her home, in Amherst, we feel that we are in the presence of a similitude without a real shape: Emily was a Yankee poet of matchless genius, Mary a bewildered Southern woman in an unmanageable role. All they shared was being alone in a big house ... Even with Reynolds’s more compelling examples of anthropological patterns, small whitecaps of uncertainty may stir in the reader’s mind ... Throughout Abe, the terms \'culture\' and \'cultural\' recur with such hammering relentlessness that one wishes Reynolds’s editor had given him a thesaurus. Not having enough words means not seeing enough types ... What counts is a sense of what counts.
Augustine Sedgewick
Positive The New Yorker Extremely wide-ranging and well researched, Sedgewick’s story reaches out into American political history, not to mention the history of American breakfast ... The originality and ambition of Sedgewick’s work is that he insistently sees the dynamic between producer and consumer—Central American peasant and North American proletarian—not merely as one of exploited and exploiter but as a manufactured co-dependence between two groups both exploited by capitalism. \'Cravings\' are not natural appetites but carefully created cultural diktats ... To be sure, Sedgewick recognizes that the actual history of caffeine and capitalist efficiency is more complicated than one might expect ... At the same time, Sedgewick perhaps ascribes undue propagandistic power to the public-relations exercises of coffee producers. Like many radical historians, Sedgewick has a passionate feeling for detail, but lacks a sense of irony ... Sedgewick’s approach can seem dutifully leftist, but the evidence suggests that socialist models of production have hardly humanized the demands of agricultural labor ... Sedgewick, in a tradition of protest literature rooted more in William Blake than in Marx, sees mankind chained to a treadmill of obedience leading only to oblivion.
David G. Marwell
Positive The New Yorker Marwell’s life has much new to tell us, both about Mengele himself and, more significant, about the social and scientific milieu that allowed him to flourish. There is nothing surprising in educated people doing evil, but it is still amazing to see how fully they construct a rationale to let them do it, piling plausible reason on self-justification, until, like Mengele, they are able to look themselves in the mirror every morning with bright-eyed self-congratulation.
Steve Inskeep
Positive The New Yorker One of the virtues of Steve Inskeep’s new book is that it tracks this American phenomenon back to something like a satisfying starting point ... Inskeep’s subtitle might be a bit showy, but the Frémonts turn out to be fine characters for a book, or a miniseries, for that matter ... The irony is that the Frémonts, pioneers of publicity as much as of the American frontier, are now largely forgotten, and in need of salvage operations like Inskeep’s good one.
Fergus M. Bordewich
Mixed The New Yorker Although the subject of the book is specific, its implications are universal ... has an aptly pugnacious subtitle ... This is popular history of a high order—Bordewich has a terrific eye and ear for the details of his chosen time—and it thoroughly reflects the larger revisionism of our day ... Bordewich is more concerned with magnifying his Radical Republican heroes than with diminishing old Abe ... Lincoln understood the great truth of liberal-democratic policies: that it is the job of a political leader, in a time of crisis, to make the unthinkable imaginable, for then it will rapidly become possible, and soon essential. Bordewich, failing to grasp this truth, reads Lincoln’s words in ways that miss his purposes. He accuses Lincoln of looking past moral concerns when he is actually looking around corners ... Bordewich—like left revisionists generally—resists a political understanding of Lincoln’s political rhetoric. What Booth grasped in a second the revisionists tend to miss at length: that throughout the war Lincoln saw, as great politicians do, that opening the door to radical reform is the hardest part.
Cole Porter
Positive The New Yorker Certainly, Porter’s ghost could not ask for better care than he has been given in The Letters of Cole Porter ... Laid out with a meticulous scholarly apparatus, as though this were the correspondence of Grover Cleveland, every turn in the songwriter’s story is deep-dived for exact chronology, and every name casually dropped by Porter gets a worried, explicatory footnote. The editors have also included some secondary material that is not, strictly speaking, correspondence at all ... As an artist’s letters, they are, truth be told, disappointing. There are few flights of fancy or spontaneous improvisations in Porter’s writings to friends—for such a famous wit, there is remarkably little wit. The most arresting passages of writing and thinking arrive less often in letters-from than in letters-to ... Yet a reader, without learning much directly about Porter’s art, comes away from the book with an even higher opinion of him as an artist than might have been held before ... Clues about his creativity shine through the workmanlike surface.
Frank Dikötter
Positive The New Yorker Each dictator’s life is offered with neat, mordant compression. Dikötter’s originality is that he counts crimes against civilization alongside crimes against humanity ... His most interesting chapters, in some ways, are on the \'tin-pot\' dictators—like Duvalier, in Haiti, and Mengistu, in Ethiopia—who, ravaging poverty-stricken countries, still conform to the terrible type ... The elements come together in almost every case to make one standard biography ... Still, Dikötter’s portrait of his dictators perhaps underemphasizes a key point about such men: that, horribly grotesque in most areas, they tend to be good in one, and their skill at the one thing makes their frightened followers overrate their skill at all things ... Where does the double tour of dictator style leave us? Dikötter, in How to Be a Dictator, seems uncertain whether he is writing an epitaph or a prologue to a new edition ... Perhaps the most depressing reflection sparked...is on the supine nature of otherwise intelligent observers in the face of the coarse brutalities of dictatorships.
Brian Jay Jones
Positive The New York Times Book Review Jones on the whole spends more time on Seuss’ prolific drawing than on his rhyming, a reasonable choice ... Jones’s previous biographies were of Jim Henson and George Lucas, and Geisel seems intuitively a good third to add to the trilogy, or, rather, a foundation for the others.
Emily Bazelon
Positive The New Yorker Charged, though far-reaching in purpose, is above all a study of two cases in which prosecutorial misconduct or overreach put two people through hell. She tells these stories in microscopic detail, analyzing the background of each bizarre stop along the infernal circle—why bail is so hard to get and why it exists at all; why public defenders are often so inadequate—in a way that allows the specific case stories to become general truths. Her book achieves what in-depth first-person reporting should: it humanizes the statistics, makes us aware that every courtroom involves the bureaucratic regimentation of an individual’s life. She has a good ear for talk, and a fine eye for detail ... Yet, though Bazelon’s larger points about the madness of prosecutorial power are all impeccably well taken, the two central cases she uses to illustrate these points are somewhat surprising choices ... The matter of...innocence...may be less certain than Bazelon supposes ... Charged is meant to, and does, provoke pity and terror in us at the sheer inhumanity of all imprisonment ... [the] struggle to make sense of an existence now permanently enclosed within a prison’s walls is one of the more moving accounts in Bazelon’s book.
Henry Louis Gates
Positive The New Yorker \"Gates is one of the few academic historians who do not disdain the methods of the journalist, and his book... is flecked with incidental interviews with and inquiries of other scholars, including the great revisionist historian Eric Foner. Though this gives the book a light, flexible, talking-out-loud texture, it is enraging to read—to realize how high those hopes were, how close to being realized, how rapidly eradicated ... Gates goes on to illuminate the complex efforts of black intellectuals, in the face of the reimposition of white rule, to find a sane and safe position against it ... At one point in Stony the Road, Gates writes wisely of images as weapons ... Gates, who is expert at both, catching fish while seeing tides, leaves us with a simple, implicit moral: a long fight for freedom, with too many losses along the way, can be sustained only by a rich and complicated culture. Resilience and resistance are the same activity, seen at different moments in the struggle. It’s a good thought to hold on to now.\
Robert Zaretsky
Positive The New Yorker A wonderfully opinionated and erudite evaluation of the whole of Diderot\'s career, of the Enlightenment, and of Russian culture ... As Zaretsky brilliantly illuminates in a discussion of the era\'s \'philosophic geography,\' Diderot grasped that what Catherine wanted, following in the footsteps of Peter the Great, was to \'Europeanize\' Russia, while what Europeans, including Diderot, wanted was to exoticize Russia ... Catherine comes off extremely well in Zaretsky\'s account.
Andrew S. Curran
Positive The New Yorker \"Curran does a terrific job of sorting through the crazily complicated history of the Encyclopédie’s publication ... Curran also makes a strong and convincing case that the largely forgotten Louis de Jaucourt, a chevalier, or knight, and a practicing physician, was chiefly responsible for finishing the big book; he produced seventeen thousand articles for it, gratis.\
David W. Blight
Rave The New Yorker \"[an] extraordinary new biography ... Blight has certainly written, in the book’s texture and density and narrative flow—one violent and provocative incident arriving right after another—a great American biography.\
Jenny Uglow
Positive The New Yorker \"When it comes to Lear, Uglow’s disability, if there is one, is that she is such an enthusiast that her enthusiasm crowds out, a little, her urge to explication. That nursery nationalism kicks in. She takes Lear’s greatness for granted, piling on limericks and sketch drawings as though we, too, had known them since infancy. Her enthusiasm can become a velvet rope separating us from her subject, more than an invitation to the dance ... What is eloquent and astonishing in Uglow’s biography is her demonstration of how embedded Lear was in Victorian art and culture ... Throughout, Uglow patiently traces the contours of a closeted gay man’s life.\
Karen Crouse
Positive The New Yorker The secrets of that kind of athletic achievement are the subject of Karen Crouse’s book Norwich: One Tiny Vermont Town’s Secret to Happiness and Excellence. Crouse, a Times sportswriter disillusioned by drug-enhanced results and joyless competitions, stumbled on Norwich in the midst of her travels with more or less the same stunned enthusiasm with which Ronald Colman, in the movie Lost Horizon, stumbles on Shangri-La ... What we don’t get to see, in Crouse’s account, is the little town nearby, where, as must be the case, everyone coöperates and yet no one is a champion ... In any case, one has the sense that what Crouse has found is not a 'secret' but a well-known effect: unusual excellence emerges within tightly structured local traditions.
Philip Roth
Rave The New Yorker Peeking out mordantly from the start is Roth’s natural gift for comedy, which can’t help but rise to the surface even amid the seriousness. And Roth is a comedian, really, rather than a humorist or a satirist … Then there comes a last third, gathered here for the first time, called ‘Explanations,’ which is in many ways the most arresting and apropos part of the book. Roth’s great subject turns out to be, by his own account, patriotism—how to savor American history without sentimentalizing it, and how to claim an American identity without ceasing to inquire into how strangely identities are made.
Ron Chernow
Positive The New Yorker Though he does the usual justice to the military saga of the Civil War, and Grant’s decisive part in it, his book aims to rehabilitate Grant as a politician and as President. He makes a convincing case that Grant actually behaved nobly, even heroically, while in the White House ... Chernow tells all this rapidly and well; his talent is suited to Grant’s story ...lacking elegance of means, he covers an immense area of ground, thoroughly and relentlessly, capturing his objectives one by one ...fluent and intelligent narrative... Coming to the close of Chernow’s book, one will think that we have had, since Grant’s Presidency, very much the same politics, with the same two political parties.
Robert Wright
Positive The New Yorker Wright’s book has no poetry or paradox anywhere in it. Since the poetic-comic side of Buddhism is one of its most appealing features, this leaves the book a little short on charm. Yet, if you never feel that Wright is telling you something profound or beautiful, you also never feel that he is telling you something untrue. Direct and unambiguous, tracing his own history in meditation practice, he makes Buddhist ideas and their history clear. Perhaps he makes the ideas too clear ... The dwindling down of Buddhism into another life-style choice will doubtless irritate many, and Wright will likely be sneered at for reducing Buddhism to another bourgeois amenity, like yoga or green juice. Yet what Wright is doing seems an honorable, even a sublime, achievement. Basically, he says that meditation has made him somewhat less irritable. Being somewhat less irritable is not the kind of achievement that people usually look to religion for, but it may be as good an achievement as we ought to expect.
John F. Pfaff
Mixed The New Yorker Pfaff, let there be no doubt, is a reformer ... But he also makes a more complicated argument, following recent sociological research: it’s not that the prohibition of drugs attracts crime, which then produces violence; it’s that violence thrives among young men deprived of a faith in their own upward mobility, making drug dealing an attractive business ... Putting aside quarrels about the specific numbers, one can accept the broad truth of Pfaff’s data without necessarily buying into his position completely.
Heather Ann Thompson
Positive The New Yorker Though her sympathies are entirely with the prisoners, she extends humanity and individual witness to the guards ... Thompson’s capacity for close observation and her honesty, which are impressive, are occasionally undermined by a desiccated political vocabulary.
David Wootton
Positive The New Yorker Wootton, in his new, encyclopedic history, The Invention of Science (Harper), recognizes the blurred lines between magic and science but insists that the revolution lay in the public nature of the new approach.
James Kaplan
Rave The New Yorker \"Kaplan’s book turns out to be, to continue in the old reviewers’ language, hugely readable, vastly entertaining, a page-turner, and all the rest. But it’s also interesting as a fine instance of a strikingly newish kind of thing: the serious and even scholarly biography of a much gossiped-over pop figure, where the old Kitty Kelley-style scandal-sheet bio is turned into a properly documented and footnoted study that nonetheless trades on, or at least doesn’t exclude, the sensational bits.\
Timonthy Snyder
Mixed The New Yorker Politics and procedures obviously enabled the killings; we owe Snyder a debt for his realism about this. But the desire to maim and murder had its roots in a disease of the mind so powerful and passionate that to call it political or procedural hardly seems to capture its nature, or its prevalence.