Kwame Anthony Appiah | The New York Review of Books

The Prophet of Maximum Productivity

Thorstein Veblen’s maverick economic ideas made him the foremost iconoclast of the Age of Iconoclasts.

Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics

by Charles Camic

January 14, 2021 issue

The Defender of Differences

On Franz Boas and his critics

Franz Boas: The Emergence of the Anthropologist

by Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt

Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

by Charles King

From Boas to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism, and American Anthropology

by Mark Anderson

May 28, 2020 issue

Claude Lévi-Strauss in his office in Paris, 1969

The Key to All Mythologies

Lévi-Strauss: A Biography

by Emmanuelle Loyer, translated from the French by Ninon Vinsonneau and Jonathan Magidoff

Claude Lévi-Strauss: A Critical Study of His Thought

by Maurice Godelier, translated from the French by Nora Scott

February 13, 2020 issue

Herder in the Balance

September 26, 2019 issue

Voltaire’s Tears

June 6, 2019 issue

Dialectics of Enlightenment

‘Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason’ by Justin E.H. Smith

Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason

by Justin E.H. Smith

May 9, 2019 issue

Letter

David Ball

Voltaire’s Tears

June 6, 2019 issue

Letter

Zeev Sternhell

Herder in the Balance

September 26, 2019 issue

An Open Letter to Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, and Donald Tusk, President of the European Council

March 21, 2019 issue

The Red Baron

On Michael Young and the ideal of meritocracy

October 11, 2018 issue

Francis Bacon: Portrait of Michel Leiris, 1976

Surreal Anthropology

Phantom Africa

by Michel Leiris, translated from the French by Brent Hayes Edwards

March 8, 2018 issue

The Achievement of Achebe

The genius of Chinua Achebe, like all genius, escapes precise analysis. The first of the novels in his “African trilogy” defined a starting point for the modern African novel.

May 22, 2017

Turkey’s Attack on Teachers

April 21, 2016 issue

Letter

Seyla Benhabib

Turks, Teachers & Kurds

May 12, 2016 issue

Mexican photojournalists with a picture of their murdered colleague, Rubén Espinosa, at a demonstration in Mexico City, August 2015

Murder in Mexico: An Open Letter

September 24, 2015 issue

President Obama at the White House, January 2012

We’re Still Puzzled

The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House

by Edward Klein

The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era

by Michael Grunwald

November 8, 2012 issue

Letter

Arnold Goldberg

To The White House

December 6, 2012 issue

A still from a video of Mitt Romney talking to wealthy donors at a fund-raiser in Boca Raton, Florida, May 17, 2012

The Election—III

November 8, 2012 issue

Battling with Du Bois

Democracy's Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W.E.B. Du Bois

by Lawrie Balfour

In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America

by Robert Gooding-Williams

December 22, 2011 issue

Letter

Barbara L. Solow

The British & the Slave Trade

January 12, 2012 issue

Barack Obama with his stepgrandmother, Sarah, half-sister, Auma, and stepmother, Kezia, at their homestead in Alego, Kenya

The Apple Fell Far from the Tree

A history of the African Obamas

The Obamas: The Untold Story of an African Family

by Peter Firstbrook

May 12, 2011 issue

The philosopher Martin Buber, Tel Aviv, 1962

Religious Faith and John Rawls

A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith, with "On My Religion"

by John Rawls, edied by Thomas Nagel

Reading Obama: Dreams, Hopes and the American Political Tradition

by James T. Kloppenberg

December 9, 2010 issue

How Muslims Made Europe

God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 570–1215

by David Levering Lewis

November 6, 2008 issue

What Was Africa to Them?

The Door of No Return: The History of Cape Coast Castle and the Atlantic Slave Trade

by William St Clair

Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005

by James T. Campbell

American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era

by Kevin K. Gaines

Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in Africa and Beyond

by Ekow Eshun, with illustrations by Chris Ofili

Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

by Saidiya Hartman

See all reviewed works

See less

September 27, 2007 issue

Whose Culture Is It?

February 9, 2006 issue