October 19, 2023 issue

Gary Younge

‘We Return Fighting’

The ambivalence many Black soldiers felt toward the United States during World War II was matched only by the ambivalence the United States demonstrated toward the principles on which the war was fought.

Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad

by Matthew F. Delmont

Cathleen Schine

The Voyage Out

Selby Wynn Schwartz’s novel After Sappho is populated by the notable lesbians who helped modernism blossom.

After Sappho

by Selby Wynn Schwartz

Michael Hofmann

Punning for Germany

The strange experience of youth in Thomas Brussig’s East Germany.

The Short End of the Sonnenallee

by Thomas Brussig, translated from the German by Jonathan Franzen and Jenny Watson, with an introduction by Jonathan Franzen

Arthur Sze

Against the Rubble

a poem

David Shulman

Heading Toward a Second Nakba

Nathan Thrall argues that the accident in which Abed Salama’s son died was a predictable, even inevitable, outcome of the Israeli occupation in its quotidian forms.

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy

by Nathan Thrall

Jenny Uglow

‘A Haughty Independence’

The early-twentieth-century painter Gwen John struggled to forge her own place in an art world dominated by men.

Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris

by Alicia Foster

Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris

an exhibition at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, England, May 13–October 8, 2023

Suzy Hansen

Twenty Years of Outsourced War

In Uncertain Ground, Phil Klay sets out to determine what twenty-first-century US foreign policy has done to the cocksure American mind.

Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War

by Phil Klay

Missionaries

by Phil Klay

Emmanuel Ordóñez Angulo

‘Give Me All the Power’

Did Latin rock meaningfully challenge authoritarian politics in Central and South America during the twentieth century, or was it music for rebels without a cause?

Break It All: The History of Rock in Latin America

a Netflix documentary series written by Nicolas Entel and Nicolas Gueilburt and directed by Picky Talarico

Kim Phillips-Fein

Conspicuous Destruction

Two new books argue that the private equity industry has created an economic order in which getting rich quickly preempts every other value, undermining companies and evading the law.

Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America

by Brendan Ballou

These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs—and Wrecks—America

by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner

Natalie Angier

Not Milk?

A new book shows how cow’s milk attained the status of kitchen essential and universal beverage in the United States. But its consumption has been in decline for decades—a trend that nothing seems capable of stopping.

Spoiled: The Myth of Milk as Superfood

by Anne Mendelson

Megan O’Grady

Art as Action

Lucy Lippard is a canonical figure who held no truck with canons, who disdained art history only to become art history.

Stuff: Instead of a Memoir

by Lucy R. Lippard

Jessica Laser

New Angle

a poem

David Motadel

Is Prussian Militarism a Myth?

Peter Wilson’s Iron and Blood is a bold survey of over half a millennium of German military history.

Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples Since 1500

by Peter H. Wilson

Jules Laforgue,
Mark Ford

Warning

a poem

Adam Kirsch

Intolerable Freedoms

The Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Three Colors” trilogy darkly anticipated some of the central conflicts of the post–cold war period.

Three Colors: Blue, White, and Red

a trilogy of films written and directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski, and cowritten by Krzysztof Piesiewicz

Charlie Lee

The Way of All Flesh

In The Love of Singular Men, Victor Heringer scrambles genres—tragic romance, pulpy noir, family drama—to plumb the false solace that narrative promises.

The Love of Singular Men

by Victor Heringer, translated from the Portuguese by James Young

Gregory Afinogenov

Field Maneuvers

An authoritative biography of General Kutuzov strips away the layers of propaganda that have encrusted its subject since 1812.

Kutuzov: A Life in War and Peace

by Alexander Mikaberidze

Philip Clark

The Transgressor

RJ Smith’s biography of Chuck Berry examines his subject’s instinct for crossing the line musically, racially, and morally.

Chuck Berry: An American Life

by RJ Smith

Susan Neiman

Historical Reckoning Gone Haywire

Germans’ efforts to confront their country’s criminal history and to root out antisemitism have shifted from vigilance to a philosemitic McCarthyism that threatens their rich cultural life.

Letters

Susie Linfield,
Michael Walzer,
Jeffrey Herf,
Dahlia Scheindlin,
et al.

Israel’s Origins and Revolutions: An Exchange

Emilie Moorhouse,
Anahid Nersessian

Gray Area

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