December 7, 2023

Perry Link

A Fallen Artist in Mao’s China

Ha Jin’s The Woman Back from Moscow, a fictionalized account of the life of the actress Sun Weishi, depicts the hypocrisy of the Communist elites and the fate of those who embraced new ideals after the revolution.

The Woman Back from Moscow: In Pursuit of Beauty

by Ha Jin

Aminatta Forna

Prelude to Empire

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novels, whether set in German East Africa or the United Kingdom, never cease to demonstrate how the minutiae of people’s lives have been affected by European colonialism.

Afterlives

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Paradise

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Elizabeth Metzger

Don’t Make Me

a poem

Fintan O’Toole

No Endgame in Gaza

After weeks of bombardment and thousands of deaths, what are Netanyahu’s political and ethical limits?

Nitin K. Ahuja

Gut Instincts

Recent books about the importance of the microbiome have driven many patients to fixate on the idea of “gut health.” Are they right to do so?

A Silent Fire: The Story of Inflammation, Diet, and Disease

by Shilpa Ravella

Flush: The Remarkable Science of an Unlikely Treasure

by Bryn Nelson

The Anti-Viral Gut: Tackling Pathogens from the Inside Out

by Robynne Chutkan

Sophie Pinkham

Invasion, Day by Day

Yevgenia Belorusets’s War Diary is rigorous in its focus on the interior life, asking what it means to be at home during a war.

War Diary

by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated from the German by Greg Nissan

Caleb Crain

Fatal Embracements

In Tom Crewe’s debut novel The New Life, based on the first tolerant Victorian case studies of homosexuality, sex becomes a touchstone that helps bridge time.

The New Life

by Tom Crewe

Adam Hochschild

Mildred Rutherford’s War

The “historian general” of the United Daughters of the Confederacy began the battle over the depiction of the Old South and slavery in US history textbooks that continues today.

Nicolas Niarchos

In Congo’s Cobalt Mines

The lucrative mining industry is unscrupulous, environmentally disastrous, and a linchpin of Congo’s economy. How can it be reformed?

Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

by Siddharth Kara

Cobalt Mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: Addressing Root Causes of Human Rights Abuses

a report by Dorothée Baumann-Pauly

Conflict Minerals Inc.: War, Profit and White Saviourism in Eastern Congo

by Christoph N. Vogel

Eating the Congo: Unveiling State Governance of Copper and Cobalt Mining in Former Katanga

by Claude Iguma Wakenge

The Eyes of the World: Mining the Digital Age in the Eastern DR Congo

by James H. Smith

Magda Teter

Found in Translation

A painstaking work of linguistic and textual archaeology unravels a forgotten story of pre-Ashkenazi Jews’ presence in medieval eastern Europe and their intellectual contributions.

The Cultural Legacy of the Pre-Ashkenazic Jews in Eastern Europe

by Moshe Taube

Edward Chancellor

The Naturalist

In a new biography, Friedrich Hayek emerges as a paradoxical figure: a passionate liberal whose most enthusiastic supporters have been conservative.

Hayek: A Life, 1899–1950

by Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger

Liberalism’s Last Man: Hayek in the Age of Political Capitalism

by Vikash Yadav

Julia Kornberg

Strangers in the City

In Seven Empty Houses, the Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin revives the rioplatense short story tradition, which was born at the turn of the century and reached a peak during the Latin American Boom.

Seven Empty Houses

by Samanta Schweblin, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

The Collaborator in Chief

The trial of Marshal Philippe Pétain was also implicitly a trial of the millions of French men and women who may have disliked the German occupation but who compromised with it and obeyed Vichy.

France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain

by Julian Jackson