June 20, 2024 Issue

Catherine Nicholson

Livelier Than the Living

In the Renaissance, reading became both a passion and a pose of detachment—for those who could afford it—from the pursuits of wealth and power.

A Marvelous Solitude: The Art of Reading in Early Modern Europe

by Lina Bolzoni, translated from the Italian by Sylvia Greenup

Untold Futures: Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England

by J.K. Barret

Mark Lilla

Catholic postliberal thinkers opposed to modern liberal individualism are less interested in transforming people’s unhappy lives through the power of the gospel than in jockeying for political power as the vanguard of a conservative revolution.

Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen, with a foreword by James Davison Hunter and John M. Owen IV

From Fire, by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith

by Sohrab Ahmari

Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—and What to Do About It

by Sohrab Ahmari

Common Good Constitutionalism: Recovering the Classical Legal Tradition

by Adrian Vermeule

Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future

by Patrick J. Deneen

Martin Filler

Up on the Roof

Carlos de Beistegui’s Parisian penthouse apartment, designed by Le Corbusier, was the product of two supreme egotists squaring off against each other.

Machine à Amuser: The Life and Death of the Beistegui Penthouse Apartment

by Wim van den Bergh

Meghan O’Gieblyn

Leaving the Fold

The memoir of a former nun who left her convent after twelve years reveals the contradictions of the monastic life as well as the limits of memoir.

Cloistered: My Years as a Nun

by Catherine Coldstream

Adom Getachew

Black Atlantics

The scholar Louis Chude-Sokei does the urgent work of reimagining the African diaspora as multiple diasporas.

Floating in a Most Peculiar Way

by Louis Chude-Sokei

The Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora

by Louis Chude-Sokei

The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics

by Louis Chude-Sokei

Jonathan Lethem

Grand Poobah of the Antigrandiose

In his five very different novels Charles Portis’s signature was deflation, his attention always fixed on how the world declines to make sense.

Charles Portis: Collected Works

edited by Jay Jennings

Haunted Man’s Report: Reading Charles Portis

by Robert Cochran

Christine Henneberg

‘I Still Would Have Had That Abortion’

Well-meaning supporters of abortion tend to tell stories that focus on decisions rather than experiences. This is the rhetorical legacy of a reproductive rights movement that has for too long focused on “choice” rather than “rights.”

Undue Burden: Life-and-Death Decisions in Post-Roe America

by Shefali Luthra

Frederick Seidel

People Walk Around

a poem

Tim Flannery

No Place Like Home

In the naturalist Jonathan Kingdon’s latest book, Origin Africa, the boundaries between humans and animals soften, then simply disappear.

Origin Africa: A Natural History

by Jonathan Kingdon

Francisco Cantú

A Legacy of Plunder

In its reexamination of entrenched narratives about the expropriation of Native land, Michael Witgen’s work is changing how Native people are situated in the arc of North American history.

Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America

by Michael John Witgen

Zhenya Bruno

Russian Decency

In the investigative journalist Elena Kostyuchenko’s new book about Russia, resistance is carried out through small, discreet acts.

I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country

by Elena Kostyuchenko, translated from the Russian by Bela Shayevich and Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse

Jenny Xie

I Can’t Stop

a poem

Linda Greenhouse

The Constant Presence of Fear

The anthropologist Laurence Ralph has long written about the search for meaning in lives beset by conflict and crisis. In Sito, his new book about the murder of a nineteen-year-old relative, one of the seekers turns out to be Ralph himself.

Sito: An American Teenager and the City That Failed Him

by Laurence Ralph

Gyan Prakash

A ‘Life of Contradictions’

As Indian democracy comes under increasing threat from Hindu nationalists, the Dalit politician B.R. Ambedkar’s fight against caste inequality acquires a new significance.

A Part Apart: The Life and Thought of B.R. Ambedkar

by Ashok Gopal

B.R. Ambedkar: The Man Who Gave Hope to India’s Dispossessed

by Shashi Tharoor

The Evolution of Pragmatism in India: Ambedkar, Dewey, and the Rhetoric of Reconstruction

by Scott R. Stroud

Brian Seibert

‘You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught’

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, once kings of American culture, invented a new kind of musical theater in shows like Oklahoma!, Carousel, and South Pacific. But by the time of their final work together, a critical backlash had begun.

Oscar Hammerstein II and the Invention of the Musical

by Laurie Winer

Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers

by Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green

Ed Vulliamy,
Pascal Vannier

D-Day’s Forgotten Victims Speak Out

Eighty years after D-Day, few know one of its darkest stories: the thousands of French civilians killed by a British and American carpet-bombing campaign of little military purpose.

L’Enfer du Havre, 1940–1944

by Julien Guillemard

Le Havre 44: À feu et à sang

by Eddy Florentin

Forgotten Blitzes: France and Italy Under Allied Air Attack, 1940–1945

by Claudia Baldoli and Andrew Knapp

Les Français sous les bombes alliées, 1940–1945

by Andrew Knapp

Les Civils dans la bataille de Normandie

by Françoise Passera and Jean Quellien

Le Calvados dans la guerre, 1939–1945

by Jean Quellien