April 24, 2025 Spring Books Issue

Fara Dabhoiwala

Charting an Unheroic Past

With her densely textured, ambitious, and deeply collaborative scholarship, the historian Catherine Hall has transformed public discourse about slavery.

Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism

by Catherine Hall

Laura Marsh

Shared Delusions

Katie Kitamura’s latest novel prizes open the question of what a family is and what pretenses sustain it.

Audition

by Katie Kitamura

Fintan O’Toole

Shredding the Postwar Order

Donald Trump is reshaping relations between Europe and the US more dramatically than at any time since World War II.

Vivian Gornick

At the University of Chicago all they wanted to know was, What’s the theory? At Yale all they wanted to know was, What’s the technique? At City College of New York all they wanted to know was, How does this relate to real life?

Francisco Cantú

Legacies of Japanese American Incarceration

The Afterlife Is Letting Go, Brandon Shimoda’s book about how survivors and descendants of the United States’ Japanese internment camps try to keep their families’ histories alive, is also a look at the brutal system of migrant detention that continues to this day.

The Afterlife Is Letting Go

by Brandon Shimoda

Jenny Uglow

Lunar Myths and Mysteries

Two new books explore our growing scientific understanding of the moon as well as its powerful appeal to the imagination.

Lunar: A History of the Moon in Myths, Maps, and Matter

edited by Matthew Shindell, with a foreword by Dava Sobel

Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

by Rebecca Boyle

Jesse McCarthy

Return to My Native Land

Vincent O. Carter’s forgotten novel Such Sweet Thunder is a modernist masterpiece and a tribute to a lost black world of Kansas City.

Erin Maglaque

Vexed by Sex

A new history of how Christianity has met the problem of desire argues for more flexibility in proclamations on gender and sexuality.

Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Francine Prose

Poisoning the Family Tree

Joe Dunthorne’s Children of Radium is an account of his search for information about his great-grandfather, a German Jewish scientist who helped develop chemical weapons for the Nazis.

Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance

by Joe Dunthorne

Thomas Powers

A Mighty Theme

Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove is “the Moby-Dick of the plains”—the great book about the American West.

Pastures of the Empty Page: Fellow Writers on the Life and Legacy of Larry McMurtry

edited by George Getschow

Books: A Memoir

by Larry McMurtry

In a Narrow Grave

by Larry McMurtry, with an introduction by Diana Ossana

Literary Life

by Larry McMurtry

Lonesome Dove

by Larry McMurtry

Paradise

by Larry McMurtry

Roads: Driving America’s Great Highways

by Larry McMurtry

Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen

by Larry McMurtry

The Last Picture Show

by Larry McMurtry

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David Cole

Academic Freedom in Peril

Two books by leading First Amendment scholars offer a timely defense of the principle that politicians should not try to control what universities and professors teach their students.

Academic Freedom: From Professional Norm to First Amendment Right

by David M. Rabban

You Can’t Teach That! The Battle Over University Classrooms

by Keith E. Whittington

Jorie Graham

Who

a poem

Merve Emre

An Unsentimental Education

Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons summons the romantic vision of the university as an unblighted Eden to mock it through the downfall of one of its deceived mortals.

Benjamin Nathans

The Enigma of George Kennan

Frank Costigliola’s biography of George Kennan explores the contrast between the supreme confidence of his policy prescriptions and the perpetual turbulence of his inner life.

Kennan: A Life Between Worlds

by Frank Costigliola

Peter Singer

Circling the Good

In his new book the eminent philosopher Thomas Nagel asks whether humans are capable of redefining morality itself.

Moral Feelings, Moral Reality, and Moral Progress

by Thomas Nagel

Omer Bartov

‘Infinite License’

The memory of the Holocaust has, perversely, been enlisted to justify both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that violence has been met.

Off-White: The Truth About Antisemitism

by Rachel Shabi

Gaza Faces History

by Enzo Traverso, translated from the French by Willard Wood

Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

by Peter Beinart

The World After Gaza

by Pankaj Mishra

To Be a Jewish State: Zionism as the New Judaism

by Yaacov Yadgar

What Does Israel Fear from Palestine?

by Raja Shehadeh