3Contents
4 Fintan O’Toole The Designated Mourner
10 Clair Wills To Calais, in Ordinary Time by James Meek
The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner
12 Noah Feldman Is Trump Above the Law?
14 Natalie Shapero Poem
15 David Salle Rachel Harrison Life Hack an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York City, October 25, 2019–January 12, 2020
Catalog of the exhibition by Elisabeth Sussman and David Joselit, with contributions
by Johanna Burton, Darby English, Maggie Nelson, and Alexander Nemerov
18 Cathleen Schine Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler by Cate Haste
22 Robyn Creswell Beirut Hellfire Society by Rawi Hage
Cockroach by Rawi Hage
De Niro’s Game by Rawi Hage
24 Bill McKibben Grinnell: America’s Environmental Pioneer and His Restless Drive to Save the West
by John Taliaferro
Natural Rivals: John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the Creation of America’s Public Lands
by John Clayton
25 William Logan Poem
26 Amy Knight Judgment in Moscow: Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity by Vladimir Bukovsky
29 David W. Blight The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul
from the Revolution to the Civil War by Andrew Delbanco
32 Merve Emre The Organs of Sense by Adam Ehrlich Sachs
35 Jed Perl In a Cloud, in a Wall, in a Chair: Six Modernists in Mexico at Midcentury an exhibition
at the Art Institute of Chicago, September 6, 2019–January 12, 2020
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Zoë Ryan
38 Josephine Quinn Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome by Guy de la Bédoyère
40 Jonathan Stevenson Road Warriors: Foreign Fighters in the Armies of Jihad by Daniel Byman
Targeting Top Terrorists: Understanding Leadership Removal in Counterterrorism Strategy
by Bryan C. Price
The London Bombings by Marc Sageman
42 Freeman Dyson Zwicky: The Outcast Genius Who Unmasked the Universe by John Johnson Jr.
45 Mark Mazower De Gaulle by Julian Jackson
49 Peter Brooks The Storyteller Essays by Walter Benjamin, edited and with an introduction by Samuel Titan
52 Nick Laird Blood and Brexit
54 Letter from John K. Collins
CONTRIBUTORS
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NYRDaily Matt Seaton, Editor; Lucy McKeon, Associate Editor.
The drawings on the cover and on page 4 are by Anders Nilsen. The drawings on page 12 are by Tom Bachtell. The drawing on page 41 is by James Ferguson. The
drawing on page 45 is by David Levine. The engraving on page 50 is by Grandville. The photographs of the sculptures by Rachel Harrison on pages 15, 16, and 17
are by Sam Pulitzer, Oren Slor, and Jean Vong. The painting on page 20 is © 2019 Fondation Oskar Kokoschka/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ProLitteris,
Zurich. The artwork on page 35 is © Center for Creative Photography, the University of Arizona Foundation. The artwork on page 37 is © The Josef and Anni
Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2019.
The New York Review of Books (ISSN 0028-7504), published 20 times a year, monthly in January, August, and September; semi-monthly in February, March, April, May,
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Editors: Emily Greenhouse, Gabriel Winslow-Yost
Deputy Editor: Michael Shae
Senior Editors: Eve Bowen, Prudence Crowther,
Julie Just, Andrew Katzenstein
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Plus: Tiana Reid on gender and migration in ‘Atlantics,’ Claire Messud on art crossing borders, and more ...nybooks.com/dailyDEMOCRACY IN DANGERDAVID W. BLIGHT is Sterling Professor of American History at
Yale. His biography of Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom,
received the Pulitzer Prize for history.
PETER BROOKS has written several books on narrative and the
novel, including Reading for the Plot. A new book, Balzac’s Lives,
will be published next fall. He is Sterling Professor Emeritus of
Comparative Literature at Yale.
ROBYN CRESWELL is Assistant Professor of Comparative
Literature at Yale. He is the author of City of Beginnings: Poetic
Modernism in Beirut.
FREEMAN DYSON is Professor of Physics Emeritus at the Insti-
tute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
MERVE EMRE is Associate Professor of English Literature at
Oxford and a Fellow of Worcester College. Her latest book is The
Ferrante Letters: An Exercise in Collective Thinking.
NOAH FELDMAN is the Felix Frankfurter Professor at Harvard
Law School, a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, and host of the
podcast “Deep Background.” His most recent book is The Three
Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President.
AMY KNIGHT is a former Woodrow Wilson Fellow. Her most re-
cent book is Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder.
NICK LAIRD is a poet, novelist, and former litigator who worked
on the Bloody Sunday inquiry. He teaches at NYU and is Professor of
Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Belfast. His fourth
collection of poetry, Feel Free, was published in the US in July.
WILLIAM LOGAN ’s most recent book of poems is Rift of Light;
his most recent book of essays is Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods.
MARK MAZOWER is Director of the Columbia Institute for
Ideas and Imagination in Paris. He is the author, most recently, of
What You Did Not Tell: A Russian Past and the Journey Home.
BILL McKIBBEN is the founder of 350.org and Schumann Dis-
tinguished Scholar at Middlebury. His new book is Falter: Has the
Human Game Played Itself Out?
FINTAN O’TOOLE is a columnist with The Irish Times and the
Leonard L. Milberg Visiting Lecturer in Irish Letters at Princeton.
His new book, The Politics of Pain: Postwar En gland and the Rise
of Nationalism, was published in the US in November.
JED PERL ’s Calder: The Conquest of Space, the second and con-
cluding volume of his biography of the American sculptor, will be
published in April.
JOSEPHINE QUINN teaches ancient history at Oxford and is
currently a Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman
Center for Scholars and Writers.
DAVID SALLE is a painter and essayist. He will have a show of
recent paintings at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris this winter.
CATHLEEN SCHINE ’s novel The Grammarians was published
in September.
NATALIE SHAPERO is the author of the poetry collections Hard
Child and No Object. She teaches at Tufts.
JONATHAN STEVENSON is a Senior Fellow at the International
Institute for Strategic Studies and Managing Editor of Survival.
He was National Security Council Director for Political-Military
Affairs, Middle East and North Africa, from 2011 to 2013.
CLAIR WILLS teaches at Cambridge. Her latest book is Lovers
and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Post-War Britain.basicbooks.comTHE SPIRIT
OF LIBERTY
A NEW
WORLD BEGINS
The History of
the French Revolution
JEREMY D. POPKIN
“Jeremy Popkin is one of the
most eminent scholars working
on the French Revolution, and
his A New World Begins provides
us with the best, fullest, and
most up-to-date history of
the Revolutionary decade from
1789 through to the advent
of Napoleon. Writing with an
insight that distils a lifetime’s
study, Popkin is particularly
alert to the range of experience
of those who lived through the
Revolutionary years. There is
heart and compassion here as
well as wit and intelligence.”
—COLIN JONES,
author of The Great Nation:
France from Louis XV to Napoleon“This is a book that has
been needed for a long
time: a lucid, engaging,
authoritative, accurate, and
up-to-date histor y of the
French Revolution. Jeremy
Popkin is one of the great
living experts on the subject,
and he has drawn on a half-
century of study to produce
this fi rst-rate work.”
—DAVID A. BELL,
Princeton University