3
Contents
4 Anne Diebel Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow
9 Ruth Padel Poem
10 Sanford Schwartz Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet an exhibition at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York City
Catalog of the exhibition by Dita Amory, Ann Dumas, Patrick McGuinness,
Belinda Thomson, Philippe Büttner, Katia Poletti, and Christian Rümelin
12 Jessica T. Mathews Do the Democrats Have a Foreign Policy?
15 Elaine Blair The Topeka School by Ben Lerner
18 Kwame Anthony Appiah Lévi-Strauss: A Biography by Emmanuelle Loyer, translated from the French
by Ninon Vinsonneau and Jonathan Magidoff
Claude Lévi-Strauss: A Critical Study of His Thought by Maurice Godelier,
translated from the French by Nora Scott
21 David Oshinsky Signature Wounds: The Untold Story of the Military’s Mental Health Crisis
by David Kieran
23 Dan Chiasson The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem: Reading and Remembering
Thomas Wyatt by Peter Murphy
25 Adam Tooze The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality
by Katharina Pistor
28 Robert Irwin The World of the Crusades: An Illustrated History by Christopher Tyerman
Crusaders: The Epic History of the Wars for the Holy Lands by Dan Jones
The Accursed Tower: The Fall of Acre and the End of the Crusades
by Roger Crowley
30 Sarah Elizabeth Lewis An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden
by Mary Schmidt Campbell
The Romare Bearden Reader edited by Robert G. O’Meally
32 Geoffrey Wheatcroft Boris Johnson: The Opportunist Triumphant
36 Ruth Margalit The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy
39 Steven Simon The Middle East: Trump Blunders In
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On the cover: Félix Vallotton: I: The Trench (detail), 1915 (Cabinet d’arts graphiques, Musées d’art et d’histoire, Geneva). The drawing on page 4 is by Tom
Bachtell. The drawings on pages 32 and 34 are by John Springs. The drawing on page 40 is by Pancho. The artworks on pages 30 and 31 are © 2020 Romare Bearden
Foundation/Licensed by VAG A at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
The New York Review of Books (ISSN 0028-7504), published 20 times a year, monthly in January, June, August, and September; semi-monthly in February, March, April,
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next issue will be February 27, 2020.
Editors: Emily Greenhouse, Gabriel Winslow-Yost
Deputy Editor: Michael Shae
Senior Editors: Eve Bowen, Prudence Crowther,
Julie Just, Andrew Katzenstein
Senior Editor, Poetry: Jana Prikryl
Editor-at-Large: Daniel Mendelsohn
Founding Editors : Robert B. Silvers (1929–2017)
Barbara Epstein (1928–2006)
Publisher: Rea S. Hederman
Advertising Director: Lara Frohlich Andersen» Tim Flannery: Australia’s Scorched Earth
» Lydia Wilson : The Syrian Exiles in Jordan» David Graeber: The Center Blows Itself Up
» Tamsin Shaw : A Carl Schmitt for Our Time
Plus: Rick Moody on ‘Three Christs,’ Peter S. Gordon on historical analogies, and more ...nybooks.com/dailyCONFLAGRATIONSKWAME ANTHONY APPIAH teaches philosophy at NYU.
His latest book, The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity, is
based on his 2016 BBC Reith Lectures.
ELAINE BLAIR is a regular contributor to The New York
Review.
DAN CHIASSON ’s fifth book of poetry, The Math Campers,
will be published in September. He teaches at Wellesley.
ANNE DIEBEL works as a private investigator with QRI in
New York City.
ROBERT IRWIN is the Middle East Editor of the Times Liter-
ary Supplement and the author of many books, including Ibn
Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography. His most recent novel, My
Life Is Like a Fairy Tale, was published in the UK in November.
SARAH ELIZABETH LEWIS is an Associate Professor in
the Department of the History of Art and Architecture and
the Department of African and African-American Studies
at Harvard. She is completing a book on race, sight, and the
Caucasian War.
RUTH MARGALIT ’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker
and The New York Times Magazine. She lives in Tel Aviv.
JESSICA T. MATHEWS was President of the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace from 1997 to 2015 and is
now a Distinguished Fellow there. She has served in the State
Department and on the National Security Council staff in the
White House.
DAVID OSHINSKY is the Director of the Division of Medical
Humanities at NYU Langone Health and a Professor in the
Department of History at NYU. His most recent book is Belle-
vue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s
Most Storied Hospital.
RUTH PADEL is a Professor of Poetry at King’s College Lon-
don and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her book
Beethoven Variations: A Life in Poems was published this year.
SANFORD SCHWARTZ is the author of Christen Købke and
William Nicholson, and some of his reviews have been collected
in The Art Presence and Artists & Writers.
STEVEN SIMON is an analyst at the Quincy Institute for
Responsible Statecraft and Professor in the Practice of Inter-
national Relations at Colby. He was National Security Coun-
cil Senior Director for the Middle East and North Africa from
2011 to 2012 and Senior Director for Counterterrorism from
1994 to 1999. His book The Long Goodbye: The US and the
Middle East from the Islamic Revolution to the Arab Spring will
be published next year.
ADAM TOOZE is the Director of the European Institute
at Columbia. He is the author of Crashed: How a Decade of
Financial Crises Changed the World and is currently working on
an economic history of the climate emergency.
GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT ’s books include The Contro-
versy of Zion, The Strange Death of Tory England, and Yo, Blair!
His new book, Churchill’s Bust, will be published this year.basicbooks.comGENESIS
TRANSCENDENCE
How Humans Evolved
through Fire, Language,
Beauty, and Time
GAIA VINCE
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story from the Big Bang
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—RICHARD WRANGHAM,
Harvard University“A wondrous,
visionary work.”
—TIM FLANNERY,
author of The Weather Makers“A hugely enjoyable
sprint through human
evolutionary history.”
—T IM R A DFORD,
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