3Contents
4 Caroline Fraser Elizabeth Warren in the Trap
9 Art Spiegelman SCREWBALL!: The Cartoonists Who Made the Funnies Funny by Paul C. Tumey
The Art of Rube Goldberg an exhibition at the Queens Museum, New York City
13 Bill McKibben A Very Hot Year
15 Ruth Franklin The Kairos Novels: The Wrinkle in Time and Polly O’Keefe Quartets
by Madeleine L’Engle, edited by Leonard S. Marcus
Penguins and Golden Calves: Icons and Idols in Antarctica and Other Unexpected Places
by Madeleine L’Engle, with a foreword by Charlotte Jones Voiklis
The Rock That Is Higher: Story as Truth by Madeleine L’Engle, with a foreword by Sarah Bessey
18 Howard W. French Maoism: A Global History by Julia Lovell
China’s New Red Guards: The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong
by Jude Blanchette
21 James Fenton The Last Knight: The Art, Armor, and Ambition of Maximilian I an exhibition
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Pierre Terjanian
The Renaissance of Etching an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Catalog of the exhibition by Catherine Jenkins, Nadine M. Orenstein, Freyda Spira, and others
23 Tim Parks Dario Fo and Franca Rame: Theatre, Politics, Life by Joseph Farrell
25 Paula Bohince Poem
26 Brenda Wineapple American Demagogue: The Great Awakening and the Rise and Fall of Populism
by J. D. Dickey
28 Lili Loofbourow Women Talking by Miriam Toews
The Question Authority by Rachel Cline
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
31 Tim Flannery Cities: The First 6,000 Years by Monica L. Smith
Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott
33 Ian Frazier Inland by Téa Obreht
36 Robert Pogue Harrison Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography by Christophe Bident, translated
from the French by John McKeane
38 Christian Caryl The Compatriots: The Brutal and Chaotic History of Russia’s Exiles, Émigrés,
and Agents Abroad by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan
From Russia with Blood: The Kremlin’s Ruthless Assassination Program and Vladimir Putin’s
Secret War on the West by Heidi Blake
42 Charles Petersen Adjunct by Geoff Cebula
The Good University: What Universities Actually Do and Why It’s Time
for Radical Change by Raewyn Connell
The Adjunct Underclass: How America’s Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students,
and Their Mission by Herb Childress
and eight other books and reports about academia
45 Letters from Jesse Kass and James Oakes
CONTRIBUTORS
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NYRDaily Matt Seaton, Editor; Lucy McKeon, Associate Editor.
The illustration on the cover is adapted from And Her Name Was Maud by Freder ick Bu r r Opper, October 2 , 19 0 4 (f rom Society Is Nix, published by Sunday Press).
The drawing on page 4 is by Anders Nilsen. The drawing on page 15 is by Tom Bachtell. The drawing on page 24 is by Tullio Pericoli. The illustration on page 33
is by Joanna Neborsky. The drawing on page 42 is by John Cuneo. The engraving on page 45 is by Thomas Bewick.
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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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
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Plus: Jenny Uglow on David Bomberg’s early work, Kate Maltby on Tom Stoppard’s ‘Leopoldstadt,’ and more ...nybooks.com/dailyFORMATION & DEFORMATIONPAULA BOHINCE is the author of three books of poems, most
recently Swallows and Waves. She is the 2020 John Montague
International Poetry Fellow at University College Cork.
CHRISTIAN CARYL is an editor at the Opinions section of
The Washington Post and the author of Strange Rebels: 1979 and
the Birth of the Twenty-First Century.
JAMES FENTON is a British poet and literary critic. From
1994 until 1999, he was Oxford Professor of Poetry; in 2015 he
was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize. He is the author of School
of Genius: A History of the Royal Academy of Arts and, most
recently, Yellow Tulips: Poems, 1968 –2011.
TIM FLANNERY ’s Europe: A Natural History was published
last year.
RUTH FRANKLIN ’s most recent book, Shirley Jackson: A
Rather Haunted Life, won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle
Award in Biography.
CAROLINE FRASER ’s most recent book, Prairie Fires: The
American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, received the Pulitzer
Prize for biography. Her first book, God’s Perfect Child: Living
and Dying in the Christian Science Church, was reissued last fall.
IAN FRAZIER is the author of eleven books, including Great
Plains, Family, On the Rez, and Travels in Siberia.
HOWARD W. FRENCH is a Professor at the Columbia Univer-
sity Graduate School of Journalism. His latest book is Everything
Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for
Global Power. He is at work on a book about the role of Africa
and Africans in the launching of modernity.
ROBERT POGUE HARRISON teaches literature at Stanford.
His latest book is Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age.
LILI LOOFBOUROW is a staff writer at Slate. Her work has
appeared in Best American Essays 2019, Virginia Quarterly
Review, and The New York Times Magazine. She is working on
a book of essays.
BILL McKIBBEN is the founder of 350.org and Schumann
Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury. His new book is Falter: Has
the Human Game Played Itself Out?
TIM PARKS is the author of many novels, translations, and
works of nonfiction, most recently Out of My Head: On the Trail
of Consciousness and the novel In Extremis.
CHARLES PETERSEN is a Senior Editor at n+1 and a Ph.D.
candidate in American Studies at Harvard. Later this year, he
will join the Cornell Department of History as a Klarman Post-
doctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows.
ART SPIEGELMAN is a cartoonist and writer. His Pulitzer
Prize–winning graphic novel, Maus, has just been issued as a two-
volume boxed set of paperbacks with a booklet of related comics
and drawings.
BRENDA WINEAPPLE ’s most recent book, The Impeachers:
The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation, was
published last May.basicbooks.comTHE BEGINNING
OF THE END
“Hitler’s First Hundred Days,
a thoroughly researched and
elegantly written book, is a
must for understanding
how a majority of Germans
adapted to the new regime,
even cheered it, merely
a few months after Hitler’s
accession to the chancellorship.
A stark reminder of the
blandishments of power.”—SAUL FRIEDLÄNDER,
author of
Nazi Germany and the Jews“Not all 100 days are the
same. This riveting and
troubling portrait of political
and social depredation by a
master historian of the Third
Reich underscores liberal
democratic frailty in the face
of fi erce determined attack.
As such, it implicitly offers
readers a clarion call to
take incipient and assertive
authoritarianism seriously lest
they create an ugly new normal.”—IRA KATZNELSON,
author of Fear Itself: The New Deal
and the Origins of Our TimeHITLER’S FIRST
HUNDRED DAYS
PETER FRITZSCHE
When Germans Embraced
the Third Reich