3Contents
4 Clair Wills Stepping Out
8 Bill McKibben Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency by Mark Lynas
11 Ingrid D. Rowland Raffaello 1520 –1483 an exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome, June 2–August 30, 2020
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Marzia Faietti and Matteo Lafranconi,
with Francesco P. Di Teodoro and Vincenzo Farinella
13 Jonathan Stevenson The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir by John Bolton
14 Logan Fry Poem
16 Colm Tóibín The Man in the Red Coat by Julian Barnes
19 Jessica T. Mathews The Age of Hiroshima edited by Michael D. Gordin and G. John Ikenberry
The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War by Fred Kaplan
The Button: The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power from Truman to Trump
by William J. Perry and Tom Z. Collina
The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States:
A Speculative Novel by Jeffrey Lewis
22 Fara Dabhoiwala The Freedom of Speech: Talk and Slavery in the Anglo-Caribbean World by Miles Ogborn
Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War by Vincent Brown
Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire by Tom Zoellner
25 David Cole The Court’s Declarations of Independence
27 Sophie Pinkham Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia by Joshua Yaffa
29 Rumaan Alam Collected Stories by Lorrie Moore
32 Joseph O’Neill Code Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country by E. J. Dionne Jr.
Politics Is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and
Make Real Change by Eitan Hersh
36 Kate Bolick Lives of Houses edited by Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee
38 Jonathan Freedland Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare by Thomas Rid
The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics by Ben Buchanan
Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk
News Operations, and Political Operatives by Philip N. Howard
40 Rae Armantrout Poem
42 Michelle Kuo Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair by Danielle Sered
48 Adam Thirlwell BoJack Horseman a TV series created by Raphael Bob- Waksberg and art-directed by Lisa Hanawalt
50 David Luban America the Unaccountable
53 Michelle Nijhuis When Animals Speak: Toward an Interspecies Democracy by Eva Meijer
Animal Languages by Eva Meijer, translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson
Animal Internet: Nature and the Digital Revolution by Alexander Pschera,
translated from the German by Elisabeth Lauffer
Nightingales in Berlin: Searching for the Perfect Sound by David Rothenberg
56 James Walton Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
58 Darryl Pinckney ‘We Must Act Out Our Freedom’
61 Letters from Nir Eyal, Marc Lipsitch, Marcia Angell, Carl Elliott, Joel Marks, Michael Pollan, Donald Wittman,
Marilynne Robinson, Edward Blumenthal, James Cohen, and Enrique Krauze
CONTRIBUTORS
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NYRDaily Matt Seaton, Editor; Lucy McKeon, Associate Editor.
The illustration on the cover is by Anders Nilsen. The illustrations on pages 31, 61, and 62 are by Edward Lear.
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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Plus: April Zhu’s dispatch from Nairobi, Alejandro Zambra’s ‘Multitudes,’ and more ...nybooks.com/dailyCRISIS & OPPORTUNITYRUMAAN ALAM is the author of Rich and Pretty and That Kind
of Mother. His third novel, Leave the World Behind, will be published
in October.
RAE ARMANTROUT ’s newest book of poems, Conjure, will be
published in September.
KATE BOLICK is the author of Spinster: Making a Life of One’s
Own. She teaches in the graduate Cultural Reporting and Criticism
program at NYU.
DAVID COLE is the National Legal Director of the ACLU and the
Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at
the Georgetown University Law Center. His latest book is Engines of
Liberty: How Citizen Movements Succeed.
FARA DABHOIWALA , the author of The Origins of Sex, teaches
at Princeton and is writing a global history of free speech.
JONATHAN FREEDLAND is an editorial-page columnist for
The Guardian. His latest novel is To Kill a Man, published under the
pseudonym Sam Bourne.
LOGAN FRY is the author of Harpo Before the Opus and Editor of
Flag + Void.
MICHELLE KUO is an attorney and Associate Professor in the His-
tory, Law, and Society program at the American University of Paris.
She is the author of Reading with Patrick.
DAVID LUBAN is a University Professor in Law and Philosophy
at Georgetown and Distinguished Chair in Ethics at the Stockdale
Center for Ethical Leadership, United States Naval Academy. He is
currently writing a study of the moral and legal philosophy of Han-
nah Arendt.
JESSICA T. MATHEWS was President of the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace from 1997 until 2015 and is now a Distin-
guished Fellow there. She has served in the State Department and on
the National Security Council staff in the White House.
BILL MCKIBBEN is the founder of 350.org and Schumann Distin-
guished Scholar at Middlebury. His new book is Falter: Has the Hu-
man Game Played Itself Out?
MICHELLE NIJHUIS is a Project Editor at The Atlantic and
a Contributing Editor at High Country News. Her book Beloved
Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction will be published
next spring.
JOSEPH O’NEILL teaches at Bard and is the author of six books,
including the novels The Dog and Netherland.
DA R RY L PI NCK N EY ’s latest book is Busted in New York and
Other Essays.
SOPHIE PINKHAM recently received a Ph.D. from Columbia’s
Slavic Department. She is the author of Black Square: Adventures in
Post-Soviet Ukraine.
INGRID D. ROWLAND is a Professor of History and Classics at the
University of Notre Dame’s Rome Global Gateway. Her latest books
are The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art,
cowritten with Noah Charney, and The Divine Spark of Syracuse.
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 Af-
fairs, Middle East and North Africa, from 2011 to 2013.
ADAM THIRLWELL ’s latest novel is Lurid and Cute.
COLM TÓIBÍN is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of
the Humanities at Columbia. His tenth novel, The Magician, will be
published next year.
JAMES WALTON is a writer and broadcaster. He is the editor of
The Faber Book of Smoking and the author of the literary quiz books
Who Killed Iago? and The Penguin Book Quiz: From the Very Hun-
gry Caterpillar to Ulysses.
CLAIR WILLS is the King Edward VII Professor of English Litera-
ture at the University of Cambridge.THE REAL
VIKINGS
NEIL PRICE
CHILDREN OF
ASH AND ELM
A History of the Vikings
“As vivid as it is learned,
as thrillingly cutting-
edge as it is deep rooted
in the distant past, this is
as brilliant a history of
the Vikings as one could
possibly hope to read.”—T OM HOLL A ND, author of
Dominion: How the Christian
Revolution Remade the World“Neil Price offers a spirited
account of the Vikings
from unexpected angles,
and brilliantly succeeds
in seeing the world from
their perspective rather
than from that of the people
whose lands suffered
from Viking raids.”—DAVID ABULAFIA, author of
The Boundless Sea:
A Human History of the Oceans“Elegantly conceived,
constantly surprising.... An
exemplary history that gives
a nuanced view of a society
long reduced to a few clichés.”—KIRKUSbasicbooks.com