3Contents
4 Elaine Blair The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein
8 Saskia Hamilton Poem
10 Jay Caspian Kang The Game Is Not a Game: The Power, Protest, and Politics of American Sports by Robert Scoop Jackson
16 Susan Tallman A History of Art History by Christopher S. Wood
The Barbarian Invasions: A Genealogy of the History of Art by Éric Michaud, translated from the
French by Nicholas Huckle
22 Anne Diebel Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump
28 Jerome Groopman Plague Years: A Doctor’s Journey Through the AIDS Crisis by Ross A. Slotten
34 Fintan O’Toole The DNC: Night and Day
38 Edwidge Danticat Mourning in Place
40 Simon Callow Life Isn’t Everything: Mike Nichols, as Remembered by 150 of His Closest Friends by Ash Carter and Sam Kashner
42 Paul Muldoon Poem
43 David A. Bell The Betrayal of the Duchess: The Scandal That Unmade the Bourbon Monarchy and Made France Modern
by Maurice Samuels
45 Janet Malcolm A Second Chance
47 Martin Filler Eileen Gray an exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, New York City
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Cloé Pitiot and Nina Stritzler- Levine
Eileen Gray: Her Life and Work by Peter Adam
Eileen Gray: E .1027, 1926 –1929 by Wilfried Wang, Peter Adam, and others
Eileen Gray: A House Under the Sun by Charlotte Malterre- Barthes and Zosia DzierĪawska
In Conversation with Eileen Gray a documentary film by Michael Pitiot
Gray Matters a documentary film by Marco Orsini
The Price of Desire a film by Mary McGuckian
51 Kathryn Hughes Radical Words worth: The Poet Who Changed the World by Jonathan Bate
The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Words worths, and Their Year of Marvels by Adam Nicolson, with woodcuts
and paintings by Tom Hammick
William Words worth: A Life, Second Edition by Stephen Gill
54 Hari Kunzru The Wages of Whiteness
57 Larry Wolff Listening to China : Sound and the Sino- Western Encounter, 1770 –1839 by Thomas Irvine
59 Ruth Franklin Strange Hotel by Eimear McBride
61 Peter Brown The Tragedy of Empire: From Constantine to the Destruction of Roman Italy by Michael Kulikowski
Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity by Walter Scheidel
King and Emperor: A New Life of Charlemagne by Janet L. Nelson
63 Adam Kirsch Fifty- Two Stories: 1883 –1898 by Anton Chekhov, translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear
and Larissa Volokhonsky
65 Leah Price Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe by Anthony Grafton
When Novels Were Books by Jordan Alexander Stein
67 José Manuel Prieto North of Havana : The Untold Story of Dirty Politics, Secret Diplomacy, and the Trial of the Cuban Five by Martin Garbus
71 Robert Kuttner Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World by Branko Milanovic
78 Sarah Boxer Making Comics by Lynda Barry
80 David Shulman Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata by Karthika Naïr
82 Ed Vulliamy Will Covid Change Italy?
85 Letters from Andrew Altschul, Esther Allen, John M. Ackerman, Enrique Krauze, Eric Reeves, and Steven R. Weissman
CONTRIBUTORS
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On the cover: William Kentridge, A Natural History of the Studio (Where Shall We Place our Hope?), 2020 (© William Kentridge/Marian Goodman Gallery, New
York, London, and Paris/Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg). The drawing on page 63 is by David Levine.
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nybooks.com /daily Plus: Christopher Benfey’s dance career, Emily Raboteau’s conversation with Chloë Bass, and more ...SAVING GRACESDAVID A. BELL is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the History
Department at Princeton. His book Men on Horseback: The Power of Cha-
risma in the Age of Revolutions has just been published.
ELAINE BLAIR is a regular contributor to The New York Review.
SARAH BOXER is a contributing writer for The Atlantic and the author of
two cartoon novels, In the Floyd Archives: A Psycho- Bestiary and its sequel,
Mother May I?: A Post-Floydian Folly.
PETER BROWN is the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History
Emeritus at Princeton. His books include Augustine of Hippo: A Biog-
raphy and, most recently, Treasure in Heaven: The Holy Poor in Early
Christianity.
SIMON CALLOW is an English actor and director who has written about
Orson Welles, Charles Dickens, Charles Laughton, and Oscar Wilde. His
latest book, with Derry Moore, is London’s Great Theatres.
EDWIDGE DANTICAT ’s most recent book is Everything Inside: Stories.
ANNE DIEBEL works as a private investigator with QRI in New York City.
MARTIN FILLER ’s article “The Dark Lady of High Tech,” which ap-
peared in The New York Times Magazine (January 27, 1980), was one of the
first critical reappraisals of Eileen Gray’s career to appear in the popular
press after her death.
RUTH FRANKLIN ’s most recent book, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted
Life, won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography.
JEROME GROOPMAN is the Recanati Professor of Medicine at Har-
vard Medical School, Chief of Experimental Medicine at the Beth Israel
Deaconess Medical Center, and a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the
co author, with Pamela Hartzband, of Your Medical Mind: How to Decide
What Is Right for You.
SASKIA HAMILTON is the author of three books of poetry, including
Corridor. She is the editor, most recently, of The Dolphin Letters, 1970 –
1979 : Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle. She teaches at
Barnard.
KATHRYN HUGHES is Professor of Life Writing at the University of East
Anglia. Her books include Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age
of Decorum, G eorge E liot : T he L a s t Vi c tor i a n, and The Short Life and Long
Times of Mrs. Beeton.
JAY CASPIAN KANG is a Writer-at-Large for The New York Times Mag-
azine and the author of the forthcoming book The Loneliest Americans.
ADAM KIRSCH is an Editor at The Wall Street Journal’s weekend Review
section and the author, most recently, of the essay collection Who Wants to
Be a Jewish Writer?
HARI KUNZRU ’s latest novel, Red Pill, and his new podcast, Into the
Zone, have just been released.
ROBERT KUTTNER is a Cofounder and Coeditor of The American
Prospect and a Professor at Brandeis’s Heller School. His latest book is The
Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy.
JANET MALCOLM ’s latest book is Nobody’s Looking at You, a collection
of essays.
PAUL MULDOON is the Howard G. B. Clark University Professor at
Princeton. His fourteenth collection of poems, Howdie-Skelp, will be pub-
lished in 2021.
FINTAN O’TOOLE is a columnist for The Irish Times and Leonard L. Mil-
berg Lecturer in Irish Letters at Princeton. His most recent book is The
Politics of Pain: Postwar England and the Rise of Nationalism.
LEAH PRICE ’s books include What We Talk About When We Talk About
Books, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, and The Anthol-
ogy and the Rise of the Novel. She directs the Rutgers Initiative for the Book.
JOSÉ MANUEL PRIETO is a novelist, translator, and Associate Profes-
sor at Seton Hall. His latest book is La Revolución Cubana Explicada a Los
Ta xi sta s. REGINA GALASSO is an Associate Professor in the Spanish
and Portuguese Studies Program and Director of the Translation Center at
the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
DAVID SHULMAN ’s Freedom and Despair: Notes from the South Hebron
Hills was published in 2018. He is Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem and was awarded the Israel Prize for Religious Studies in 2016.
SUSAN TALLMAN is an art historian living in Chicago and Berlin. She
is currently working on a book about the prints of Kerry James Marshall.
ED VULLIAMY has been a reporter for The Guardian and The Observer
for over thirty years. His most recent book is Louder Than Bombs: A Life
with Music, War, and Peace.
LARRY WOLFF is the Silver Professor of History at NYU, the Executive
Director of the Remarque Institute at NYU, the Codirector of NYU Flor-
ence, and the author of The Singing Turk: Ottoman Power and Operatic
Emotions on the European Stage from the Siege of Vienna to the Age of
Napoleon.SISTER
SOLDIERS
MARTHA S. JONES
VANGUARD
How Black Women Broke
Barriers, Won the Vote, and
Insisted on Equality for All“Martha Jones is the political
historian of African American women.
And this book is the commanding
history of the remarkable struggle
of African American women for
political power. All Americans
would be better off learning this
history and grasping just how much
we owe equality’s vanguard.”
—IBRAM X. KENDI,
author of How to Be an Antiracist“Bold, ambitious, and beautifully
crafted, Vanguard represents
more than two hundred years of
Black women’s political history.
From Jarena Lee to Stacey Abrams,
Martha S. Jones reminds her
readers that Black women stand as
America’s original feminists.”
—ERICA ARMSTRONG DUNBAR,
author of Never Caught“You cannot tell the history of modern
democracy without the history of
Black women, and vibrating through
Martha Jones’s prose, argument,
and evidence is analysis that takes
Black women seriously. Vanguard
brilliantly lays bare how a full
accounting of black women
as powerful political actors is
both past and prologue.”
—TRESSIE McMILLAN COTTOM,
author of Thick: And Other Essaysbasicbooks.com