3Contents
4 On the Election Elaine Blair, David W. Blight, Caroline Fraser, Vivian Gornick, Michael Gorra,
Michael Greenberg, Linda Greenhouse, Hari Kunzru, Mark Lilla,
Jessica T. Mathews, Minae Mizumura, Darryl Pinckney, Thomas Powers,
Jacqueline Rose, Anna Deavere Smith, David Treuer, and Claire Vaye Watkins
18 Matthew Aucoin Music Lessons: The Collège de France Lectures by Pierre Boulez, edited and translated
from the French by Jonathan Dunsby, Jonathan Goldman, and Arnold Whittall
22 Yiyun Li The Book of Anna (Karenina’s Novel) by Carmen Boullosa, translated from the Spanish
by Samantha Schnee
26 Fintan O’Toole William Barr: Enabler in Chief
29 Sanford Schwartz Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle an exhibition the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York City, August 29–November 1, 2020
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Elizabeth Hutton Turner and Austen Barron Bailly
31 Lynn Hunt Marie Antoinette’s World: Intrigue, Infidelity, and Adultery in Versailles by Will Bashor
Marie- Antoinette: The Making of a French Queen by John Hardman
33 Francisco Cantú Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants by César
Cuauhtémoc García Hernández
The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the US-Mexico Border and Beyond
by John Washington
The Book of Rosy: A Mother’s Story of Separation at the Border by Rosayra Pablo Cruz
and Julie Schwietert Collazo
35 Ruth Margalit The Sound of Our Steps by Ronit Matalon, translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu
The One Facing Us by Ronit Matalon, translated from the Hebrew by Marsha Weinstein
And the Bride Closed the Door by Ronit Matalon, translated from the Hebrew
by Jessica Cohen
37 Anthony Grafton Magic and the Dignity of Man: Pico della Mirandola and His Oration in Modern Memory
by Brian P. Copenhaver
40 Nellie Hermann The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data,
Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care by Anne Boyer
42 Colin Grant Romance in Marseille by Claude McKay, edited and with an introduction by Gary Edward
Holcomb and William J. Maxwell
44 Maggie Doherty Battling Bella: The Protest Politics of Bella Abzug by Leandra Ruth Zarnow
Bella Bella a play written by Harvey Fierstein and directed by Kimberly Senior
45 Maureen N. McLane Poem
47 Ian Johnson The Art of Political Control in China by Daniel C. Mattingly
Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City by Fang Fang, translated from
the Chinese by Michael Berry
49 Mike Jay Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound
in Human Skin by Megan Rosenbloom
50 Ange Mlinko Poem
52 Sigrid Nunez To Be a Man by Nicole Krauss
55 Tom Scocca Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno- Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American
Conversation by Andrew Marantz
Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church
by Megan Phelps- Roper
57 Letters from John Fitzgerald, Michelle Kuo, Abie Rohrig, Carl Elliott, David B. Kanin, and Jessica T. Mathews
CONTRIBUTORS
Maya Chung, Nawal Arjini, and Willa Glickman, Editorial Assistants; Aurora Ferrer and Jose Nieves Herrera, Editorial Interns; Sylvia Lonergan, Researcher;
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nybooks.com: Matt Seaton, Editor; Lucy McKeon, Associate Editor.
The illustration on the cover is by Anders Nilsen. The drawings on pages 20 and 24 are by David Levine. The drawings on pages 8, 12, 14, and 16 are by Saul
Steinberg, © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. The paintings on pages 10, 29, and 30 are © The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight
Lawrence Foundation, Seattle/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,
May, July, October, November, and December. NYREV, Inc., 435 Hudson Street, Suite 300, New York, NY 10014-3994. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY 10001
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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
Advertising Director: Lara Frohlich AndersenWhat’s new on
nybooks.comMATTHEW AUCOIN is a composer, conductor, and 2018 Mac Arthur
Fellow. His new opera, Eurydice, will come to the Metropolitan Opera in
November 2021.
FRANCISCO CANTÚ is the author of The Line Becomes a River: Dis-
patches from the Border.
MAGGIE DOHERTY is the author of The Equivalents: A Story of Art,
Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s. She teaches writing at
Harvard.
ANTHONY GRAFTON teaches European history at Prince ton. His
most recent book is Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern
Europe.
COLIN GRANT ’s books include Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall
of Marcus Garvey and His Dream of Mother Africa and, most recently,
Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation.
NELLIE HERMANN is the author of the novels The Cure for Grief and
The Season of Migration. She is the Creative Director of the Program in
Narrative Medicine at Columbia.
LY N N H U N T is Distinguished Research Professor in History at the Uni-
versity of California at Los Angeles. Her books include Inventing Human
Rights, Writing History in the Global Era, and, most recently, History:
Why It Matters.
MIKE JAY ’s books include Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nine-
teenth Century, This Way Madness Lies: The Asylum and Beyond, and,
most recently, Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic.
IAN JOHNSON has been awarded a 2020 –2021 Public Scholar grant
from the National Endowment for the Humanities to write a book on un-
derground history in China.
YIYUN LI ’s books include The Vagrants, Where Reasons End, and Must
I Go, which was published in July. She is a winner of the 2020 Windham
Campbell Prize and teaches at Princeton.
RUTH MARGALIT ’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker and The
New York Times Magazine. She lives in Tel Aviv.
MAUREEN N. MCLANE is the author of six books of poetry and of My
Poets, a hybrid of memoir and criticism. Her More Anon: Selected Poems
will be published next year.
ANGE MLINKO is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at the
University of Florida. A new poetry collection, Venice, will be published
in 2022.
SIGRID NUNEZ ’s most recent novel, What Are You Going Through,
was published in September. Her previous novel, The Friend, received the
2018 National Book Award for fiction.
FINTAN O’TOOLE is a columnist for The Irish Times and Leonard
L. Milberg Lecturer in Irish Letters at Princeton. His most recent book is
The Politics of Pain: Postwar England and the Rise of Nationalism.
SANFORD SCHWARTZ ’s new book, On Edward Hicks, will be pub-
lished early next year.
TOM SCOCCA is the Politics Editor of Slate, the Editor of Hmm Weekly,
and the author of Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of
the Future.FATHERS
AND SONS
ADRIAN GOLDSWORTHY
PHILIP AND
ALEXANDER
Kings and Conquerors
“Philip and Alexander
is history writing
at its best.”
—BARRY STRAUSS,
author of Ten Caesars
“A brilliant account
of how father and son
changed the world,
for both good and bad.”
—VICTOR DAVIS HANSON,
author of A War Like No Other
“A thrilling read,
as successful in
meeting its ambitions
as Philip’s kingship,
as sweeping as
Alexander’s conquests.”
—TOM HOLLAND,
author of Rubicon
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