Reviews Archives - Page 6 of 18

War and Peace in Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest

How the banality of everyday life keeps us fenced off from evil

March 25, 2024 • by Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus

In a way, our memory culture both in Germany and in Israel is an exact reversal of the reality revealed by the film. Perhaps that's why the film seems to annoy many people in Germany, who complain that it shows the "perpetrator's perspective." But memory must also be a memory ...

War and Peace in Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest

Body & Mind

Forget This Book

In The Vulnerables, Sigrid Nunez elegizes what we don’t remember

March 11, 2024 • by Chloe Cheimets

Whether we remember them or not, the details of life still drive our lingering emotions. ...

Body & Mind

The Hunger Artist

Dead Weight by Emmeline Clein conveys the simple terror and intoxicating asceticism of anorexia

March 4, 2024 • by Josephine Houman

“I watched my body shrink in the mirror,” Clein writes, “proud to discover how powerful my mind was.” I know the feeling....

Reviews

Can American Liberalism Reinvent Itself?

How obscuring the public side of public-private partnerships from FDR to Clinton rendered the liberal state politically precarious

June 27, 2023 • by Henry Tonks

The DLC, soon to anoint Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas as their chairman and presidential standard-bearer, were leaving the legacy of New Deal and postwar liberalism behind. They were, after all, “New Democrats.” Or were they? ...

Can American Liberalism Reinvent Itself?

Reviews

A World in Motion

A review of Sindya Bhanoo’s Seeking Fortune Elsewhere

May 17, 2023 • by Palak Godara

Bhanoo evokes not the spectacular scenes of people in motion that fill the news, but the ordinary and everyday events that make up lives in migration, and how the lives of Indian and Indian American women have changed over the years....

Reviews

The Little Prince and the Allure of Sadness

Is it possible to decode the mystery of the world’s most haunting children’s book?

January 24, 2023 • by Alla Anatsko

What The Morgan gets right is showing us how The Little Prince took shape from day one...

The Little Prince and the Allure of Sadness

Film & Performing Arts

Three Thousand Years of Longing—And One Hour and Forty-Eight Minutes of Regret from This Humanities Professor

The new film from George Miller doesn’t do humanities scholars any favors

October 5, 2022 • by Hannah H. Kim

The problem of Three Thousand Years of Longing isn’t just that Alithea, our unfortunate representative, is unimaginative; the plot suggests the humanities have no natural home in the twenty-first century....

Three Thousand Years of Longing—And One Hour and Forty-Eight Minutes of Regret from This Humanities Professor

Reviews

Burning Cities

The Natural History of Destruction examines the European bombing campaigns of WWII with provocative disregard for convention

July 27, 2022 • by Altair Brandon-Salmon

Part of the film’s thrill is its boldness in posing these ethical questions through sound and imagery. He makes them come alive through his fictionalizing interventions into the archival material, with the extensive foley work and the assemblage of disparate material. It is, dare I say it, entertaining. Destruction is ...

Reviews

The Bloody Autumn of Butcher’s Crossing

July 27, 2022 • by Naomi Oreskes

The following is an excerpt from an essay first appeared in Social Research: An International Quarterly. It is part of the journal’s summer 2022 issue, Books That Matter II. The most famous environmental book ever written in America is Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, published in 1962. But just two years before, ...

Reviews

My Life in Wonderland

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, Lewis Carroll

July 27, 2022 • by Wendy Doniger

My mother seemed to me, when I was a child, a combination of the Queen of Hearts and the Red Queen. She was, like the Queen of Hearts, idiosyncratic and imperious, someone with whom you could never win an argument, even when you knew you were right and she was ...

Reviews

James Joyce’s Ulysses at 100

An exhibition at the Morgan Library

July 8, 2022 • by Mitchell Abidor

One hundred years ago, James Joyce’s Ulysses was first published in Paris. This year, the Morgan Library in New York is celebrating with a remarkable exhibition, “One Hundred Years of James Joyce’s Ulysses,” on display until October 2. ...

Literature

The Best Books I Read in 2021

And why I liked them

December 15, 2021 • by Claire Potter

It’s the most wonderful time of the year—buying books for other people that you want to read yourself! And on that note, here are the best ones I read last year. All links are to IndieBound to gently nudge you to buy from independent bookstores. Fiction It’s a tie between Douglas Stuart’s ...