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Vivian Gornick
Surviving by Accident

With neither cynicism nor sentimentality, Marina Jarre makes us feel the hard, dull ache of the spiritual aloneness that countless lives endure, especially in the shadow of a dramatic world war.

Howard W. French
The Creation of Nigeria

Britain’s consolidation of Nigeria as a single colony has been the source of most of the major political conflicts that have roiled the country since independence.

Kevin Power
Ideal Detachments

Tracing the memories of an employee at Andy Warhol’s Factory, Nicole Flattery’s Nothing Special dramatizes a young woman’s self-scrutiny in an era defined by male looking and listening.

Fauré Second Piano Quartet

a poem by
James Schuyler

November 7, 1985 issue

On a day like this the rain comes
down in fat and random drops among
the ailanthus leaves—“the tree
of Heaven”—the leaves that on moon-
lit nights shimmer black and blade-
shaped at this third-floor window…

Joe Bucciero
A Sea of Forms

In his exuberantly colored, idiosyncratic paintings, Bob Thompson at once drew on the medium’s past and pushed its vanguard.

Judith Levine
Name the Lost!

A memorial in Green-Wood Cemetery for New Yorkers who have died of Covid-19 is intended to be ephemeral.

Free from the Archives

Ninety years ago last Thursday, Franklin Roosevelt signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act, establishing the eponymous agency, a major initiative of Roosevelt’s New Deal that today remains the largest public utility in the United States. In the Review’s May 10, 1984, issue, Jane Jacobs considered the legacy of the TVA—and of grand industrial projects around the world—and why it hadn’t succeeded in revitalizing the economy of the Tennessee River watershed region.

Jane Jacobs
Why TVA Failed

“All these economic omissions meant that, by default, the region had to depend ever more heavily upon the one great asset it did possess, the capacity to produce electric power. That wasn’t enough.”