Sponsored by MIT Press
Mark O’Connell
Shooting Werner Herzog
The director’s memoir, packed with unlikely incident, suggests that Herzog has always been his own greatest creation.
John Banville
Back to the State of Nature
John Gray argues in The New Leviathans that only Thomas Hobbes can explain how a liberal civilization based on tolerance came to an end, and what we have lost in abandoning it.
Kathryn Hughes
Jane Austen Gets Dressed
Sifting through the trove of well-preserved garments that belonged to Jane Austen, a new study offers a surprising new glimpse of the novelist’s life.
Ursula Lindsey
The Ghost in the Labyrinth
Inspired by the disgrace and silencing of an African novelist half a century ago, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s The Most Memory of Men both satirizes and embraces an overwrought belief in literature.
Two Poems by
Francisco Hernández
translated from the Spanish by Guillermo Manning
Scardanelli Speaks
How can I sing to you, Diotima,
without wine
and the muted piano freezing me
with gestures.
How can I describe, through their cadences,
your slow ceremonies
if I cannot drink you from my cup…
Words of the Greek
Don’t keep me in your memory.
Don’t think about me.
Your eyes are filled with
splendid bitterness.
Don’t look at me…
Free from the Archives
In the Review’s October 27, 1977, issue—ten months after Henry Kissinger left public office and two years before he advised Chilean officials on how best to undermine President Carter’s efforts to prosecute the assassins who murdered a Chilean dissident in Washington D.C.—Anthony Lewis assessed Kissinger’s legacy: “His instinctive preference for right-wing dictatorships involved the United States in their repression and corruption and helped make America the arsenal not of democracy but of authoritarianism.”
Anthony Lewis
A Matter of Character
“His cold-bloodedness left him seemingly untouched by the human disasters in Cambodia, Vietnam, and elsewhere.… In 1974 Richard Holbrooke wrote that in his actions on Vietnam Kissinger had been ‘wholly free of any constraint based on a set of moral beliefs.’ Holbrooke added that his attitudes in such tragedies as those in Biafra and Bangladesh ‘seem to indicate that he does not consider the factor of human suffering the overriding one. That, in fact, is putting it gently: Some of his former associates…consider him wholly without feeling for human suffering.’”
