Fintan O’Toole
Kamala’s Moment

Kamala Harris’s campaign asks: Who is a normal American now?

Andrew Katzenstein
Fools in Love

Screwball comedies are among the most beloved films of Hollywood’s golden age, but for decades historians and critics have disagreed over what the genre is and which movies belong to it.

Marina Warner
Torrents of Magpies, Spheres of Hope

Throughout Rikki Ducornet’s prolific writing career, she has adhered to a Surrealist commitment to dream knowledge as well as a belief in literature’s ability to confront all of experience.

Lynn Hunt
In Search of Steady Reform

Fareed Zakaria seeks lessons for the present in various European revolutions, but the “liberal” English and Dutch examples he singles out as exemplary barely qualify as revolutionary at all.

82 Sentences, Each Taken from the ‘Last Statement’ of a Person Executed by the State of Texas Since 1984

a poem by
Joe Kloc

Um, I don’t know what to say. I am not as strong as I thought I was going to be, but I guess it only hurts for a little while. I sat in my cell many days wondering what my last words would be. I’m not going to shout, use profanity, or make idle threats. I am not going to play a part in my own murder, no one should have to do that. Can you hear me? This here is a tragedy. They are fixing to pump my veins with a lethal drug the American Veterinary Association won’t even allow to be used on dogs. I should not have to be here. I’m not a killer…

Free from the Archives

Eighty-five years ago today, Hitler’s armies invaded Poland; sixteen days later Stalin’s armies invaded from the east. German and Soviet forces, first as allies then as belligerents, occupied Poland for the remainder of the war.

In the Review’s July 15, 2004, issue, Simon Sebag Montefiore wrote about the long occupation, in particular “the dreadful climax of Polish history during that benighted time”: the Warsaw Uprising. From August to October of 1944, the German army slaughtered the Polish Resistance, murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians, and razed Warsaw, while the Soviet army to the east, hoping to see the Resistance weakened before their arrival, declined to assist.

Simon Sebag Montefiore
A Great Betrayal

“Polish General Władysław Anders, a former prisoner of the NKVD, was only too aware of Soviet perfidy and ruthlessness. He was not the only observer (Polish or otherwise) who understood the naiveté and desperate gamble of launching a rebellion aimed partly against the Soviets on whose support the enterprise depended for its success. Davies starts with a dedication that catches the complexity of the tragedy he describes so brilliantly: ‘To Warsaw and to all who fight tyranny regardless.’”

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