Sponsored by Library of America

Peter E. Gordon
Music and Memory

After the Holocaust, classical composers explored music’s capacity to commemorate historical trauma without permitting horrific events to take on the allure of facile beauty.

David S. Reynolds
Grant vs. the Klan

New books reconsider how Ulysses S. Grant became a forceful defender of the rights of African Americans after the Civil War.

Hannah Gold
‘Deviations and Catastrophes’

The characters in Kathleen Alcott’s stories struggle with whether to let their attachment to the past derail them in the present.

Walker Mimms
Ted Lives!

The poet and visual artist Ted Joans found a kind of mystical power in jazz and surrealism alike.

Free from the Archives

In the Review’s December 4, 2003, issue, William Dalrymple wrote about the murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl by Islamist militants in Pakistan. Dalrymple focused on two accounts: one, The Mighty Heart, by Pearl’s widow, Mariane, he found to be “a book of love, a simply written but very moving tribute to a murdered husband by a bereaved and grieving wife.” The other, by the French philosopher and scion of a lumber fortune Bernard-Henri Lévy, was “a book of hate,” “deeply flawed, riddled with major factual errors,” and “amateurish.”

William Dalrymple
Murder in Karachi

“Most ludicrous of all is the self-portrait of the aspiring James Bond figure BHL draws as he casts himself as the hero of his own spy story: ‘I reactivate the old networks from my earlier investigations,’ he tells us portentously at one point. He changes hotels every night, pretends he is writing a novel as a ‘cover,’ and believes he is being constantly followed. At times this farce comes close to being an Inspector Clouseau–like parody of Gallic self-importance, and it is difficult to read some of Lévy’s observations without hearing an echo of Peter Sellers: ‘Everywhere I go, I feel he has been—and yet I find no trace of him. With every step I sense his presence—but it is as insubstantial as shadows.’ At this point, you half expect Clouseau’s Chinese manservant, Kato, to jump out of a Karachi cupboard and practice his martial arts on the fearless Lévy.”

Special Offer
Subscribe for just $1 an issue and receive a FREE 2025 calendar

Get the deal

Politics   Literature   Arts   Ideas

You are receiving this message because you signed up
for email newsletters from The New York Review.

Update your address or preferences

View this newsletter online

The New York Review of Books
207 East 32nd Street, New York, NY 10016-6305