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Today in The New York Review of Books: Marci Shore goes to the thirteenth annual Kyiv Book Arsenal amid Russia’s bombing campaign on the city; Dennis Zhou looks at how Hong Kong looks; and Alexander Stille teases out the Italian Futurists’ fascism. Plus, from the archives, remembering the War of 1812.

Marci Shore
Kyiv: Death and Other Borders

In Ukraine today all ideas are sharply embodied. They pierce and startle.

Dennis Zhou
Hong Kong Plays Itself

Over the past decade, the filmmaker Chan Hau Chun has kept seeking new ways to capture how Hong Kong’s residents navigate its ambiguity and indeterminacy.

Alexander Stille
Killing the Moonlight

A recent exhibition of Futurism at Italy’s national modern art museum celebrated the movement’s techno-optimism and played down its fascist roots.

Free from the Archives

Two hundred and eleven years ago today, two years into the War of 1812, British forces captured Washington, D.C., and sacked and burned, among other buildings, the White House, the US Capitol, the Treasury, and the Department of War.

In the Review’s October 28, 2010, issue, Gordon S. Wood wrote about this “strangest war in American history”—a conflict America initiated with “scarcely” sufficient reason, a quixotic attempt to conquer Canada, a “political war” between Federalists and Republicans, a further attempt to expel American Indians from the land, and the final gasp of the British hope to retake its former colonies.

Gordon S. Wood
The War We Lost—and Won

“The Canadians ‘remember what Americans forget’—that with a population that was just a tiny fraction of that of the United States, they repelled the American invaders.”

David S. Reynolds
The Contradictory Revolution

A new history of the American Revolution “mines the speeches, laws, private writings, and newspaper articles of the Revolutionary era to discover the actual motivations, North and South, for joining the battle against Britain.”

Sean M. Carroll
A First Time for Everything

Dark energy? Inflaton fields? Eternal inflation? “It is a good time for books that take stock of where we are [in modern cosmology] and that illustrate which puzzles modern physicists choose to take seriously.”

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