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Today in The New York Review of Books: Willa Glickman takes the measure of Curtis Sliwa; Nitin K. Ahuja ponders the science of dying; Hillary Kelly reads the complete Tessa Hadley; David A. Bell scrutinizes the historical development of sociology; a painting by Maira Kalman; and, from the archives, Richard C. Lewontin on Michael Crichton.

Willa Glickman
The Sliwa Era

For more than four decades, Curtis Sliwa has been a bellwether for New Yorkers’ perception of urban crime—and what they think should be done about it.

Nitin K. Ahuja
Looking Behind the Veil

Can the tools of science be used to investigate the mysteries of death?

Hillary Kelly
Bedsit Metamorphoses

Tessa Hadley’s greatest subject is the unfulfilled promise of womanhood.

David A. Bell
A Baleful Legacy

Enlightenment writers who proposed ways of improving and even perfecting the human species laid the theoretical foundations of modern racism.

Maira Kalman
On Devil’s Island

Here is Alfred Dreyfus in his cell on Devil’s Island, where he was wrongfully imprisoned for over four years. I think of Dreyfus all the time because of Proust, because of Zola, because of my grandparents—because antisemitism always has been and always will be. I look at his glasses. His pocket watch. The photos of his children. His military medal! The artifacts of a life torn apart. A society torn apart. It is consoling to paint Dreyfus. An act of engagement and remembrance.

Free from the Archives

Michael Crichton was born eighty-three years ago today. During his best-selling heyday in the 1990s and early 2000s, the Review reviewed five of his books: Rising Sun, Jurassic Park, Prey, Airframe, and, in our February 29, 1996, issue, The Lost World.

Writing in his capacity as a biologist and a reader of science fiction, Richard C. Lewontin found that Crichton’s return to dinosaur mayhem privileged spectacle and gore at the expense of scientific sobriety or technological speculation.

Richard C. Lewontin
The Last of the Nasties?

“Virtually every element of the great body of speculative fiction that is meant to test a question of social structure or human nature is excluded from Crichton’s dinosaur stories, both in print and in the movie versions. For the most part they are concerned with a variety of sharp teeth and bad smells, which cause the release of large amounts of adrenaline followed by blood, sweat, and tearing flesh.”

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