A casual browser could be forgiven for feeling somewhat misled if they picked up The New York Review Abroad in hopes of a diverting beach read. That one word—abroad—with its echo of Twain’s satires, invokes a certain romance and lightness, a gap-year adventure in the great world. But these aren’t the qualities on offer in this immensely powerful and troubling collection of reportage, which includes twenty-eight pieces that span the fifty-year existence of the celebrated journal of ideas. They amount to an anti-escapist grand tour of twentieth-century horrors: Cambodia, Bosnia, Tibet, Palestine.