Sometimes you find books that are sharply reported, incisive, edifying—and that you wish you could just file away in a hermetically sealed memory hole. That’s the dilemma posed by Amos Kamil and Sean Elder’s Great Is the Truth: Secrecy, Scandal, and the Quest for Justice at the Horace Mann School (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26). I am not a particularly soft person—in fact, I am rather callous—but this chronicle of an awful, decades-long conspiracy to cover up massive trauma being inflicted on defenseless kids is all but begging me to tune it out. It’s like Andrea Dworkin doing a dramatic

The art historian Robert Farris Thompson taught us that African art is an “art of motion.” Kongo: Power and Majesty (Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University Press, $65) demonstrates that the most compelling objects of central African art are not static, timeless creations—as they may seem in museum displays—but urgent responses by a community under siege. This exhibition catalogue, spanning the late-fifteenth to the early-twentieth centuries, documents much of what remains of precolonial artworks from the Kongo kingdoms, many being gifts by African royalty to their European counterparts.

Elizabeth Taylor is as fabulous and as undead as ever. Just this month on Page Six the megastar yielded two fresh items of vintage gossip. On Turner Classic Movies, she sizzled away as Maggie the Cat. And in “Becoming Jewish: Warhol’s Liz and Marilyn,” the Jewish Museum in New York kvells: Between wedding Mike Todd in 1957 and Eddie Fisher in 1959, Elizabeth converted and remained a lifelong Jew. It seems that every tribe is making a landgrab to claim Elizabeth (she hated being called “Liz”) as one of their own, and who wouldn’t want to identify with the legendary beauty, sassy dame, and

Stars have always provided direction for long-range travelers, whether by land or by sea. Until relatively recently, even modern ships used them to navigate. The stars have inspired entire civilizations, technologies, and literatures; conversely, peoples and cultures have been destroyed by their guidance. How else would Christopher Columbus have reached the Americas? Perhaps appropriately, given its title, Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s second book of poems, Heaven, makes numerous references to the day and night sky: “ . . . that star-beleaguered dome, that void, / Where giants moved against the

Few living philosophers’ names elicit quite as much public recognition and scorn as that of the utilitarian ethicist Peter Singer, who has argued in support of animal liberation, euthanasia, and even, in some extreme cases, infanticide. In the 1990s, when Singer’s mother, Cora, fell victim to Alzheimer’s, it was with almost vituperative glee that critics seized on the fact that Singer and his siblings spent huge amounts of money on her care, insinuating that he’d betrayed his own morality-by-the-numbers arguments.

One of the foremost proponents of effective altruism, Singer has long pointed

This autumn has brought two novels by Eka Kurniawan—a young Indonesian writer, born in 1975—to English-speaking readers. It’s a lucky and too-rare debut for an international writer: having two books appear from different translators and publishers lends an instant diversity to our initial encounter with his work. For many US readers, Kurniawan’s novels may provide their first experience of Indonesian literature. Pramoedya Ananta Toer is perhaps the best-known Indonesian writer here; in an introduction to Man Tiger, Benedict Anderson discusses Kurniawan’s own book on Pramoedya and his complicated