Daily Review

Daily Review

The Thin Red Line
By Dexter Filkins
from The New Yorker
A 2013 report on the Obama administration's reaction to the use of chemical weapons in Syria, and the costs and consequences of a military response.
How to Murder Your Life:
A Memoir
by Cat Marnell
Simon & Schuster
$26.99 List Price
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How to Murder Your Life by Cat Marnell
By Kaitlin Phillips
Apr/May 2017
Cat Marnell—the popular drug-addicted beauty editor and blogger—has written the kind of '90s-era junkie memoir that lends itself to the morbid curiosity we reserve for anyone who dies before we discover their work. Like Anna Kavan, a lifelong imbiber of heroin, Marnell published her first piece of

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Should We Fear Russia? (Global Futures)
by Dmitri Trenin
Polity
$12.95 List Price
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Fear and Loathing
By Sean Guillory
Apr/May 2017
THE LONG-STANDING ANIMOSITY and suspicion between Russia and the United States have reached such a frenzied pitch of late that the very idea of good relations has begun to feel impossible, almost ahistorical. You'd never know that, until the late-nineteenth century, the two countries were, in the

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You Say to Brick:
The Life of Louis Kahn
by Wendy Lesser
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
$30.00 List Price
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You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn by Wendy Lesser
By Julian Rose
Apr/May 2017
Readers could be forgiven for assuming that the biographer of an architect might devote her most incisive analysis to the work of her subject, particularly if that subject happens to be widely acknowledged as one of the masters of the twentieth century. The first, bracing surprise in Wendy Lesser's

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Unwanted Advances:
Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus
by Laura Kipnis
Harper
$26.99 List Price
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Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus by Laura Kipnis
By Charlotte Shane
Apr/May 2017
Melissa Goldbach accused her child's father of having sexually assaulted her during their custody handoff in a Wisconsin parking lot in 2011. When confronted with security footage of events different from those she described, she conceded that the sex had been consensual. In late 2013, North Carolinian

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Raw Material
By Adam Shatz
from London Review of Books Blog
In 1989, John Ahearn, a white artist living in the South Bronx, cast a group of local black and Latino people for a series of bronze sculptures commissioned by the city for an intersection outside a police station. As his models, he chose a drug addict, a hustler and a street kid. Ahearn thought that

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More than Magic: the Legacy of Robert Silvers
By Laura Marsh
from The New Republic
Serious writing and thought, he knew, wasn’t a hopeless but honorable pursuit; for the Review’s subscribers it was an essential part of life. An intellectual magazine with a larger, more devoted readership than many lifestyle publications—he proved that was possible.

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Southern Sublime
By Julian Lucas
from The New York Review of Books
The solitary artist on the snowy ridge of Peter Doig’s Figure in Mountain Landscape (1997–1998) couldn’t be farther from the Caribbean. Back turned, he looks over his easel toward a smattering of evergreens on a mauve hillside. It is winter, but there is hardly any white on the canvas, and the distant

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The Idiot
by Elif Batuman
Penguin Press
$27.00 List Price
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The Idiot by Elif Batuman
By Lidija Haas
Apr/May 2017
Among those who consider themselves serious readers, it's seen as infra dig to treat literature as self-help. Fiction is not there to teach us how to live or to help us imagine different ways out of our mundane personal difficulties. Nabokov is stern on this in his Lectures on Literature: "Only

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The Night Ocean
by Paul La Farge
Penguin Press
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The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge
By Albert Mobilio
Feb/Mar 2017
Like many authors—Charles Bukowski, Kathy Acker, Jack Kerouac, Ayn Rand, Philip K. Dick, to name a few—who have attracted cultish followings, H. P. Lovecraft has a biography that feels essential to and inextricable from his work's singular vision. In Lovecraft's case that biography is almost unbelievably

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