{"title":"New York Review Books","description":"New York Review Books publishes new fiction, narrative nonfiction, and essays by literary mavericks and original thinkers.","products":[{"product_id":"after-the-tall-timber-renata-adler","title":"After the Tall Timber","description":"\u003cp\u003eWhat is really going on here? For decades Renata Adler has been asking and answering this question with unmatched urgency. In her essays and long-form journalism, she has captured the cultural zeitgeist, distrusted the accepted wisdom, and written stories that would otherwise go untold. As a staff writer at \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e from 1963 to 2001, Adler reported on civil rights from Selma, Alabama; on the war in Biafra, the Six-Day War, and the Vietnam War; on the Nixon impeachment inquiry and Congress; on cultural life in Cuba. She has also written about cultural matters in the United States, films (as chief film critic for \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e), books, politics, television, and pop music. Like many journalists, she has put herself in harm’s way in order to give us the news, not the “news” we have become accustomed to—celebrity journalism, conventional wisdom, received ideas—but the actual story, an account unfettered by ideology or consensus. She has been unafraid to speak up when too many other writers have joined the pack. 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In doing so, she unravels the tangled narratives that pass for the resolution of scandal and finds the threads that others miss, the ones that explain what really is going on here—from the Watergate scandal, to the “preposterous” Kenneth Starr report submitted to the House during the Clinton impeachment inquiry, to the plagiarism and fabrication scandal of the former \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e reporter Jayson Blair. And she writes extensively about the Supreme Court and the power of its rulings, including its fateful decision in Bush v. 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Drawing on the work of scholars, the memoirs of civil rights workers, and the speeches and writings of black leaders like Martin Luther King and Stokely Carmichael, Andrew Young and John Lewis, Pinckney traces the disagreements among blacks about the best strategies for achieving equality in American society as well as the ways in which they gradually came to create the Democratic voting bloc that contributed to the election of the first black president.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eInterspersed through the narrative are Pinckney's own memories of growing up during the civil rights era and the reactions of his parents to the changes taking place in American society. He concludes with an examination of ongoing efforts by Republicans to suppress the black vote, with particular attention to the Supreme Court's recent decision striking down part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAlso included here is Pinckney's essay \"What Black Means Now,\" on the history of the black middle class, stereotypes about blacks and crime, and contemporary debates about \"post-blackness.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"display: none;\"\u003eDarryl Pinckney\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":1094927969,"sku":"9781590177693","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/products\/Blackballed.jpg?v=1528391223"},{"product_id":"chinas-new-rulers-paperback","title":"China's New Rulers","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eNow in paperback\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAt the Chinese Communist Party's 16th Congress in November 2002, a group of new leaders took over the world's most populous country. 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Their work carries the weight of scientific authority and attracts widespread public attention, but it is often based on what the renowned evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin identifies as a highly reductive misconception: \"the pervasive error that confuses the genetic state of an organism with its total physical and psychic nature as a human being.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn these nine essays covering the history of modern biology from Darwin to Dolly the sheep, all of which were originally published in \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e, Lewontin combines sharp criticisms of overreaching scientific claims with lucid expositions of the exact state of current scientific knowledge—not only what we do know, but what we don't and maybe won't anytime soon. Among the subjects he discusses are heredity and natural selection, evolutionary psychology and altruism, nineteenth-century naturalist novels, sex surveys, cloning, and the Human Genome Project. In each case he casts an ever-vigilant and deflationary eye on the temptation to look to biology for explanations of everything we want to know about our physical, mental, and social lives.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese essays—several of them updated with epilogues that take account of scientific developments since they were first written—are an indispensable guide to the most controversial issues in the life sciences today.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":1094928177,"sku":"9780940322950","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/products\/productimage-picture-it-aint-necessarily-so-75_2f824690-b3bd-4506-a25a-ec7665c71afb.jpeg?v=1528391219"},{"product_id":"makers-of-modern-architecture","title":"Makers of Modern Architecture, Volume I","description":"\u003cp\u003eEveryone knows what modern architecture looks like, but few understand how this revolutionary new form of building emerged little more than a century ago or what its aesthetic, social, even spiritual aspirations were. Through his illuminating studies of the leading men and women who forever changed our built environment, veteran architecture critic Martin Filler offers fresh insights into this unprecedented cultural transformation. From Louis Sullivan, father of the skyscraper, to Frank Gehry, magician of the post-millennial museum, Filler emphasizes how their force of personality has had a decisive effect on everything from how we inhabit our homes to how we shape our cities.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhy was the sudden shift in architectural fashion that wrecked the career of the Scottish designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh not enough to destroy the indomitable spirit of Frank Lloyd Wright, who rose from adversity to become America's greatest architect? Why was Philip Johnson, \"dean of American architecture\" during the 1980s, so haunted by the superior talent of his less-fortunate contemporary Louis Kahn that he could barely utter his name even at the peak of his own success? 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Exemplifying his belief that an architect's personality and character have a direct and profound bearing on this most public and social of art forms, Filler's lively melding of biographical and aesthetic perspectives gives these accessible yet scrupulously researched interpretations a rare human immediacy. From profiles of such universally admired masters as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier to emerging figures including Michael Arad, creator of New York City's National September 11 Memorial, and the international design collaborative Snohetta, Filler's shifting focus remains consistently trained on the enduring values of great architecture. His panoramic vision encompasses the historically inspired Gilded Age urbanism of the celebrated New York bon vivant Stanford White as well as the expressive collages of ancient and modern elements orchestrated by the reclusive Venetian intellectual Carlo Scarpa. 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Dwight Macdonald, by contrast, was a haute-WASP anarchist and aesthete driven by an exuberant moral commitment, in a time of cautious mediocrity, to doing the right thing. Alfred Kazin, from a poor Jewish emigre background, remained an outsider at the center of literary New York, driven both to escape from and do justice to the deepest meanings of his Jewish heritage.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePerhaps most intriguing are the two poets, W.H. Auden and Frank O'Hara. Early in his career, Auden was tempted to don the mantle of the poet as prophet, but after his move from England to America he lived and wrote in a spirit of modesty and charity born out of a deeply idiosyncratic understanding of Christianity. O'Hara, tireless partygoer and pioneering curator at MoMA, wrote much of his poetry for private occasions. 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Along the way he offers insights into the novel's prodigious development as a form for depicting and interpreting society in the nineteenth century and its diminishing capacity to do the same in the twentieth—a task that, in his view, passed to the creative energies of the early cinema.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs a child trying to read, I had felt that two worlds separated me from the books that were offered to me at school and in the libraries: the childhood world of our remembered India, and the more colonial world of our city. ... What I didn't know, even after I had written my early books of fiction ... was that those two spheres of darkness had become my subject. Fiction, working its mysteries, by indirections finding directions out, had led me to my subject. But it couldn't take me all the way. —V.S. Naipaul, from \u003ci\u003eReading \u0026amp; Writing\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":1094928437,"sku":"9780940322387","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/products\/ReadingWriting.jpg?v=1528391216"},{"product_id":"the-age-of-conversation-paperback","title":"The Age of Conversation","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, between the reign of Louis XIII and the Revolution, the French nobility of the \u003ci\u003eancien regime\u003c\/i\u003e turned their energies to developing the art of sociability, a refined code of manners, and an ideal of gallant, spirited conversation that became a model for social and intellectual life.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBenedetta Craveri's history of this leisured, worldly society begins in the 1620s with the celebrated Blue Room of the Marquise de Rambouillet, one of the first in a long series of women who resided over conversations among nobles, writers, prelates, and diplomats. The women Craveri profiles played a significant part in the development of new literary forms such as the novel and the maxim, the codification of language, taste, and behavior, and debates over religion, philosophy, and science. Some, like Madame de Lafayette and Madame de Stael, were gifted writers themselves. Some were involved in the major events of their time, like the Grande Mademoiselle and the Duchesse de Longueville during the Fronde rebellion. Later, the Marquise de Lambert, Madame de Tencin, and Julie de Lespinasse opened their salons to intellectuals such as Fontenelle, Montesquieu, d'Alembert, and Diderot, thus helping to spread the ideas of the Enlightenment.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn demonstrating the diversity of these women's accomplishments, Benedetta Craveri brings to life this brilliant, vanished culture that perfected the pleasure of living. In her pages, the world of La Rochefoucauld, Louis XIV, and Voltaire, of Jansenism, preciosity, Mlle de Scudery's literary portraits, and Mme de Sevigne's letters, appears in all its fascinating complexity.\u003cspan style=\"display: none;\"\u003e by Benedetta Craveri, translated by Teresa Waugh \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":1094928465,"sku":"9781590172148","price":24.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/products\/The-Age-of-Conversation.jpg?v=1528391216"},{"product_id":"the-company-they-kept-volume-two","title":"The Company They Kept, Volume Two","description":"\u003cp\u003eTwenty-seven memoirs of transforming personal and intellectual relationships among writers and artists from the pages of \u003cem\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/em\u003e. Many of the contributors to \u003cem\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/em\u003e have written about deep and abiding relationships— both personal and intellectual—with fellow poets, writers, and artists. \u003ci\u003eThe Company They Kept, Volume II\u003c\/i\u003e is a collection of twenty-seven accounts of these friendships that were always stimulating, often inspiring, and sometimes vexing (as Robert Lowell writes about John Berryman: \"Hyperenthusiasms made him a hot friend, and could also make him wearing to friends—one of his dearest, Delmore Schwartz, used to say no one had John's loyalty, but you liked him to live in another city\"). There are historic moments—Isaiah Berlin's conversations with Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, Hector Bianciotti's account of the death of Borges—as well as lighthearted ones—Bruce Chatwin's hilarious drunken evening with George Ortiz, and Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale's subway ride with George Balanchine (\"...like a mythical guide he made the dingy steps, the sinister train, the underground arrival at the State Theater a Tiepoloesque flight into heaven\").\u003cbr\u003e Many of the portraits include vivid images that otherwise would have been lost forever: the poet Osip Mandelstam, whom Anna Akhmatova first glimpsed as \"a thin young boy with a twig of lily-of-the-valley in his button-hole\"; the young Gore Vidal in Dawn Powell's living room suddenly realizing \"this is a menage a trois in Greenwich Village. My martini runs over\"; twelve-year-old aspiring cartoonist John Updike writing Saul Steinberg to ask for a cartoon (Steinberg sent one, and another, nearly fifty years later, when Updike turned sixty). Each portrait is written with feeling and fullness of heart. A sense of the intimacy and verve of the memoirs is captured in Darryl Pinckney's description of the premises of \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e itself, from whose offices these writings were edited and in whose pages they first appeared: \"Books were streaking across the ocean and galleys were zooming in from the West Coast or the East Side, nearly all by messenger, by overnight delivery, because everything was urgent, every contributor was at the center of a drama called his or her 'piece.' Incredible battles went on during press week as indescribable things rotted in the office refrigerator. Someone's laughter in the typesetting studio would provoke to fury someone doing layout next door and the storms, the slammed doors. It was a family.\"\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e, with an international circulation of more than 130,000, began during New York's 1963 newspaper strike when the present editor, Robert B. Silvers, and founding co-editor Barbara Epstein, along with Jason Epstein, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Robert Lowell, decided to create a new kind of magazine—one in which the most interesting and qualified minds would discuss current books and issues in depth. Since then, every two weeks, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review\u003c\/i\u003e has continued to be the journal where the most important issues in American life, culture, and politics are discussed by writers who are themselves a major force in world literature and thought. \"The secret of its success, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e wrote, \"is this: Its editors' ability to get remarkable writers and thinkers, many of them specialists in their fields, to write lucidly for lay readers on an enormous range of complex, scholarly and newly emerging subjects, issues and ideas.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnna Akhmatova on Osip Mandelstam\u003cbr\u003eVirgil Thomson on Gertrude Stein\u003cbr\u003eJonathan Miller on Lenny Bruce\u003cbr\u003eRobert Lowell on John Berryman\u003cbr\u003eStephen Spender on W. H. Auden\u003cbr\u003eMary McCarthy on Hannah Arendt\u003cbr\u003eJohn Thompson on Robert Lowell\u003cbr\u003eJames Merrill on Elizabeth Bishop\u003cbr\u003eIsaiah Berlin on Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova\u003cbr\u003eJoseph Brodsky on Nadezhda Mandelstam\u003cbr\u003eArthur Gold and Robert Fizdale on George Balanchine\u003cbr\u003eJohn Richardson on Douglas Cooper\u003cbr\u003eHector Bianciotti on Jorge Luis Borges\u003cbr\u003eGore Vidal on Dawn Powell\u003cbr\u003eBruce Chatwin on George Ortiz\u003cbr\u003ePhilip Roth on Ivan Klima\u003cbr\u003eElena Bonner on Andrei Sakharov\u003cbr\u003eElizabeth Hardwick on Murray Kempton\u003cbr\u003eAileen Kelly on Isaiah Berlin\u003cbr\u003eMurray Kempton on Frank Sinatra\u003cbr\u003eAdam Michnik on Zbigniew Herbert\u003cbr\u003eJohn Updike on Saul Steinberg\u003cbr\u003eJonathan Mirsky on Noel Annan\u003cbr\u003eAlison Lurie on Edward Gorey\u003cbr\u003eIan Buruma on John Schlesinger\u003cbr\u003eDarryl Pinckney on Elizabeth Hardwick\u003cbr\u003eColin Thubron on Patrick Leigh Fermor\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eAlso see \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.nyrb.com\/products\/the-company-they-kept\" title=\"The Company They Kept\"\u003eThe Company They Kept, Volume 1\u003c\/a\u003e, for more writers and their remarkable friendships.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":1094928517,"sku":"9781590174876","price":22.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/products\/The-Company-They-Kept-Vol-II.jpg?v=1528391214"},{"product_id":"the-house-of-twenty-thousand-books","title":"The House of Twenty Thousand Books","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.nyrb.com\/collections\/sasha-abramsky\/products\/the-house-of-twenty-thousand-books-1?variant=35276349767\"\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe House of Twenty Thousand Books\u003c\/i\u003e is the story of Chimen Abramsky, an extraordinary polymath and bibliophile who amassed a vast collection of socialist literature and Jewish history. For more than fifty years Chimen and his wife, Miriam, hosted epic gatherings in their house of books that brought together many of the age’s greatest thinkers.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe atheist son of one of the century’s most important rabbis, Chimen was born in 1916 near Minsk, spent his early teenage years in Moscow while his father served time in a Siberian labor camp for religious proselytizing, and then immigrated to London, where he discovered the writings of Karl Marx and became involved in left-wing politics. He briefly attended the newly established Hebrew University in Jerusalem, until World War II interrupted his studies. Back in England, he married, and for many years he and Miriam ran a respected Jewish bookshop in London’s East End. When the Nazis invaded Russia in June 1941, Chimen joined the Communist Party, becoming a leading figure in the party’s National Jewish Committee. He remained a member until 1958, when, shockingly late in the day, he finally acknowledged the atrocities committed by Stalin. In middle age, Chimen reinvented himself once more, this time as a liberal thinker, humanist, professor, and manuscripts’ expert for Sotheby’s auction house.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eJournalist Sasha Abramsky re-creates here a lost world, bringing to life the people, the books, and the ideas that filled his grandparents’ house, from gatherings that included Eric Hobsbawm and Isaiah Berlin to books with Marx’s handwritten notes, William Morris manuscripts and woodcuts, an early sixteenth-century Bomberg Bible, and a first edition of Descartes’s Meditations. \u003ci\u003eThe House of Twenty Thousand Books\u003c\/i\u003e is a wondrous journey through our times, from the vanished worlds of Eastern European Jewry to the cacophonous politics of modernity.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe House of Twenty Thousand Books\u003c\/i\u003e includes 43 photos.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"display: none;\"\u003esasha abramsky\u003c\/span\u003e \u003cem\u003eThe paperback edition includes a new preface by the author. \u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ciframe src=\"\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/124971603\" webkitallowfullscreen=\"\" mozallowfullscreen=\"\" allowfullscreen=\"\" width=\"100%\" height=\"400\" frameborder=\"0\"\u003e\u003c\/iframe\u003e","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":1094928649,"sku":"9781590178881","price":27.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/products\/House20k.png?v=1528391214"},{"product_id":"the-mystery-of-consciousness","title":"The Mystery of Consciousness","description":"\u003cp\u003eIt has long been one of the most fundamental problems of philosophy, and it is now, John Searle writes, \"the most important problem in the biological sciences\": What is consciousness? Is my inner awareness of myself something separate from my body?\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn what began as a series of essays in \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e, John Searle evaluates the positions on consciousness of such well-known scientists and philosophers as Francis Crick, Gerald Edelman, Roger Penrose, Daniel Dennett, David Chalmers, and Israel Rosenfield. He challenges claims that the mind works like a computer, and that brain functions can be reproduced by computer programs. With a sharp eye for confusion and contradiction, he points out which avenues of current research are most likely to come up with a biological examination of how conscious states are caused by the brain.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOnly when we understand how the brain works will we solve the mystery of consciousness, and only then will we begin to understand issues ranging from artificial intelligence to our very nature as human beings.\u003cspan style=\"display: none;\"\u003e by John R. Searle \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":1094928689,"sku":"9780940322066","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/products\/MysteryOfConsciousness.jpg?v=1528391213"},{"product_id":"the-new-york-review-abroad","title":"The New York Review Abroad","description":"\u003cp\u003eOver the past fifty years, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e has covered virtually every international war, revolution, and event of consequence by dispatching the world's most brilliant writers to send back eyewitness accounts. \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review Abroad\u003c\/i\u003e not only brings together twenty-seven of the most riveting of these pieces but includes prologues that update and reassess the political situation they describe.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAmong the pieces included are: Susan Sontag's personal narrative of staging \u003ci\u003eWaiting for Godot\u003c\/i\u003e in war-torn Sarajevo; V.S. Naipaul's visit to Argentina, which includes a mesmerizing account of the cult of Evita; Ryszard Kapuscinski's terrifying description of being set on fire while running roadblocks in Nigeria; a fellow dissident's chilling narrative of Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner's persecution and tormented daily life under a totalitarian regime; Caroline Blackwood's coverage of the gravediggers' strike in Liverpool in 1979, a mini-masterpiece of \u003ci\u003enoir\u003c\/i\u003e; and Timothy Garton Ash's minute-by-minute account from the Magic Lantern theater in Prague in 1989, where the subterranean stage, auditorium, and dressing rooms had become the headquarters of the revolution.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAmong other writers whose \u003ci\u003eNew York Review\u003c\/i\u003e articles appear are Tim Judah, Amos Elon, William Shawcross, Rosemary Dinnage, Ian Buruma, and Nadine Gordimer.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eJoan Didion's famous piece on El Salvador is included, as well as the communique from the dissident Polish priest Jerzy Popieluszko, which was smuggled out of Poland. Its devastating last line is \"I am prepared for anything.\" By the time the piece appeared in December 1984, Father Popieluszko had been abducted and murdered by Polish security forces.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe book, which is arranged chronologically, starts with two stellar pieces from the Sixties: Mary McCarthy's report from Vietnam at the height of the war, followed by Stephen Spender's report from the barricades during the student uprising in Paris in 1968. The pieces crisscross South America and Africa, Tibet and China, the former Soviet Union, Haiti and Cuba, and conclude with a stunning group of dispatches from the Middle East: Mark Danner in Baghdad, Jonathan Freedland in Hebron, Yasmine El Rashidi in Egypt, Christopher de Bellaigue in Turkey, and a chilling account of Palestinian suicide bombers by Avishai Margalit.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA tour de force of vivid and enlightening writing from the front lines, this volume is indeed the first rough draft of the history of the past fifty years.\u003cspan style=\"display: none;\"\u003e edited by Robert B. Silvers, with prologues by Ian Buruma \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":1094928697,"sku":"9781590176313","price":30.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/products\/The-New-York-Review-Abroad.jpg?v=1528391213"},{"product_id":"the-scientist-as-rebel","title":"The Scientist as Rebel","description":"\u003cp\u003eFrom Galileo to today's amateur astronomers, scientists have been rebels, writes Freeman Dyson. Like artists and poets, they are free spirits who resist the restrictions their cultures impose on them. In their pursuit of Nature's truths, they are guided as much by imagination as by reason, and their greatest theories have the uniqueness and beauty of great works of art.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDyson argues that the best way to understand science is by understanding those who practice it. He tells stories of scientists at work, ranging from Isaac Newton's absorption in physics, alchemy, theology, and politics, to Ernest Rutherford's discovery of the structure of the atom, to Albert Einstein's stubborn hostility to the idea of black holes. His descriptions of brilliant physicists like Edward Teller and Richard Feynman are enlivened by his own reminiscences of them. He looks with a skeptical eye at fashionable scientific fads and fantasies, and speculates on the future of climate prediction, genetic engineering, the colonization of space, and the possibility that paranormal phenomena may exist yet not be scientifically verifiable.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDyson also looks beyond particular scientific questions to reflect on broader philosophical issues, such as the limits of reductionism, the morality of strategic bombing and nuclear weapons, the preservation of the environment, and the relationship between science and religion. These essays, by a distinguished physicist who is also a lovely writer, offer informed insights into the history of science and fresh perspectives on contentious current debates about science, ethics, and faith.\u003cspan style=\"display: none;\"\u003eFreeman Dyson\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":1251706634247,"sku":"9781590172940","price":22.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/products\/thescientistasrebel.jpg?v=1528391212"},{"product_id":"the-struggle-for-iran","title":"The Struggle for Iran","description":"\u003cp\u003eWhen Christopher de Bellaigue first visited Iran in 1999, he found it irresistably alive: under the leadership of President Mohammad Khatami, Islamic revolutionary rule was loosening and the prospects for democratic pluralism seemed bright. But over the remaining six years of Khatami's presidency, de Bellaigue watched as the conservative religious establishment reasserted its power and the hopes of reform slowly died. The country seemed to turn its back on all that Khatami stood for when it elected an unsophisticated Islamist ideologue, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to succeed him in 2005.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs the optimism of the reform movement was fading, international tensions over Iran's nuclear program were rising. George W. Bush included Iran in the \"axis of evil,\" depicting it as a malign theocracy determined to acquire nuclear weapons and threaten Israel. Yet de Bellaigue's accounts of the nuclear negotiations make clear that the West's opposition to Iranian nuclear ambitions has helped both to empower those who oppose democratic reform and perhaps even to convince Iran it needs nuclear weapons for self-defense.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBeyond the high political drama, de Bellaigue, a long-term resident of Tehran and a fluent Persian speaker, gives a sense of the complexities of Iranian culture and society through striking portraits of Iranians going about their daily lives—reading the poetry of Rumi, looking at modern art, making films under the threat of censorship, trying to get by despite domestic turmoil and military threats. His keen analyses of Iran's politics and its people offer fascinating insights into a often misunderstood nation that poses some of the most challenging problems facing the world today.\u003cspan style=\"display: none;\"\u003eChristopher de Bellaigue\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":1094928757,"sku":"9781590172384","price":22.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/products\/The-Struggle-for-Iran.jpg?v=1528391212"},{"product_id":"theater-of-cruelty","title":"Theater of Cruelty","description":"\u003cp\u003eIan Buruma is fascinated, he writes, \"by what makes the human species behave atrociously.\" In \u003cem\u003eTheater of Cruelty\u003c\/em\u003e the acclaimed author of \u003cem\u003eThe Wages of Guilt\u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eYear Zero: A History of 1945\u003c\/em\u003e once again turns to World War II to explore that question—to the Nazi occupation of Paris, the Allied bombing of German cities, the international controversies over Anne Frank's diaries, Japan's militarist intellectuals and its kamikaze pilots. One way that people respond to power and cruelty, Buruma argues, is through art, and the art that most interests him reveals the dark impulses beneath the veneer of civilized behavior. This is what draws him to German and Japanese artists such as Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Mishima Yukio, and Yokoo Tadanori, as well as to filmmakers such as Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Kurosawa Kiyoshi, and Hans-Juergen Syberberg. All were affected by fascism and its terrible consequences; all \"looked into the abyss and made art of what they saw.\" Whether he is writing in this wide-ranging collection about war, artists, or film—or about David Bowie's music, R. Crumb's drawings, the Palestinians of the West Bank, or Asian theme parks—Ian Buruma brings sympathetic historical insight and shrewd aesthetic judgment to understanding the diverse ways that people deal with violence and cruelty in life and in art. \u003ci\u003eTheater of Cruelty\u003c\/i\u003e includes eight pages of color and black \u0026amp; white images.\u003cspan style=\"display: none;\"\u003eIan Buruma\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":1094928789,"sku":"9781590177778","price":29.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/products\/Theater-of-Cruelty.jpg?v=1528391211"},{"product_id":"waiting-for-the-barbarians","title":"Waiting for the Barbarians","description":"\u003cp\u003eOver the past decade and a half, Daniel Mendelsohn's reviews for \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e have earned him a reputation as \"one of the greatest critics of our time\" (\u003ci\u003ePoets \u0026amp; Writers\u003c\/i\u003e). In \u003ci\u003eWaiting for the Barbarians\u003c\/i\u003e, he brings together twenty-four of his recent essays—each one glinting with \"verve and sparkle,\" \"acumen and passion\"—on a wide range of subjects, from \u003ci\u003eAvatar\u003c\/i\u003e to the poems of Arthur Rimbaud, from our inexhaustible fascination with the \u003ci\u003eTitanic\u003c\/i\u003e to Susan Sontag's \u003ci\u003eJournals\u003c\/i\u003e. Trained as a classicist, author of two internationally best-selling memoirs, Mendelsohn moves easily from penetrating considerations of the ways in which the classics continue to make themselves felt in contemporary life and letters (Greek myth in the \u003ci\u003eSpider-Man\u003c\/i\u003e musical, Anne Carson's translations of Sappho) to trenchant takes on pop spectacles—none more explosively controversial than his dissection of \u003ci\u003eMad Men\u003c\/i\u003e. Also gathered here are essays devoted to the art of fiction, from Jonathan Littell's Holocaust blockbuster \u003ci\u003eThe Kindly Ones\u003c\/i\u003e to forgotten gems like the novels of Theodor Fontane. In a final section, \"Private Lives,\" prefaced by Mendelsohn's \u003ci\u003eNew Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e essay on fake memoirs, he considers the lives and work of writers as disparate as Leo Lerman, Noel Coward, and Jonathan Franzen. \u003ci\u003eWaiting for the Barbarians\u003c\/i\u003e once again demonstrates that Mendelsohn's \"sweep as a cultural critic is as impressive as his depth.\"\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":1094928825,"sku":"9781590177136","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/products\/Waiting-Barbarians-TR.jpg?v=1528391210"},{"product_id":"john-aubrey-my-life","title":"John Aubrey, My Own Life","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eShortlisted for the 2015 Costa Biography Award\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\nBorn on the brink of the modern world, John Aubrey was witness to the great intellectual and political upheavals of the seventeenth century. He knew everyone of note in England—writers, philosophers, mathematicians, doctors, astrologers, lawyers, statesmen—and wrote about them all, leaving behind a great gift to posterity: a compilation of biographical information titled \u003cem\u003eBrief Lives\u003c\/em\u003e, which in a strikingly modest and radical way invented the art of biography.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAubrey was born in Wiltshire, England, in 1626. The reign of Queen Elizabeth and, earlier, the dissolution of the monasteries were not too far distant in memory during his boyhood. He lived through England’s Civil War, the execution of Charles I, the brief rule of Oliver Cromwell and his son, and the restoration of Charles II. Experiencing these constitutional crises and regime changes, Aubrey was impassioned by the preservation of traces of Ancient Britain, of English monuments, manor houses, monasteries, abbeys, and churches. He was a natural philosopher, an antiquary, a book collector, and a chronicler of the world around him and of the lives of his friends, both men and women. His method of writing was characteristic of his manner: modest, self-deprecating, witty, and concerned above all with the collection of facts that would otherwise be lost to time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003eJohn Aubrey, My Own Life\u003c\/em\u003e is an extraordinary book about the first modern biographer, which reimagines what biography can be. This intimate diary of Aubrey’s days is composed of his own words, collected, collated, and enlarged upon by Ruth Scurr in an act of meticulous scholarship and daring imagination. Scurr’s biography honors and echoes Aubrey’s own innovations in the art of biography. Rather than subject his life to a conventional narrative, Scurr has collected the evidence—the remnants of a life from manuscripts, letters, and books—and arranged it chronologically, modernizing words and spellings, and adding explanations when necessary, with sources provided in the extensive endnotes. Here are Aubrey’s intricate drawings of Stonehenge and the ancient Avebury stones; Aubrey on Charles I’s execution (“On this day, the King was executed. It was bitter cold, so he wore two heavy shirts, lest he should shiver and seem afraid”); and Aubrey on antiquity (“Matters of antiquity are like the light after sunset—clear at first—but by and by \u003cem\u003ecrepusculum\u003c\/em\u003e—the twilight—comes—then total darkness”). From the darkness, Scurr has wrested a vibrant, intimate account of the life of an ingenious man.","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":16330445255,"sku":"9781681370422","price":35.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/products\/John_Aubrey-My_Own_Life_2172238c-15ee-488a-9857-97990e909ef0.jpg?v=1528391208"},{"product_id":"the-shipwrecked-mind","title":"The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan face=\"Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif\" color=\"#000000\" size=\"2\"\u003eWe don’t understand the reactionary mind. As a result, argues Mark Lilla in this timely book, the ideas and passions that shape today’s political dramas are unintelligible to us. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe reactionary is anything but a conservative. He is as radical and modern a figure as the revolutionary, someone shipwrecked in the rapidly changing present, and suffering from nostalgia for an idealized past and an apocalyptic fear that history is rushing toward catastrophe. And like the revolutionary his political engagements are motivated by highly developed ideas.  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLilla begins with three twentieth-century philosophers—Franz Rosenzweig, Eric Voegelin, and Leo Strauss—who attributed the problems of modern society to a break in the history of ideas and promoted a return to earlier modes of thought. He then examines the enduring power of grand historical narratives of betrayal to shape political outlooks since the French Revolution, and shows how these narratives are employed in the writings of Europe’s right-wing cultural pessimists and Maoist neocommunists, American theoconservatives fantasizing about the harmony of medieval Catholic society and radical Islamists seeking to restore a vanished Muslim caliphate. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe revolutionary spirit that inspired political movements across the world for two centuries may have died out. But the spirit of reaction that rose to meet it has survived and is proving just as formidable a historical force. We live in an age when the tragicomic nostalgia of Don Quixote for a lost golden age has been transformed into a potent and sometimes deadly weapon. Mark Lilla helps us to understand why.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":16634265671,"sku":"9781590179024","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/products\/The_Shipwrecked_Mind.jpg?v=1528391208"},{"product_id":"bresson-on-bresson","title":"Bresson on Bresson","description":"\u003cp\u003eRobert Bresson, the director of such cinematic master-pieces as \u003ci\u003ePickpocket\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eA Man Escaped\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eMouchette\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eL’Argent\u003c\/i\u003e, was one of the most influential directors in the history of French film, as well as one of the most stubbornly individual: He insisted on the use of nonprofessional actors; he shunned the “advances” of Cinerama and Cinema-Scope (and the work of most of his predecessors and peers); and he minced no words about the damaging influence of capitalism and the studio system on the still-developing—in his view—art of film. \u003ci\u003eBresson on Bresson\u003c\/i\u003e collects the most significant interviews that Bresson gave (carefully editing them before they were released) over the course of his forty-year career to reveal both the internal consistency and the consistently exploratory character of his body of work. Successive chapters are dedicated to each of his fourteen films, as well as to the question of literary adaptation, the nature of the sound track, and to Bresson’s one book, the great aphoristic treatise \u003ci\u003eNotes on the Cinematograph\u003c\/i\u003e. Throughout, his close and careful consideration of his own films and of the art of film is punctuated by such telling mantras  as “Sound...invented silence in cinema,” “It’s the film that...gives life to the characters—not the characters that give life to the film,” and (echoing the Bible) “Every idle word shall be counted.” Bresson’s integrity and originality earned him the admiration of younger directors from Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette to Olivier Assayas. And though Bresson’s movies are marked everywhere by an air of intense deliberation, these interviews show that they were no less inspired by a near-religious belief in the value of intuition, not only that of the creator but that of the audience, which he claims to deeply respect: “It’s always ready to feel before it understands. And that’s how it should be.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cspan style=\"display: none;\"\u003erobert bresson, translated by Anna Moschovakis\u003c\/span\u003e","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":19271975687,"sku":"9781681370446","price":24.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/products\/bresson.jacket_hires.jpg?v=1528391207"},{"product_id":"the-reckless-mind","title":"The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics","description":"\u003cspan face=\"Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif\" color=\"#000000\" size=\"2\"\u003eEuropean history of the past century is full of examples of philosophers, writers, and scholars who supported or excused the worst tyrannies of the age. How was this possible? How could intellectuals whose work depends on freedom defend those who would deny it?   \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn profiles of six leading twentieth-century thinkers—Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Alexandre Kojève, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida—Mark Lilla explores the psychology of political commitment. As continental Europe gave birth to two great ideological systems in the twentieth century, communism and fascism, it also gave birth to a new social type, the philotyrannical intellectual. Lilla shows how these thinkers were not only grappling with enduring philosophical questions, they were also writing out of their own experiences and passions. These profiles demonstrate how intellectuals can be driven into a political sphere they scarcely understand, with momentous results.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan face=\"Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif\" color=\"#000000\" size=\"2\"\u003eIn a new afterword, Lilla traces how the intellectual world has changed since the end of the cold war. The ideological passions of the past have been replaced in the West, he argues, by a dogma of individual autonomy and freedom that both obscures the historical forces at work in the present and sanctions ignorance about them, leaving us ill-equipped to understand those who are inflamed by the new global ideologies of our time.  \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan face=\"Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif\" color=\"#000000\" size=\"2\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":22511414599,"sku":"9781681371160","price":18.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/products\/The_Reckless_Mind.jpg?v=1528391207"},{"product_id":"typewriters-bombs-jellyfish","title":"Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish","description":"\u003cspan color=\"#000000\" size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif\"\u003eFifteen brilliant essays written over as many years provide a map of the sensibility and critical intelligence of Tom McCarthy, one of the most original and challenging novelists at work today. \u003cem\u003eTypewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish\u003c\/em\u003e explores a wide range of subjects, from the weather considered as a form of media, to the paintings of Gerhard Richter and the movies of David Lynch, to Patty Hearst as revolutionary sex goddess, to the still-radical implications of established masterpieces such as \u003cem\u003eUlysses\u003c\/em\u003e (how do you write after it?), \u003cem\u003eTristram Shandy\u003c\/em\u003e, and the unsung junky genius Alexander Trocchi’s darkly beautiful \u003cem\u003eCain’s Book\u003c\/em\u003e. The longer “Recessional” examines the place of time in writing—how writing makes a new time of its own, a time apart from institutional time—while the startling “Nothing Will Have Taken Place” moves from Mallarmé and Don DeLillo to the ball mastery of Zidane to look at how art, whether that of a poet, novelist, or athlete, destroys given codes of meaning and behavior, returning them to play. Certain points of reference recur with dreamlike insistence—among them the artist Ed Ruscha’s \u003cem\u003eRoyal Road Test\u003c\/em\u003e, a photographic documentation of the roadside debris of a Royal typewriter hurled from the window of a traveling car; the great blooms of jellyfish that are filling the oceans and gumming up the machinery of commerce and military domination—and the question throughout is: How can art explode the restraining conventions of so-called realism, whether aesthetic or political, to engage in the active reinvention of the world?\u003c\/span\u003e \u003cspan style=\"display: none;\"\u003etom mccarthy\u003c\/span\u003e","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":29933062407,"sku":"9781681370866","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/products\/Typewriters_Bombs_Jellyfish.jpg?v=1489701929"},{"product_id":"gaslight","title":"Gaslight","description":"In \u003cem\u003eGaslight\u003c\/em\u003e, Joachim Kalka delves into the mythos of the nineteenth century, exploring our fascination with its “auratic gaslight,” its mingling of romanticism and modernity, enlightenment and darkness. Here we find the roots of our contemporary preoccupations: gender roles and sexuality, terrorism and technology, mad scientists and serial killers, kitsch and commodification. Mustering a wealth of cultural references, Kalka draws illuminating connections between Balzac and Billy Wilder, Mickey Mouse and the arms race, the cake fights of Laurel and Hardy and Madame Bovary’s wedding cake. He brings the nineteenth century to life with all its contradictions, aspirations, and absurdities, inviting us to reexamine that era and our own, and the stories we tell ourselves about history.","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":30482072007,"sku":"9781681371184","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/products\/Kalka_Gaslight_cvr_new.jpg?v=1491578118"},{"product_id":"the-house-of-twenty-thousand-books-1","title":"The House of Twenty Thousand Books (Paperback)","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.nyrb.com\/collections\/sasha-abramsky\/products\/the-house-of-twenty-thousand-books?variant=1094928649\"\u003eAlso available in hardcover. \u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eNamed one of \u003ci\u003eKirkus\u003c\/i\u003e's Best Nonfiction Books of 2015\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe House of Twenty Thousand Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e is the story of Chimen Abramsky, an extraordinary polymath and bibliophile who amassed a vast collection of socialist literature and Jewish history. For more than fifty years Chimen and his wife, Miriam, hosted epic gatherings in their house of books that brought together many of the age’s greatest thinkers.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThe atheist son of one of the century’s most important rabbis, Chimen was born in 1916 near Minsk, spent his early teenage years in Moscow while his father served time in a Siberian labor camp for religious proselytizing, and then immigrated to London, where he discovered the writings of Karl Marx and became involved in left-wing politics. He briefly attended the newly established Hebrew University in Jerusalem, until World War II interrupted his studies. Back in England, he married, and for many years he and Miriam ran a respected Jewish bookshop in London’s East End. When the Nazis invaded Russia in June 1941, Chimen joined the Communist Party, becoming a leading figure in the party’s National Jewish Committee. He remained a member until 1958, when, shockingly late in the day, he finally acknowledged the atrocities committed by Stalin. In middle age, Chimen reinvented himself once more, this time as a liberal thinker, humanist, professor, and manuscripts’ expert for Sotheby’s auction house. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eJournalist Sasha Abramsky re-creates here a lost world, bringing to life the people, the books, and the ideas that filled his grandparents’ house, from gatherings that included Eric Hobsbawm and Isaiah Berlin to books with Marx’s handwritten notes, William Morris manuscripts and woodcuts, an early sixteenth-century Bomberg Bible, and a first edition of Descartes’s \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eMeditations\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe House of Twenty Thousand Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e is a wondrous journey through our times, from the vanished worlds of Eastern European Jewry to the cacophonous politics of modernity.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe House of Twenty Thousand Books \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003eincludes 43 photos.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ciframe src=\"\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/124971603\" webkitallowfullscreen=\"\" mozallowfullscreen=\"\" allowfullscreen=\"\" width=\"100%\" height=\"400\" frameborder=\"0\"\u003e\u003c\/iframe\u003e","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":35276349767,"sku":"9781681371139","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/products\/The_House_of_Twenty_Thousand_Books.jpg?v=1482184190"},{"product_id":"the-resurgence-of-central-asia","title":"The Resurgence of Central Asia","description":"\u003cem\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan face=\"Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif\" size=\"2\" color=\"#000000\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Resurgence of Central Asia\u003c\/em\u003e is Ahmed Rashid’s seminal study of the states that emerged in the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. All have Muslim majorities and ancient histories but are otherwise very different. Rashid’s book, now with a new introduction by the author examining some of the crucial political developments since its first publication in 1994, provides entrée to this little-known but geopolitically important region. Rashid gives a history of each country, including its incorporation into Tsarist Russia, to the present day, provides basic socioeconomic information, and explains the diverse political situations. 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Whether he is writing on origins, aphorisms, coherence, vulnerability, anxiety, or a number of other subjects, his command of language, his erudition, and his own personal history serve not so much to illuminate or magnify the subject as to discover it anew through a kaleidoscopic alignment of attention, thought, and feeling, a dazzling and momentary suspension of disparate elements, again and again.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cspan style=\"display: none;\"\u003e dillon \u003c\/span\u003e","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":6835799064628,"sku":"9781681372822","price":18.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/products\/Dillon_with_Subtitle.jpg?v=1527889187"},{"product_id":"makers-of-modern-architecture-volume-iii","title":"Makers of Modern Architecture, Volume III","description":"Martin Filler's \"contribution to both architecture criticism and general readers' understanding is invaluable,\" according to \u003cem\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/em\u003e. This latest installment in his acclaimed \u003cem\u003eMakers of Modern Architecture\u003c\/em\u003e series again demonstrates his unparalleled skill in explaining the revolutionary changes that have reshaped the built environment over the past century and a half. These studies of more than two dozen master builders--women and men, celebrated and obscure, idealists and opportunists--range from the environmental pioneer Frederick Law Olmsted and the mystical eccentric Antoni Gaudí to the present-day visionaries Frank Gehry and Maya Lin. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFiller's broad knowledge embraces everything from the glittering Viennese luxury of Josef Hoffmann to the heavy-duty construction of the New Brutalists, from the low-cost postwar suburbs of the Levitt Brothers to today's super-tall condo towers on Manhattan's Billionaire's Row. Sometimes the interplay of social and political forces leads to dark results, as with Hitler's favorite architect, Albert Speer, and interior designer, Gerdy Troost. More often, though, heroic figures including Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn, and Lina Bo Bardi offer uplifting inspiration for the future of the one art form we all live with—and in—every day. \u003cspan style=\"display: none;\"\u003e martin filler \u003c\/span\u003e","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":6835856244788,"sku":"9781681373027","price":29.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/products\/8_-_Makers_of_Modern_Arch.jpg?v=1518564835"},{"product_id":"fragments-of-an-infinite-memory","title":"Fragments of an Infinite Memory","description":"\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003e“One day, as I was daydreaming on the boulevard Beaumarchais, I had the idea—it came and went in a flash, almost in spite of myself—of Googling to find out what I’d been up to and where I’d been two evenings before, at five o’clock, since I couldn’t remember on my own.” So begins Maël Renouard’s \u003ci\u003eFragments of an Infinite Memory\u003c\/i\u003e, a provocative and elegant inquiry into life in a wireless world. Renouard is old enough to remember life before the internet but young enough to have fully accommodated his life to the internet and the gadgets that support it. Here this young philosopher, novelist, and translator tries out a series of conjectures on how human experience, especially the sense of self, is being changed by our continual engagement with a memory that is impersonal and effectively boundless. Renouard has written a book that is rigorously impressionistic, deeply informed historically and culturally, but is also playful, ironic, personal, and formally adventurous, a book that withstands comparison to the best of Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":6842059194420,"sku":"9781681372808","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/products\/9781681372808.jpg?v=1584387565"},{"product_id":"almost-nothing","title":"Almost Nothing","description":"\u003cp\u003eJózef Czapski (1896–1993) lived many lives during his ninety-six years. He was a student in Saint Petersburg during the Russian Revolution and a painter in Paris in the roaring twenties. As a Polish reserve officer fighting against the invading Nazis in the opening weeks of the Second World War, he was taken prisoner by the Soviets. For reasons unknown to this day, he was one of the very few excluded from Stalin’s sanctioned massacres of Polish officers. He never returned to Poland after the war, but worked tirelessly in Paris to keep alive awareness of the plight of his homeland, overrun by totalitarian powers. Czapski was a towering public figure, but painting gave meaning to his life. Eric Karpeles, also a painter, reveals Czapski’s full complexity, pulling together all the threads of this remarkable life.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg src=\"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/files\/Czapski_family_1_medium.jpg?v=1540831909\" alt=\"\"\u003e \u003cimg src=\"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/files\/Czapski_uniform_medium.jpg?v=1540831916\" alt=\"\"\u003e \u003cimg src=\"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/files\/Czapski_at_war_medium.jpg?v=1540831922\" alt=\"\"\u003e\u003cimg src=\"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/files\/Czapski_painting_1_medium.jpg?v=1540831929\" alt=\"\"\u003e \u003cimg src=\"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/files\/Czapski_painting_2_medium.jpg?v=1540831934\" alt=\"\"\u003e \u003cimg src=\"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/files\/Czapski_painting_3_medium.jpg?v=1540831941\" alt=\"\"\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":6867935887412,"sku":"9781681372846","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/products\/Almost_Nothing_cover.jpg?v=1527267545"},{"product_id":"the-unsure-manifesto","title":"Uncertain Manifesto","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe writer and artist Frédéric Pajak was ten when he began to dream of “a book mixing words and pictures: snippets of adventure, random memories, maxims, ghosts, forgotten heroes, trees, the raging sea,” but it was not until he was in his forties that this dream took form as \u003cem\u003eUncertain Manifesto\u003c\/em\u003e. The utterly original book that he produced is a memoir born of reading and a meditation on the lives and ideas, the motivations, feelings, and fates of some of Pajak’s heroes: Samuel Beckett and the artist Bram van Velde, and, especially, Walter Benjamin, whose travels to Moscow, Naples, and Ibiza, whose experiences with hashish, whose faltering marriage and love affairs and critique of modern experience Pajak re-creates and reflects on in word and image. Pajak’s moody black-and-white drawings accompany the text throughout, though their bearing on it is often indirect and all the more absorbing for that. Between word and image, the reader is drawn into a mysterious space that is all Pajak’s as he seeks to evoke vanished histories and to resist a modern world more and more given over to a present without a past.\u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eWith the support of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eClick to enlarge image\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cimg src=\"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/files\/The_Wind_of_Things_1_medium.jpg?v=1538491612\" alt=\"\"\u003e\u003cimg src=\"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/files\/Wind_of_Things_2_medium.jpg?v=1538491642\" alt=\"\"\u003e\u003cimg src=\"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/files\/Wind_of_Things_3_medium.jpg?v=1538491664\" alt=\"\"\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":6992809263156,"sku":"9781681372860","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/products\/Pajak_NEW_TITLE.jpg?v=1538513326"},{"product_id":"friend-of-my-youth","title":"Friend of My Youth","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eFriend of My Youth\u003c\/em\u003e begins with the novelist Amit Chaudhuri returning to Bombay, the city in which he grew up, to give a reading. 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There are quotations from Seneca, Meister Eckhart, and the Goncourt brothers mixed in with the equally compelling imagined words of fictional film directors, actors, and, always, the fascinating Imogen, who is alive now only “in the perpetual present of the sentence.” In \u003cem\u003eThe Great Concert of the Night\u003c\/em\u003e, Jonathan Buckley expertly interweaves sexual despair, cultural critique, the plot lines of one man’s quietly brilliant life, and the problems and paradoxes of writing, especially writing about and to the dead.","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":14728617394228,"sku":"9781681373959","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/products\/Unknown-1.jpg?v=1579898340"},{"product_id":"balzacs-lives","title":"Balzac's Lives","description":"\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003eBalzac, more than anyone, invented the nineteenth-century novel, and Oscar Wilde went so far as to say that Balzac had invented the nineteenth century. But it was above all through the wonderful, unforgettable, extravagant characters that Balzac dreamed up and made flesh—entrepreneurs, bankers, inventors, industrialists, poets, artists, bohemians of both sexes, journalists, aristocrats, politicians, prostitutes—that he brought to life the dynamic forces of an era that ushered in our own. Peter Brooks’s \u003ci\u003eBalzac’s Lives\u003c\/i\u003e is a vivid and searching portrait of a great novelist as revealed through the fictional lives he imagined.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":29148245065780,"sku":"9781681374499","price":18.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/products\/9781681374499.jpg?v=1587578165"},{"product_id":"self-portrait","title":"Self-Portrait","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eOne of Britain's most important contemporary painters, Celia Paul has written a reflective, intimate memoir of her life as an artist. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eSelf-Portrait\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003etells the artist's story in her own words, drawn from early journal entries as well as memory, of her childhood in India and her days as an art student at London's Slade School of Fine Art; of her intense decades-long relationship with the older esteemed painter Lucian Freud and the birth of their son; of the challenges of motherhood, the unresolvable conflict between caring for a child and remaining committed to art; of the \"invisible skeins between people,\" the profound familial connections Paul communicates through her paintings of her mother and sisters; and finally, of the mystical presence in her own solitary vision of the world around her. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eSelf-Portrait\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e is a powerful, liberating evocation of a life and of a life-long dedication to art.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e \u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eOn November 12, 2020, artist Celia Paul discussed \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSelf-Portrait\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e with \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eNew Yorker\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e staff writer and author Judith Thurman. This virtual event is part of New York Review Books' \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/playlist?list=PL4HF_6fy_ZZ-6p6nMNqb8kAwbSLxFoqgl\" data-mce-href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/playlist?list=PL4HF_6fy_ZZ-6p6nMNqb8kAwbSLxFoqgl\" target=\"_blank\"\u003eongoing series\u003c\/a\u003e with Brooklyn's \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.communitybookstore.net\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"\u003eCommunity Bookstore\u003c\/a\u003e. Watch an archive of the event below.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003ciframe src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ztgkAXPM1y0\" height=\"315\" width=\"560\" allowfullscreen=\"\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" frameborder=\"0\"\u003e\u003c\/iframe\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eClick to enlarge images\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg src=\"https:\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/files\/Self_Portrait13_medium.jpg?v=1607097912\" alt=\"\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\" data-mce-src=\"https:\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/files\/Self_Portrait13_medium.jpg?v=1607097912\"\u003e\u003cimg src=\"https:\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/files\/Self_Portrait44_medium.jpg?v=1607097932\" alt=\"\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\" data-mce-src=\"https:\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/files\/Self_Portrait44_medium.jpg?v=1607097932\"\u003e\u003cimg src=\"https:\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/files\/Self_Portrait76_medium.jpg?v=1607097946\" alt=\"\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\" data-mce-src=\"https:\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/files\/Self_Portrait76_medium.jpg?v=1607097946\"\u003e\u003cimg src=\"https:\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/files\/Self_Portrait95_medium.jpg?v=1607097966\" alt=\"\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\" data-mce-src=\"https:\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/files\/Self_Portrait95_medium.jpg?v=1607097966\"\u003e\u003cimg src=\"https:\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/files\/Self_Portrait137_medium.jpg?v=1607097981\" alt=\"\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\" data-mce-src=\"https:\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/files\/Self_Portrait137_medium.jpg?v=1607097981\"\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":31424988020873,"sku":"9781681374826","price":29.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/products\/selfportrait.jpg?v=1576690715"}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/collections\/Header_NYRB.jpg?v=1680091573","url":"https:\/\/www.nyrb.com\/collections\/new-york-review-books\/biography-memoir.oembed?page=2","provider":"New York Review Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}