The New York Review of Books

David A. Bell is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the History Department at Princeton. His latest book is Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution. Steve Coll is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Directorate S: The CIA and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Fara Dabhoiwala is completing a global history of free speech and researching a biography of the eighteenth-century Black Jamaican polymath Francis Williams. He teaches at Princeton. Rachel Donadio is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a former Rome Bureau Chief and European Cultural Correspondent for The New York Times. Martin Filler’s most recent book is Makers of Modern Architecture, Volume III: From Antoni Gaudi to Maya Lin, a collection of his…

Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age by Dennis Duncan. Norton, 344 pp., $30.00; $17.95 (paper) In 1941 an ambitious Philadelphia pedi-atrician, the wonderfully named Waldo Emerson Nelson, became the editor of America’s leading textbook of pediatrics. For the next half-century the compilation of successive editions of this large volume advanced his career, consumed his weekends, and encroached heavily on his domestic life. Every few years, when a new edition was being prepared for the press, he would dragoon his family into assembling the index for him. He would read through the proofs of all 1,500 or so pages, calling out the words and concepts to be listed, while his wife, Marge, and their three children—Jane, Ann, and Bill—wrote down on index…

Guido Reni an exhibition at the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, March 28–July 9, 2023. Catalog of the exhibition edited by David García Cueto. Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 446 pp., €35.58 The Roman church of Santa Maria della Concezione sits atop a precipitous cliff of volcanic stone that frames the modern Via Veneto. Most visitors climb a flight of outdoor stairs to see the crypt, whose five chambers are packed with the skeletons and mummified bodies of 3,700 Capuchin friars, many of their bones attached to the walls and ceilings in elaborate Rococo patterns. A second flight of stairs leads up to the church itself, and to the spectacle that drew visitors long before the crypt received its macabre decoration in the eighteenth century: Guido Reni’s painted vision of…

Nathalie Sarraute: A Life Between by Ann Jefferson. Princeton University Press, 425 pp., $42.00; $32.00 (paper) “Ich werde es zerreissen”—“I’m going to slash it.” So asserted the five- or six-year-old future novelist Nathalie Sarraute to her Swiss governess as she held a pair of scissors above a stuffed armchair. The governess protested. The future novelist held firm: “Yes, I’m going to do it” …There now, I’m freeing myself, excitement and exaltation impel my arm, I plunge the point of the scissors in with all my strength, the silk gives, tears, I slash the back of the settee from top to bottom, and I look at what comes out of it … something flabby, greyish, is escaping from the slit. Sarraute recalls this youthful outburst in her memoir, Childhood, published in…

Rattlesnakes fill the lawn one rattlesnakeA baby rattlesnake I’m almost tenYears old because in two months I’ll be nineSummer has stuffed the willow’s darkHair full that flashes white in gusts with hairAnd branches dark green leaves and branches theRattler I hope won’t climb and spotting meDrop from to bite my head the green blades everywhere Bend in the strong gusts and the snakeRivers the blades apart I watch from the deckOn the other side of the fence a windowOpens then closes I’ve been sent toKill it the snake a river parting low in the grass the grassStop with a rake a river that is its own source…

Tunguska: A Siberian Mystery and Its Environmental Legacy by Andy Bruno. Cambridge University Press, 305 pp., $39.99 On February 15, 2013, a luminous object trailed across the skies above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, in the southern Urals. It was around 9:00 am, just after the late winter dawn. The recent popularity of dashcams in Russia—useful in case of an accident or an encounter with the corrupt traffic police—meant that the event was filmed by many of the cars on the road that morning. Soon anyone with an Internet connection could watch a ball of fire arc toward an Orthodox church as a driver muttered obscene variations on the question “What is that?” Other videos captured an earth-shaking sonic boom. Windows broke, people screamed, alarms wailed, dogs barked. About 1,500…