Books published by publisher The New York Review of Books, Inc

Whether you’re entertaining garden sprites, feeding a regiment of toy soldiers, or simply whiling away a lazy afternoon, Mud Pies and Other Recipes is the only make-believe cookbook you’ll ever need. With Marjorie Winslow’s timeless guide on hand, you’ll never be at a loss for something to do in your backyard or by the seashore; you’ll be busy scooping up sand (a filling for Stuffed Sea Shells), hunting for flower petals (they make lovely hors d’oeuvres), and collecting raindrops (essential for brewing up Fried Water). The book is organized by course, and includes a general discussion of yard cookery along with detailed ingredient lists, methods for preparation, and helpful serving suggestions. And on every page, Erik Blegvad’s delightful pen-and-ink drawings ensure that Mud Pies and Other Recipes is a feast for the eyes as well as the imagination.

During the twelve years of Hitler’s Third Reich, very few Germans took the risk of actively opposing his tyranny and terror, and fewer still did so to protect the sanctity of law and faith. In No Ordinary Men, Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern focus on two remarkable, courageous men who did—the pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his close friend and brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi—and offer new insights into the fearsome difficulties that resistance entailed. (Not forgotten is Christine Bonhoeffer Dohnanyi, Hans’s wife and Dietrich’s sister, who was indispensable to them both.)From the start Bonhoeffer opposed the Nazi efforts to bend Germany’s Protestant churches to Hitler’s will, while Dohnanyi, a lawyer in the Justice Ministry and then in the Wehrmacht’s counterintelligence section, helped victims, kept records of Nazi crimes to be used as evidence once the regime fell, and was an important figure in the various conspiracies to assassinate Hitler. The strength of their shared commitment to these undertakings—and to the people they were helping—endured even after their arrest in April 1943 and until, after great suffering, they were executed on Hitler’s express orders in April 1945, just weeks before the Third Reich collapsed.Bonhoeffer’s posthumously published Letters and Papers from Prison and other writings found a wide international audience, but Dohnanyi’s work is scarcely known, though it was crucial to the resistance and he was the one who drew Bonhoeffer into the anti-Hitler plots. Sifton and Stern offer dramatic new details and interpretations in their account of the extraordinary efforts in which the two jointly engaged. No Ordinary Men honors both Bonhoeffer’s human decency and his theological legacy, as well as Dohnanyi’s preservation of the highest standard of civic virtue in an utterly corrupted state.

What 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 The New Yorker 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 The New York Times), 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. In this sense, Adler is one of the few independent journalists writing in America today.This collection of Adler’s nonfiction draws on Toward a Radical Middle (a selection of her earliest New Yorker pieces), A Year in the Dark (her film reviews), and Canaries in the Mineshaft (a selection of essays on politics and media), and also includes uncollected work from the past two decades. The more recent pieces are concerned with, in her words, “misrepresentation, coercion, and abuse of public process, and, to a degree, the journalist’s role in it.” With a brilliant literary and legal mind, Adler parses power by analyzing language: the language of courts, of journalists, of political figures, of the man on the street. 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 New York Times reporter Jayson Blair. And she writes extensively about the Supreme Court and the power of its rulings, including its fateful decision in Bush v. Gore.

What is really going on here? For decades Renata Adler has been asking and answering this question with unmatched urgency. As a staff writer at The New Yorker. Adler reported on civil rights from Selma, Alabama; the wars in Biafra, and the Middle East; the Nixon impeachment inquiry; cultural life in Cuba. She also reported on politics and culture in the United States, films (as chief film critic for The New York Times), books, television, pop music, the press. She has taken risks 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, when too many other writers have joined the pack. The more recent pieces are concerned with, in her words, "misrepresentation, coercion, and abuse of public process, and, to a degree, the journalist's role in it.". Adler brilliantly 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 --from the Watergate scandal, to the "preposterous" Kenneth Starr report during the Clinton impeachment inquiry, and the story of then New York Times reporter Jayson Blair. She writes brilliantly too about the Supreme Court and the power of its rulings, including its fateful decision in Bush v. Gore. The Best Books of 2015 (So Far). Two years after the reappearance in print of her novels Speedboat and Pitch Dark, Adler has returned again as a reporter, essayist, and critic --- one of the best we've had on all three fronts. ... and the truth is, though she's been near-silent for some time, she only ever got better. - Christian Lorentzen, New York Magazine (July 23, 2015) Review "The wonderfully funny, acute Renata Adler is almost as good an essayist as a novelist ... It doesn't mean much to say that Renata Adler's journalism isn't quite as interesting as her novels --- almost nothing is as interesting as Renata Adler's novels. ... If Adler has an heir it might be someone like the recently retired TV satirist Jon Stewart, who shares both her moral wryness and love for America. Perhaps the real loss is that nobody quite this careful is paying attention." --- Daniel Swift, Spectator, UK; Review" It is Adler's sort of death's-head wit that makes her such a visionary reporter -- in the Letter from Biafra, for example: "Suddenly a shrieking, giggling band of of eleven young men and three boys passed through the market, as though carried away by some enervating, mocking joke. These were some of the 'artillery cases' one sees all over Biafra, people claiming some local variety of shell shock and traveling always in packs." The "enervating, mocking joke" here -- if we listen for it --- is the failure of the UN to prevent or arrest a genocide, and beyond that the "sheer, bitterly comic ugliness of human suffering." "If Adler were a man ... would she be one of the boys ---celebrated and honored as a journalist-hero in the popular mind? With the electricity of her prose, I think she would. The publication of After the Tall Timber may move her closer in, or place a seal upon her exile. Either way, she'll be proved right."--- Barnes & Noble Review.Review "Ladies and gentlemen, Renata Adler is back! It feels momentous and just plain correct that we now have After the Tall Timber, a new collection of Adler's nonfiction, "--Abby Aguirre, Vogue "One of the last essays in the book is, hilariously. about Bush v. Gore. Remember that? What a time in our shared heritage. ... I can't stop thinking about these sentences, both their meaning and their structure. Because she is so right about something we've all experienced but so rarely name. ... Last week I mentioned that I was reading the new collection of Renata Adler's essays. Now I'm going to mention it again, because the entire book is so fucking good. You have to read it. --- Haley Mlotek, The Hairpin

During the twelve years of Hitler’s Third Reich, very few Germans took the risk of actively opposing his tyranny and terror, and fewer still did so to protect the sanctity of law and faith. In No Ordinary Men, Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern focus on two remarkable, courageous men who did—the pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his close friend and brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi—and offer new insights into the fearsome difficulties that resistance entailed. (Not forgotten is Christine Bonhoeffer Dohnanyi, Hans’s wife and Dietrich’s sister, who was indispensable to them both.)From the start Bonhoeffer opposed the Nazi efforts to bend Germany’s Protestant churches to Hitler’s will, while Dohnanyi, a lawyer in the Justice Ministry and then in the Wehrmacht’s counterintelligence section, helped victims, kept records of Nazi crimes to be used as evidence once the regime fell, and was an important figure in the various conspiracies to assassinate Hitler. The strength of their shared commitment to these undertakings—and to the people they were helping—endured even after their arrest in April 1943 and until, after great suffering, they were executed on Hitler’s express orders in April 1945, just weeks before the Third Reich collapsed.Bonhoeffer’s posthumously published Letters and Papers from Prison and other writings found a wide international audience, but Dohnanyi’s work is scarcely known, though it was crucial to the resistance and he was the one who drew Bonhoeffer into the anti-Hitler plots. Sifton and Stern offer dramatic new details and interpretations in their account of the extraordinary efforts in which the two jointly engaged. No Ordinary Men honors both Bonhoeffer’s human decency and his theological legacy, as well as Dohnanyi’s preservation of the highest standard of civic virtue in an utterly corrupted state.

At the Chinese Communist Party's 16th Congress in November 2002, a group of new leaders took over the world's most populous country. Their accession as the "Fourth Generation" of rulers of the People's Republic—following the generations of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Zemin—signaled the end of a long, complex struggle for power. Yet little has been known outside high Party circles about either that struggle or the men who emerged victorious from it. China's New Rulers, based on confidential Party files leaked to a Chinese writer abroad, offers an unprecedented glimpse into the most orderly succession in the turbulent history of the People's Republic. At its center are detailed descriptions of the nine men who will rule China for the next five years—their backgrounds, their characters, and their visions for the future. Among the challenges they will face are economic reform and China's integration into a global economy, pressures for political liberalization and human rights, ethnic unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang, the status of Taiwan, and relations with the US. China's New Rulers is an extraordinary account of a high-level political drama that has largely taken place in secret. It portrays many key figures in the Party, government, and military, and provides new information on Jiang Zemin's thirteen years in office. Most importantly, it contains the first insights into matters of great importance to the West: who will lead China, what changes they may bring to their country, and how they may act as international partners and competitors.