The New York Review of Books (December 21, 2023 Issue) – The latest issue features —the Holiday Issue—with Susan Tallman on William Kentridge, David Shulman on violence in the West Bank, Neal Ascherson on Timothy Garton Ash’s Europe, Elaine Blair on what we talk about when we talk about porn, Rebecca Giggs on the return of dinosaurs, Kathryn Hughes on Jane Austen’s fashion, Mark O’Connell on Werner Herzog, Linda Greenhouse on Covid in the courts, Gabriel Winslow-Yost on Bill Watterson’s first book since Calvin and Hobbes, John Banville on liberalism after Hobbes, poems by Lindsay Turner and Greg Delanty, and much more.

A Leaf or Two from Whitman

The promises and failures of the American twentieth century suffuse Ben Lerner’s new book of poems and Tom Piazza’s new novel.

Christopher Benfey

The Lights by Ben Lerner

The Auburn Conference by Tom Piazza

Imagine a festive dinner near Topeka during the fall of 1879 to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Kansas Territory, with Walt Whitman as a featured speaker. Partially paralyzed by a stroke and described as “reckless and vulgar” by The New York Times—Leaves of Grass was soon to be banned for indecency by the Boston district attorney—Whitman, who had just turned sixty, may well have wondered why he, instead of some respectable graybeard like Emerson, was invited. Was it because he had defended John Brown, the hero of free-soil Kansas? Or was it hoped that a visit might inspire something like his 1871 “Song of the Exposition,” in which Whitman admonished the Muse:

Migrate from Greece and Ionia,
Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts,
That matter of Troy and Achilles’ wrath…
For know a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wide, untried domain awaits, demands you.

The Lost World

Nature documentary has of late become a haunted genre. Not so Prehistoric Planet, which revels in portraying that which is already dead and gone, no longer our responsibility.

Rebecca Giggs

Prehistoric Planet a BBC Studios series streaming on Apple TV+

Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds by Thomas Halliday

One early myth about the dinosaurs was that they would return. In 1830 Charles Lyell—earth scientist, Scot—gazed into the far future and posited as much in his Principles of Geology, arguing that since the planet’s climate was cyclical (or so he believed), vanished creatures could yet be revived, along with their habitats, when the right conditions came back around: “The huge iguanodon might reappear in the woods, and the ichthyosaur in the sea, while the pterodactyl might flit again through umbrageous groves of tree-ferns.” As to whether people would get to witness the spectacle of this resurrected bestiary—well, if Lyell was never drawn to that question, it was because the answer was not up for debate. His was an age in which the prospect of Earth bereft of human occupancy was too abominable, too sacrilegious, to contemplate.