"There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them." — Federico García Lorca
Timothy Leary sucked the revolutionary potential out of psychedelic science, concludes Kim Adams after reading Benjamin Breen’s “Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science.”
Jonathan Bolton uses the occasion of a new edition and translation of Karel Čapek’s play “R.U.R.,” first published in Prague in 1920, to revisit the origins of the word “robot,” and explore the play’s uncannily prescient vision of artificial life.
James Perrin Warren reviews Kurt Caswell’s “Iceland Summer: Travels Along the Ring Road.”
Melissa M. Monroe reviews Eileen Vorbach Collins’s “Love in the Archives: A Patchwork of True Stories About Suicide Loss.”
Christian Lewis reviews Sasha Velour’s “The Big Reveal: An Illustrated Manifesto of Drag.”
Tom Zoellner talks to Erika Marie Bsumek about one of the worst boondoggles in the Southwest, which she explores in her recent book “The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam: Infrastructures of Dispossession on the Colorado Plateau.”
Tia Glista interviews Lauren Elkin about her new book “Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art.”
Kate Tsurkan reviews Artem Chapeye’s “The Ukraine.”
Thomas Elrod reviews Francesca Peacock’s “Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish.”
Leif Weatherby reviews Matthew Coller’s “Football Is a Numbers Game: Pro Football Focus and How a Data-Driven Approach Shook Up the Sport.”
Joshua Yang reviews two new books on Hong Kong protests—Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin’s “Among the Braves: Hope, Struggle, and Exile in the Battle for Hong Kong and the Future of Global Democracy” and Brian Kern’s “Liberate Hong Kong: Stories from the Freedom Struggle.”
Deanna K. Kreisel reviews Andrew Leland’s “The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight.”
:quality(75)/https%3A%2F%2Fassets.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fuploads%2F202402Tripping-on-Utopia.jpg)
:quality(75)/https%3A%2F%2Fassets.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fuploads%2F202402RUR.jpg)
:quality(75)/https%3A%2F%2Fassets.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fuploads%2F202402iceland-summer.jpg)
:quality(75)/https%3A%2F%2Fassets.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fuploads%2F20240271pTchFCRL._SL1360_.jpg)
:quality(75)/https%3A%2F%2Fassets.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fuploads%2F20240281m0nCxL1cL._SL1500_.jpg)
:quality(75)/https%3A%2F%2Fassets.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fuploads%2F202402The-Foundations-of-Glen-Canyon-Dam.jpg)
:quality(75)/https%3A%2F%2Fassets.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fuploads%2F202402Unruly-Monsters.jpg)
:quality(75)/https%3A%2F%2Fassets.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fuploads%2F202402The-Ukraine.jpg)
:quality(75)/https%3A%2F%2Fassets.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fuploads%2F202401Pure-Wit.jpg)
:quality(75)/https%3A%2F%2Fassets.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fuploads%2F20231271rXqnNCFsL._SL1000_.jpg)
:quality(75)/https%3A%2F%2Fassets.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fuploads%2F202402Among-the-Braves-and-Liberate-Hong-Kong-scaled.jpg)
:quality(75)/https%3A%2F%2Fassets.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fuploads%2F202402The-Country-of-the-Blind.jpg)