Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

We are pleased to announce the publication of The Company They Kept, Volume Two, a collection of twenty-seven accounts of friendships between some of the greatest artists and thinkers of our day, drawn from the pages of the Review. Among them are Isaiah Berlin on Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, Hector Bianciotti on Jorge Luis Borges, Bruce Chatwin on George Ortiz, Gore Vidal on Dawn Powell, and John Updike on Saul Steinberg. Now available at 25% off. The Robert B. Silvers Lecture Mary Beard: Do the Classics Have a Future? November 30, 2011 at The New York Public Library General admission $25. Enter coupon code CLASSICS to save 40%. IN THE DECEMBER 8, 2011 ISSUE Is This George Kennan? Frank Costigliola The Kennan of his letters and diaries is far less conventional and more complex and elusive than the person we encounter in John Lewis Gaddis’s new biography. On the Magic Carpet of the Met Peter Brown The newly restored Islamic galleries at the Metropolitan Museum are a delight to the eye, and its meticulous new catalog is a thrill to the mind. Hugh Eakin: Defining a Culture in Doha’s Desert (NYRblog) Behind Murakami’s Mirror Charles Baxter Haruki Murakami’s novels, stories, and nonfiction display the pull of the unreal and the fantastical on ordinary citizens who, unable to bear the world they have been given, desperately wish to go somewhere else. Jordan Starts to Shake Nicolas Pelham Across Jordan, protests have erupted that the King seems unable to quench. “We know the King is a thief,” says a road-sweeper. Such backstabbing is audible at all levels of the kingdom’s hierarchy, from garbage collectors to bankers’ boardrooms. How We Were All Misled John Lanchester Michael Lewis’s Boomerang is about what he has come to see as the larger phenomenon behind the credit crunch: the increase in total worldwide debt from $84 trillion in 2002 to $195 trillion now. It Does Take a Village Melvin Konner Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is one of the most original and influential minds in evolutionary anthropology. Her most recent book, Mothers and Others, may be her most important. The Day of the Hunter Louis Begley On Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends by Tom Segev. Zuccotti Park: What Future? Michael Greenberg One protester said that she was ready to propose a media blackout: no more talking to the press. “It’s time for us to look inward, and figure out where we are and where we want to be.” Occupy Wall Street Turns a Corner (NYRblog) Plus: Sarah Manguso on Paul Guest, David Bromwich on Niall Ferguson, Nathaniel Rich on Spalding Gray, Sanford Schwartz on de Kooning at MoMA, Anthony Grafton on Stephen Greenblatt’sSwerve, Alan Ryan on John Stuart Mill, an exchange on Freud, and much more.