The New York Review of Books (November 23, 2023) – The latest features Inhumane Times – Israel’s current war, the punishment of the Palestinian people and an offensive against Hamas; Camus on Tour – Travels in the Americas: Notes and Impressions of a New World by Albert Camus; Zoning Out – Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy by Quinn Slobodian, and more…

Inhumane Times

Israel’s current war seems to be as much a brutal insistence on the collective punishment of the Palestinian people as an offensive against Hamas.

By Joshua Leifer

The scenes of devastation in Israel’s south on October 7 were almost beyond description. Children killed in their beds, babies taken from their mothers’ arms, the elderly slaughtered in their kitchens. Kfar Aza, a kibbutz close to the separation barrier with Gaza, was burned nearly to the ground: a charnel house. Between a quarter and a third of nearby Kibbutz Nir Oz’s residents were killed or kidnapped. Roughly 10 percent of Kibbutz Be’eri’s population was murdered. At least a dozen of tiny Kibbutz Holit’s two hundred members are dead. The streets of the city of Sderot were littered with bodies. At an outdoor rave near Kibbutz Reim, more than 260 young men and women were gunned down as they tried to flee.

Camus on Tour

Most of Albert Camus’s evaluations from his promotional trips across the Atlantic are superficial or laughably snotty. What’s intriguing is how quickly he demands that things make sense.

By Vivian Gornick

Travels in the Americas: Notes and Impressions of a New World by Albert Camus, edited and with an introduction by Alice Kaplan, translated from the French by Ryan Bloom

Nothing in a professional writer’s life more resembles the life of a traveling salesman than the literary book tour. The superficial difference between writers on tour and salesmen on the road is that writers are encouraged to imagine themselves prized personae whose pitch is eagerly awaited by the anonymous crowd, whereas salesmen know themselves to be an intrusion, albeit one with an edge. While both are beggars at the gate, each one singing for a bit of supper, salesmen are independent entrepreneurs, pretty much calling their own shots; writers, on the other hand, are performers in someone else’s show—a talk at ten, a class at twelve, a panel at three, a reading at seven, and oh, did I forget the ten or twelve interviews tucked in at every break in the day?—all the while being dragged around by people otherwise known as “handlers” who every half-hour tell them how much they are loved, how much their work is prized, how many lives it has changed, and yes, they know how tired you must be by now, but would you mind giving just one more very small interview, this guy’s been waiting all day to talk to you.