Article 3

Weekend reading on nybooks.com: The Review’s June 5 issue is here, with novelist Claire Messud on a new translation of Camus’s most famous work, biologist H. Allen Orr on a controversial book about race and genetics, and hedge fund manager Roger Alcaly with a proposal to limit risky banking practices. On the blogs Renee Xia and Perry Link examine the disturbing pattern of Chinese activists dying for lack of medical care in detention, Nathaniel Rich revisits the unsettling beauty of Lee Friedlander’s New Orleans, and Katherine Rundell looks at the collaboration of Randall Jarrell and Maurice Sendak.

THIS ISSUE SPONSORED BY DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

A New ‘L’Étranger’

Claire Messud

One of the most widely read French novels of the 20th century, Camus’s L’Étranger, carries, for American readers, enormous significance in our cultural understanding of midcentury French identity. Sandra Smith’s translation is an excellent new version of the novel.

How to Control the Banks

Roger E. Alcaly

The most pressing task of financial reform must be to strongly limit the risks posed to the economy by large banks and other financial institutions that borrow so much. The best way to achieve this goal is to explicitly limit the extent to which they borrow to fund their operations.

‘The Genetic Basis of Race’

H. Allen Orr

The goal of Nicholas Wade’s new book, he says, is “to demystify the genetic basis of race and to ask what recent human evolution reveals about history and the nature of human societies.” But hard evidence for Wade’s thesis is nearly nonexistent.

China: Detained to Death

Renee Xia and Perry Link

It is crucial to understand what happened to Cao Shunli, a Chinese legal rights activist who had a chronic liver condition when she was detained last year. She died in March after being denied treatment in prison—a disturbing pattern that has emerged with other Chinese detainees.