Briefly Noted Book Reviews - The New Yorker

Into the Wood Chipper, by Nicholas Enrich (Summit). This granular account of the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development, written by a former senior official, draws on internal records and firsthand observations to depict how the government agency was systematically taken apart. Enrich—who was placed on administrative leave in March, 2025, after circulating an internal memo critical of funding cuts—details how the Department of Government Efficiency hollowed out U.S.A.I.D.’s operations, disrupting its ability to respond to diseases, and thus exacting a grim human toll. His clipped, procedural account, stuffed with insider details, is a precise and unsettling record of an intentional bureaucratic collapse and its aftershocks.

Transcendence for Beginners, by Clare Carlisle (New York Review Books). In this gem of a book, Carlisle asks a question that may especially preoccupy professors of philosophy (which she is) and biographers (which she is also, of Søren Kierkegaard and George Eliot), but that equally concerns the rest of us: How to make sense of a human life? Lightly touching on her own path—we find her up a mountain in India, at a yoga class in Manchester, “converted” to philosophy at a lecture on Plato’s cave given by Jonathan Lear—Carlisle considers what she describes as “life’s relentlessly relational texture” and shows how thinkers and artists from Spinoza and Proust to Celia Paul led her to the conclusion that, in defiance of life’s losses, “love flows through us because it is an element of reality itself: like water, like air, like fire.”

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Paradiso 17, by Hannah Lillith Assadi (Knopf). This novel of exile and memory chronicles the life of Sufien, a Palestinian man displaced as a child by the Nakba, whose story unfolds across continents and encompasses entanglements with a broad range of characters. Assadi traces the full arc of Sufien’s life as he moves from Palestine to a refugee camp in Syria, then to Italy and the U.S. He deepens and matures, reflecting often on his course, but this is not a fawning portrait of a hero’s journey so much as a study of a flawed individual. Though Assadi’s prose is occasionally heavy-handed, she summons a wonderfully sprawling, almost picaresque story, which gains power from her resistance to passing simple judgment on her protagonist.

The Monuments of Paris, by Violaine Huisman (Penguin Press). Two men loom over this hybrid novel: the author’s father, Denis, a self-fashioned “academic-businessman,” and her grandfather, Georges, an influential cultural official who, being Jewish, lost his position and his influence during the Nazi occupation of France. A composite of memoir and fictionalized family history, Huisman’s book reckons with the influence of her male forebears—both possessed of grand self-conceptions, both flagrantly unfaithful to their wives—continuing a project that she began with an earlier book of a similar kind about her mother. As she sifts through the traces of the men’s lives, she reflects on her emotional inheritance. Of her mother and father, she writes, “Her story, your story—neither story was mine, and yet I couldn’t escape them.”

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