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The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2023

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Our cup runneth over with best books lists right now, and The New Yorker’s best books of 2023 is one of the latest lists to emerge. Funnily enough, no matter how many of these kinds of lists we read, it’s always interesting to see another — to note the overlap between lists, see books that perhaps hadn’t gotten a lot of buzz this year, and to read each publication’s editors’ notes.

So let’s dive in. This year, The New Yorker divided its list into three categories: The Essentials, Nonfiction, and Fiction & Poetry.

The Essentials

cover of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall (Metropolitan)

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall (Metropolitan)

cover of Master Slave Husband Wife by Ilyon Woo (Simon & Schuster)

Master Slave Husband Wife by Ilyon Woo (Simon & Schuster)

cover of A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen

A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove)

cover of A Flat Place by Noreen Masud (Melville)

A Flat Place by Noreen Masud (Melville)

Fiction & Poetry

cover of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure by Nicole Sealey (Knopf)

The Ferguson Report: An Erasure by Nicole Sealey (Knopf)

the centre book cover

The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi (Gillian Flynn)

For a full list of The New Yorker’s best books of 2023, click here .

Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in  Breaking in Books .

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10 of the Best Historical Fiction Books About Books

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What Book Should You Read Next?

Finding a book you’ll love can be daunting. Let us help.

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By The New York Times Books Staff

  • Published April 16, 2023 Updated Jan. 4, 2024

Fiction | Nonfiction

For more recommendations, subscribe to our Read Like the Wind newsletter, check out our romance columnist’s favorite books of the year so far or visit our What to Read page.

At The New York Times Book Review, we write about thousands of books every year. Many of them are good. Some are even great. But we get that sometimes you just want to know, “What should I read that is good or great for me ? Well, here you go — a running list of some of the year’s best, most interesting, most talked-about books. Check back next month to see what we’ve added.

We chose the 10 best books of 2023. See the full list .

I want a great American book full of humanity

The book cover of “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store,” which features a painting of a Black boy wearing a white shirt, blue cap and yellow pants, and holding a red ball.

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store , by James McBride

McBride’s latest opens with a human skeleton found in a well in the 1970s, and then flashes back to the past, to the ’20s and ’30s, to explore the remains’ connection to one town’s Black, Jewish and immigrant history. But rather than a straightforward whodunit, McBride weaves an intimate tale of community.

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I’d like to be wowed by a historical masterpiece

The fraud , by zadie smith.

Based on a celebrated 19th-century criminal trial in which the defendant was accused of impersonating a nobleman, Smith’s novel offers a vast, acute panoply of London and the English countryside, and successfully locates the social controversies of an era in a handful of characters.

Introduce me to a family I’ll love (even if they break my heart)

The bee sting , by paul murray.

This tragicomic novel follows a once wealthy, now ailing Irish family, the Barneses, as they struggle with both the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash and their own inner demons.

I want to read a book everyone is (still) talking about

Demon copperhead , by barbara kingsolver.

Kingsolver’s powerful novel, published in 2022, is a close retelling of Charles Dickens’s “David Copperfield” set in contemporary Appalachia. The story gallops through issues including childhood poverty, opioid addiction and rural dispossession even as its larger focus remains squarely on the question of how an artist’s consciousness is formed. Like Dickens, Kingsolver is unblushingly political and works on a sprawling scale, animating her pages with an abundance of charm and the presence of seemingly every creeping thing that has ever crept upon the earth.

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I’d like a cozy story that appreciates the little things

Tom lake , by ann patchett.

Set on a cherry orchard during the recent pandemic, this novel has echoes of both Anton Chekhov and Thornton Wilder. It follows three sisters in their 20s quarantining with their mother and drawing out stories from her past as an actress.

Give me a horror-soaked thriller from an American master

Holly , by stephen king.

King’s latest stars Holly Gibney, a private investigator who appeared in “The Outsider” and several other novels. She’s pulled into a missing-persons case with unlikely fiends at the center: two retired professors, who keep a cage in their basement. As our reviewer put it, “What makes King’s work so much more frightening than that of most other suspense writers, what elevates it to night-terror levels, isn’t his cruelty to his characters: It’s his kindness.”

Actually, a high-octane literary thriller is more my speed

Birnam wood , by eleanor catton.

In this action-packed novel from a Booker Prize winner, a collective of activist gardeners crosses paths with a billionaire doomsday prepper on land they each want for different purposes. The billionaire decides to support the collective, citing common interests, but some of the activists suspect ulterior motives.

I’m binge-watching ‘Slow Horses’

The secret hours , by mick herron.

This novel, Herron’s latest, is a stand-alone book on the periphery of the “Slow Horses” universe, and focuses on a slow-walking inquiry into historical wrongdoing in MI5, Britain’s domestic spy service. Expect all of Herron’s signatures: biting wit, power plays, thrilling action scenes. (Who knew that a rotting beaver corpse could be such an effective weapon?)

I’d like a true crime story told with a feminist twist

Bright young women , by jessica knoll.

Knoll’s assured novel begins near the end of the serial killer Ted Bundy’s gruesome spree: at a Florida sorority house where he attacked four sisters in 1978. Knoll pooh-poohs Bundy’s ballyhooed intelligence, celebrating instead the promise and perspicacity of his penultimate victims.

How about a heartwarming novel to suit any mood?

Remarkably bright creatures , by shelby van pelt.

This debut novel, a runaway best seller, follows a widow named Tova who starts working overnight shifts at a nearby aquarium, where she forms a bond with an octopus named Marcellus. As they grow closer, it turns out that Marcellus holds the key to one of her most painful episodes: the disappearance, decades ago, of her son.

I want every delicious detail from an icon’s life

My name is barbra , by barbra streisand.

In a chatty and candid new memoir, Streisand talks about her early determination to be famous and tallies the hurdles and helpers she met along the way. Try the audiobook, which the author narrates herself.

I plan on watching the Oscars

Killers of the flower moon , by david grann.

Now that you’ve sat through the nearly four-hour film adaptation, why not read the source material? This true-crime story follows the story of the Osage Nation, driven onto land in Oklahoma and made rich by the immense oil deposits later discovered underneath. Then, members of the tribe started to turn up dead. “The crime story it tells is appalling, and stocked with authentic heroes and villains,” our critic Dwight Garner wrote of the book, back in 2017. “It will make you cringe at man’s inhumanity to man.”

I can’t get enough WWII history

Judgment at tokyo , by gary j. bass.

Written by a veteran journalist and Princeton professor, this immersive look at the prosecution of Japanese war crimes offers an elegant account of a moment that shaped the politics of the region and of the Cold War to come.

Local bookstores | Barnes and Nobl e | Amazon

I want a revelatory biography of someone I thought I knew everything about

King: a life , by jonathan eig.

The first comprehensive biography of Martin Luther King Jr. in decades, Eig’s book draws on a landslide of recently released government documents as well as letters and interviews. This is a book worthy of its subject: both an intimate study of a complex and flawed human being and a journalistic account of a civil rights titan.

I want a dramatic history that reads like a novel

Master slave husband wife: an epic journey from slavery to freedom , by ilyon woo.

Woo’s book recounts a daring feat: the successful flight north from Georgia in 1848 by an enslaved couple disguised as a sickly young white planter and his male slave. But her meticulous retelling is equally a feat — of research, storytelling, sympathy and insight.

I want to hear Britney’s side of the story

The woman in me , by britney spears.

Spears is stronger than ever in her long-awaited memoir. She reveals plenty about her life in the spotlight, but tempers well-earned bitterness with an enduring, insistent optimism.

Actually, I want to read about art!

The slip: the new york city street that changed american art forever , by prudence peiffer.

From Ellsworth Kelly to Agnes Martin to Robert Indiana, a group of scrappy artists gathered in illegal studios at the tip of Lower Manhattan in the 1950s, trying to provide an answer to Abstract Expressionism. This group biography reflects the excitement of those years — and our debt to them.

I’d like a moving memoir about friendship and mental illness

The best minds: a story of friendship, madness, and the tragedy of good intentions , by jonathan rosen.

In his engrossing new memoir, Rosen pieces together how he and his brilliant childhood friend, Michael Laudor, ended up taking sharply divergent paths. (Laudor came to prominence as a Yale Law School graduate working to destigmatize schizophrenia, but later killed his pregnant girlfriend.) Rosen brings plenty of compassion to this gripping reconstruction of Laudor’s life and their friendship.

Honestly, I really like reading about animals

What an owl knows: the new science of the world’s most enigmatic birds , by jennifer ackerman.

There are some 260 species of owls spread across every continent except Antarctica, and in this fascinating book, Ackerman explains why the birds are both naturally wondrous and culturally significant.

Take down a dazzling, erudite rabbit hole

Doppelganger: a trip into the mirror world , by naomi klein.

After she was repeatedly confused online with the feminist scholar turned anti-vaxxer Naomi Wolf, Klein, the author of “The Shock Doctrine” and other progressive books, turned the experience into this sober, stylish account of the lure of disdain and paranoia.

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

In Lucy Sante’s new memoir, “I Heard Her Call My Name,” the author reflects on her life and embarking on a gender transition  in her late 60s.

For people of all ages in Pasadena, Calif., Vroman’s Bookstore, founded in 1894, has been a mainstay in a world of rapid change. Now, its longtime owner says he’s ready to turn over the reins .

The graphic novel series “Aya” explores the pains and pleasures of everyday life in a working-class neighborhood  in West Africa with a modern African woman hero.

Like many Nigerians, the novelist Stephen Buoro has been deeply influenced by the exquisite bedlam of Lagos, a megacity of extremes. Here, he defines the books that make sense of the chaos .

Do you want to be a better reader?   Here’s some helpful advice to show you how to get the most out of your literary endeavor .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

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A.J. Finn had a spectacular rise and fall. Now he has a new novel.

Five years after a damning new yorker profile, the author of the blockbuster novel ‘the woman in the window’ returns with ‘end of story’.

new yorker review books

If you’ve picked up a thriller in the last five years, you’ve probably seen A.J. Finn’s name on it. But not necessarily on the cover.

Since the publication of his blockbuster novel “ The Woman in the Window ” in 2018, Finn has become something of a serial blurber, adorning dozens of novels with his praise. “Loved every word,” he said of Richard Osman’s “The Thursday Murder Club.” He declared Alex Michaelides’s “The Silent Patient” “that rarest of beasts: the perfect thriller.” Of Nita Prose’s “ The Mystery Guest ” he gushed, “Wise and winning and altogether wondrous,” adding: “I was nearly hugging myself as I turned the pages of this splendid novel.”

Meanwhile, Finn’s next novel — the second part of the two-book, $2 million deal he made with William Morrow in 2016 — remained a work in progress. Expected to be published in 2020, the book, “ End of Story ,” finally lands in stores on Tuesday.

The question is: Will it be enough to save Finn’s reputation? Before answering, I need to explain the unexpected plot twist that preceded its publication.

“The Woman in the Window” was a smash hit that put its witty, camera-ready author on the cusp of celebrityhood. The book — a domestic suspense tale about an agoraphobic child psychologist who believes she has witnessed a murder — debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list and went on to sell millions of copies worldwide. Stephen King called it “delightful and chilling”; Louise Penny declared it a “tour de force.” Translated into more than 40 languages, the novel was made into a film with Amy Adams, Gary Oldman and Julianne Moore. It even inspired a spoof, “The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window,” a Netflix series starring Kristen Bell.

But something funny happened on the way to fame. In early 2019, an exposé in the New Yorker portrayed Finn, whose real name is Dan Mallory, as the kind of unreliable narrator you might find in an A.J. Finn novel. The article detailed a trail of less-than-true stories Mallory had told about himself over the years: that he had a doctorate from Oxford; that his mother had died of cancer; that he had a brain tumor; that his brother had died by suicide. Colleagues reported that during his decade as a book editor, Mallory used these struggles to elicit sympathy, further his career and vanish when things got awkward. At one point, when Mallory was working in New York at Morrow, he stopped coming into the office, a disappearance that was explained away by a series of emails from a mysterious sender claiming to be Mallory’s now-alive brother but sounding a lot like Mallory himself.

If the author of ‘Woman in the Window’ is a serial liar, can we still love his book?

Mallory eventually confessed to his fibs, sort of. Through a publicist’s statement to the New Yorker, he said that he had “severe bipolar II disorder,” which caused “delusional thoughts” and “memory problems.” Mallory’s psychiatrist told the magazine that the writer’s experience with his mother’s (real but not fatal) bout with breast cancer had contributed to his expressing “‘somatic complaints, fears, and preoccupations,’ including about cancer.” Mallory said he was “utterly terrified of what people would think of me if they knew” about his mental health problems. “Dissembling seemed the easier path. … I’m sorry to have taken, or be seen to have taken, advantage of anyone else’s goodwill.” Reaction to this expression of regret-cum-justification was mixed; some, including a letter-writer to the New Yorker with bipolar disorder , criticized the author for further stigmatizing the disease: “It was upsetting. … Mental illness does not make you a liar, a scammer, or a cheat.”

Given this heavy baggage, to consider “End of Story” on its own merits poses a challenge. Let’s try.

As a commercial suspense novel, “The Woman in the Window” — at least for the first 200 pages — is quite entertaining, if derivative for anyone who’s seen “Rear Window,” or any Hitchcock, for that matter. (Finn also defended himself against accusations that he had plagiarized plot points of Sarah A. Denzil’s “Saving April,” with he and his agent saying Finn’s book had been plotted before Denzil wrote her book, which Finn never read.) Told in the present tense, in short sentences and chapters, the tale speeds along. At its center is the distraught, pill-popping child psychiatrist Anna Fox, who is not as she appears.

In the heyday of thrillers with unreliable narrators — see “The Girl on the Train” and “Gone Girl” — Fox was a master dupe. She loved her merlot (a detail mocked to brilliant comic effect in the Kristen Bell parody) and staring out the window (like Grace Kelly but in a ragged bathrobe) at her neighbors, who were up to something but not what she thought.

What the plot lacks in plausibility, it makes up for in the zippy immediacy of the writing, even when it patters on too long, collecting a few odd descriptions along the way, as when a phone rings: “My head swivels, almost back to front, like an owl, and the camera drops to my lap. The sound is behind me, but my phone is in my hand. It’s the landline. … Another ring. And another. I shrivel against the glass, wilt there in the cold. I imagine the rooms of my house, one by one, throbbing with that noise.” Still, Anna is a compelling character (“I feel as though I’m falling through my own mind”), and readers rooted for her even if we knew she probably wasn’t telling the truth.

The 12 best thrillers of 2023

“End of Story” is written in the same staccato style. The first page ends: “A breath. Then that scream. They’ve found her.”

But things get leaden right away. The setup is complicated — as one character says, “There’s too much time to keep track of.” Nicky Hunter, the book’s protagonist, is a young journalist hired by a dying mystery writer named Sebastian Trapp to write his biography (the pair met as pen pals). Trapp invites Nicky to live at his mansion in San Francisco while she writes. Trapp, called “the champion deceiver” (wink, wink) by critics, writes novels featuring a “gentleman English sleuth” named Simon St. John. Trapp is also a murder suspect. Years before, his first wife, Hope, and his son Cole disappeared and are presumed dead. How Trapp figures into this puzzle is one of the questions Nicky hopes to resolve while researching her book.

Sleeping in the bedroom once occupied by young Cole, Nicky gets to know various members of the Trapp family: Sebastian’s bitter daughter Madeleine (“her hair is careless and blond, her shoulders round”), his beautiful second wife (“fortysomething, lavish lashes and Cupid’s-bow lips”), his handsome, troubled nephew (“six feet of built-to-last, muscles bulging within his sleeves”). All of them think and speak in a similar way — droll, coy, urbane — which is to say with the same studied cleverness that Mallory deploys in interviews. Even Sebastian’s dog, Watson, is a French bulldog, the breed favored by Mallory. And then there’s this comment by a bit character late in the book: “Moral indignation is envy with a halo.” Could that be Finn throwing shade on his critics?

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The plot drags on — the phrase “the plot thickens” appears without obvious irony. At times the book reads like a dime-store romance novel: “Up and across. The man is vast, an eclipse in coat and tie, pink linen shirt taut around his belly, like the skin of some unwholesome fruit. Black eyes lurking beneath zigzag brows. Face the color of rare beef.” (Thank you, but I think I’ll have the chicken.) Elsewhere, you can almost see Finn consulting a thesaurus. “You absquatulated,” Nicky says to Madeleine, whose desk is “a dainty escritoire that chafes her thighs.” At one point, books are “rutilant in the light.” And the ending, which I shall not spoil, raises more questions than it answers.

Finn drops heavy references to the works of literary greats: Agatha Christie and Alexandre Dumas, “The Count of Monte Cristo” in particular. The epigraph is from “Bleak House.” A copy of “Rebecca” is the key to opening the door to a hidden room. The book includes a note on sources, citing Raymond Chandler and Dorothy Sayers, among others. Perhaps the purpose is to protect himself from another accusation of plagiarism, though it also comes off as rather self-aggrandizing: Does he think his words would be confused with those of Arthur Conan Doyle?

Let me end the suspense here: Even readers looking past Finn’s personal woes — or those looking at them and wishing him well anyway — will quickly be hoping for end of story.

End of Story

By A.J. Finn

William Morrow. 408 pp. $37

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3 Books by Chinese Authors on The New Yorker’s 2022 Best Books List

3 Books by Chinese Authors on The New Yorker’s 2022 Best Books List

While it can sometimes be hard for western audiences to relate to chinese authors, these three jewels of contemporary chinese literature transcend the boundaries of culture and language.

Hayley Zhao

Few activities are cozier than reading a book by the fireplace with a cup of hot chocolate within arm’s reach. Avoid snowstorms (some might say Covid-19 ) by staying home this winter, and slowly thumb your way through these literary masterpieces by Chinese authors that recently made The New Yorker ’s list of the best books of 2022 (so far).

1. Barefoot Doctor (赤脚医生) by Can Xue (残雪)

To address the lack of medical facilities in rural China during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), ‘barefoot doctors’ — young people equipped with basic medical training — were sent to the countryside to help out where they could. As they weren’t bonafide doctors, these Chinese youth didn’t earn stable salaries and had to work the fields to make ends meet.

doctor, rural China

Set in the 1970s, the novel follows the life of Mrs. Yi, a barefoot doctor in a small village who dedicated her life to treating peasants’ ailments while struggling to find a suitable successor.

The book also explores the relationship between the living and the dead, healers and patients, and nature and humankind, while touching on supernatural elements. However, spirits don’t detract from the novel’s raw realism, as the author draws from her experience as a barefoot doctor back in the day.

countryside China

Originally published in Mandarin in 2019, an English translation of the novel finally found its way to the U.S. earlier this year.

While avant-garde writer Can Xue is not considered a mainstream success in China, her works have faired well overseas. Her best works have been translated and published in Japan, France, Italy, Germany, and Canada. In 2019, the prolific author was tipped as a front-runner for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

2. Rouge Street (艳粉街) by Shuang Xuetao (双雪涛)

Comprised of three novellas, Rouge Street is set in the young author’s hometown of Shenyang , an old industrial city in Northeast China.

The book offers a vivid description of life on its namesake street, a run-down stretch of town frequented by drunkards, gamblers, and laid-off factory workers. The work of fiction was inspired by the author’s real-life experiences while living on the streets during his teenage years.

chinese contemporary literature, The New Yorker best books

“I was neighbors with thieves, swindlers, drunks, and gamblers. There were a few honest people, but you really needed to look for them,” said Shuang in an interview with the Chinese weekly magazine Sanlian .

Despite Rouge Street’s rough appearance, the author deems it representative of a significant time in China. In the 1950s, Shenyang’s government-owned steel factories guaranteed jobs for many of its locals, but as China moved away from a planned economy, those who had relied on government jobs for a secure livelihood saw their dreams come crumbling down.

While the resurrection of China moved the country away from deep poverty and towards rapid economic growth, it also left many — epitomized by the residents of Rouge Street — flailing in the fast-changing environment.

Born in 1983, Shuang started his writing career as a movie critic. Rouge Street is his first work to be translated into and published in English.

3. The Wedding Party (钟鼓楼) by Liu Xinwu (刘心武)

First published in 1985, famed author Liu Xinwu, a known expert on Cao Xueqin’s mid-18th century masterpiece Dream of the Red Chamber , penned this story, which revolves around a wedding at the Xue family’s home in Beijing .

beijing, China

The Chinese title of the book directly translates to ‘Bell Tower and Drum Tower,’ two Beijing landmark buildings located close to one another and north of the Forbidden City .

The uniquely Beijing tale documents changes in wedding customs, restaurant culture, and living arrangements by describing events that take place within a 12-hour timeframe during the wedding.

Cover image via Douban

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March 7, 2024

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Finally, We Know About the Moscow Bombings

November 22, 2012 issue

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The Moscow Bombings of September 1999: Examinations of Russian Terrorist Attacks at the Onset of Vladimir Putin’s Rule

Ivan Sekretarev/AP Images

A destroyed apartment building at the site of one of the Moscow bombings, September 9, 1999

In 2000 Sergei Kovalev, then the widely respected head of the Russian organization Memorial, observed in these pages that the apartment bombings in Russia in September 1999, which killed three hundred people and wounded hundreds of others, “were a crucial moment in the unfolding of our current history. After the first shock passed, it turned out that we were living in an entirely different country….” 1

The bombings, it will be recalled, were blamed on Chechen rebels and used as a pretext for Boris Yeltsin’s Kremlin to launch a bloody second war against Chechnya, a republic in the Russian Federation. They also were crucial events in promoting Vladimir Putin’s takeover of the Russian presidency as Yeltsin’s anointed successor in 2000 and in ensuring his dominance over the Russian political scene ever since.

As John Dunlop points out in The Moscow Bombings of September 1999 , the attacks were the equivalent for Russians of September 11, 2001, for Americans. They aroused a fear of terrorism—along with a desire for revenge against the Chechens—that Russians had not known since Stalin used the supposed terrorist threat as a pretext to launch his bloody purges of the 1930s. Yet unlike in the American case, Russian authorities have stonewalled all efforts to investigate who was behind these acts of terror and why they happened. In the words of Russian journalist Yuliya Kalinina: “The Americans several months after 11 September 2001 already knew everything—who the terrorists were and where they come from…. We in general know nothing.”

Dunlop, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, seeks in his book to provide the “spade work” for an official Russian inquiry, if it ever were to be initiated (a highly doubtful proposition as long as Putin remains in power). He draws on investigative reporting by Russian journalists, accounts of Russian officials in law enforcement agencies, eyewitness testimony, and the analyses of Western journalists and academics. The evidence he provides makes an overwhelming case that Russian authorities were complicit in these horrific attacks. 2

Dunlop explains why the political situation in which the terrorist attacks took place is crucial for understanding them. Yeltsin and his “Family” (an entourage that included his daughter Tatyana Dyachenko, Yeltsin adviser Valentin Yumashev, who later married Tatyana, the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, and Aleksandr Voloshin, head of the presidential administration) were facing a huge crisis by the spring of 1999. Yeltsin was in ailing health and suffering from alcoholism. His popularity had fallen steeply and there was a strong possibility that his political base—a loose movement called “Unity”—would lose the parliamentary and presidential elections (respectively scheduled for December 1999 and March 2000). Yeltsin and his two daughters were facing reports charging that they had large amounts of money in secret bank accounts abroad through illegal transactions with a Swiss construction firm called Mabetex. And Berezovsky was under investigation for embezzlement when he had been running Aeroflot.

The Family’s solution to its dilemma, according to Dunlop, was a plan to destabilize Russia and possibly cancel or postpone the elections after declaring a state of emergency. In June 1999, two Western journalists, Jan Blomgren of the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet and Giulietto Chiesa, the respected, longtime Moscow correspondent for the Italian newspaper La Stampa , reported that there was going to be an act of “state terrorism” in Russia. The goal would be to instill fear and panic in the population. Chiesa wrote:

With a high degree of certitude, one can say that the explosions of bombs killing innocent people are always planned by people with political minds who are interested in destabilizing the situation in a country…. It could be foreigners… but it could also be “our own people” trying to frighten the country.

These reports were followed in July by an article by the Russian journalist Aleksandr Zhilin in the national paper Moskovskaya pravda warning that there would be terrorist attacks in Moscow. Citing a leaked Kremlin document, Zhilin wrote that the purpose would be to derail Yeltsin’s political opponents, in particular Yury Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, and the former prime minister Yevgeny Primakov. Zhilin’s information (appearing in an article entitled “Storm in Moscow”) was ignored. What he claimed appeared to be unthinkable.

Berezovsky, who fled to London in 2000 after a falling-out with Putin, was at the time, according to Dunlop, the mastermind of a plan to destabilize Russia (although not necessarily by using bombs to kill innocent people). He paid huge ransoms to extremist Chechen separatists to gain the release of Russian hostages, thereby undermining the more moderate political forces in Chechnya and encouraging an invasion of the neighboring republic of Dagestan, in August 1999, by Chechen rebel forces. According to Dunlop’s evidence, the Kremlin sponsored the incursion into Dagestan in order to provoke a conflict with Chechnya. This would provide an excuse to declare a state of emergency and postpone the elections. As numerous firsthand reports attested, the rebels were allowed into and out of Dagestan without hindrance.

Vladimir Putin, named acting Russian prime minister in August 1999, had a central part in carrying out the Dagestan operation. Putin had gained the favor of the Family and thus been anointed as Yeltsin’s successor. As head of the FSB —the successor of the KGB —before he became prime minster, he had demonstrated his loyalty to Yeltsin by managing to get Russian Prosecutor-General Yury Skuratov, who was pursuing the Mabetex corruption scandal, removed from office. Putin’s FSB had also started a campaign against the rich wife of Yury Luzhkov, Elena Baturina, by investigating one of her companies for money-laundering.

But Putin was unknown to the Russian public. If elections were to take place—and this apparently had yet to be decided upon—his chances were by no means certain. In order for the Family’s “operation successor” to succeed, something would have to occur to boost Putin’s public image and demonstrate his capacity for strong leadership. The invasion of Dagestan by Chechen rebels failed to have the desired effect of arousing widespread anti-Chechen sentiment. As Dunlop’s sources said, more violence was needed to justify a war against Chechnya, which would unite people around the new prime minister.

The Moscow Bombings makes it clear, first of all, that the FSB had advanced knowledge that the bombings would take place. As we have seen, rumors of impending terrorist attacks had surfaced as early as June 1999. Even more significant is the fact that a respected and influential Duma deputy, Konstantin Borovoy, was told on September 9, the day of the first Moscow apartment bombing, that there was to be a terrorist attack in the city. His source was an officer of the Russian military intelligence ( GRU ). Borovoy transmitted this information to FSB officials serving on Yeltsin’s Security Council, but he was ignored. At least one other credible warning of an impending attack was reported to law enforcement agencies in Moscow that same day and not acted upon.

Immediately after the September 13 explosion in Moscow, Putin claimed that the people responsible for the bombings in the Dagestan town of Buinaksk and Moscow were most likely terrorists who were connected with Osama bin Laden and had been trained in Chechnya. Some days later, on September 25, FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev echoed this theme in the pages of the newspaper Moskovskii komsomolets . Responding to suggestions in the Russian press that his agency was behind the bombings, he wrote: “The organizers are not some mythical conspirators in the Kremlin, but completely concrete international terrorists dug into Chechnya.” The FSB and the Russian Procuracy later identified the masterminds of all the attacks as two Arab mercenaries, Al-Khattab and Abu Umar, who were subsequently killed in Chechnya.

But the official explanations did not quell suspicions about FSB complicity among liberal, anti-Yeltsin journalists who were already making their own investigations. Their suspicions were intensified by a strange incident that occurred on September 22 in the city of Ryazan, about a hundred miles southeast of Moscow. 3 Residents of an apartment complex had reported unusual activity in the basement and observed that three people in a car with partially papered-over license plates had unloaded sacks whose contents they couldn’t make out. A professional bomb squad arrived and discovered that the sacks contained not only sugar but also explosives, including hexogen, and that a detonator was attached. After the sacks were examined and removed, they were sent by the local FSB to Moscow.

The entire apartment building was evacuated. Local authorities found the car used by the three who had planted the explosives, a white Zhiguli, in a nearby parking lot. To their astonishment the license plates were traced to the FSB . And when they apprehended two of the suspects, it turned out that they were FSB employees, who were soon released on orders from Moscow.

After a day and a half of silence, Patrushev announced on television that the apparent bomb had been part of a “training exercise” and that the sacks contained only sugar. The local Ryazan FSB and regular police, who had been combing the city for more explosives, expressed outrage. In the words of one police official: “Our preliminary tests showed the presence of explosives…. As far as we were concerned, the danger was real.”

If this incident was in fact just an exercise, it is difficult to understand why Vladimir Rushailo, the Russian minister of interior, who headed an antiterrorism commission, knew nothing about it beforehand. Shortly before Patrushev’s announcement, Rushailo spoke publicly about the terrorist act that had been planned in Ryazan and praised the people of that city for thwarting it. As Dunlop and many others have concluded, the materials discovered in Ryazan were the makings of a real bomb, and the FSB was caught in the act. In the light of this evidence, Dunlop writes, it has become all the more likely that the September terrorist attacks were also the FSB ’s work.

As Sergei Kovalev, who in 2002 created an unofficial commission to investigate the bombings, made clear, the authorities put out a great deal of disinformation but actually did little to refute the claims of FSB involvement. The trials of those accused of taking part in the Moscow and Volgodonsk plots were closed, so the evidence against the alleged terrorists was never made public. (The Buinaksk trial, in which six persons, all from Dagestan, were found guilty, was public, but, as Dunlop reports, the investigators routinely used physical coercion to extort confessions.)

In the first trial of the alleged attackers in Moscow, which began in May 2001, five residents of the North Caucasian Republic of Karachaevo-Cherkessia were charged with preparing the explosives used in the bombs and sentenced to life. At a second trial, held in 2003–2004, two other defendants from that same republic were found guilty of terrorism, again with the documents and even the full sentence in the case kept secret. These same two defendants were charged with carrying out the Volgodonsk bombings. It is worth noting that in the Moscow cases, none of the accused had been physically present in the city around the time of the explosions, and none of those charged in any of the cases was an ethnic Chechen.

The organizer of the Moscow terrorist acts, according to the FSB and the Russian Procuracy, was Achemez Gochiyaev, also from Karachaevo-Cherkessia; he later fled into hiding in Georgia. In Moscow, Gochiyaev was said to be operating under the false name of Makhid Laipanov. Thanks to the stubborn investigative work of Mikhail Trepashkin, a former FSB lieutenant colonel, it turns out that the man who carried out the bombings was not Gochiyaev, but Vladimir Romanovich, who worked for the FSB and was reportedly killed in an automobile accident in Cyprus in 2003. In November 2003, after Trepashkin’s findings were reported in the Russian press, he was arrested on false charges of carrying illegal weapons. Trepashkin was released briefly in 2005, but then was rearrested and remained in prison until 2007.

Meanwhile, the efforts of Kovalev’s commission to unearth the facts were stymied at every turn. (Trepashkin had been the commission’s lawyer before his arrest.) The commission could not interview witnesses under oath or gain access to documents and testimony in the cases. One important commission member, liberal Duma deputy Sergei Yushenkov, was gunned down in Moscow in April 2003, and another, the prominent investigative journalist Yuri Shchekochikhin, died suddenly in July of that year. Many suspect he was poisoned. As a result, the commission’s work ground to a halt.

A central question involved the materials used in the explosives. The day after the first Moscow apartment bombing, an FSB spokesman said that both hexogen and TNT were discovered. Patrushev himself confirmed this in his September television interview. But by March 2000 the FSB had changed its story and claimed that hexogen had not been used in the bombs. In fact, several Russian investigative journalists were able to demonstrate that hexogen was the key ingredient in all of the bombs and that hexogen can only be obtained from Russian government facilities under the control of the FSB . According to Novaya gazeta reporter Pavel Voloshin:

The targets, perpetrators and zakazchiki [those who gave orders] of the terrorist acts can be determined by the provenance of the explosives. The circulation of explosive substances in Russia is under strict state control…. To “conceal” a supply of hexogen by skirting the existing rules is de facto impossible.

Another important issue is that of the motives for the bombings. As the former high-ranking general Aleksandr Lebed pointed out in an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro in September 1999, Chechen rebels had little to gain by blowing up innocent civilians. But Yeltsin and his Family had a clear purpose: “A goal had been set—to create mass terror, a destabilization which will permit them at the needed moment to say: you don’t have to go to the election precincts, otherwise you will risk being blown up with the ballot boxes.”

As it turned out, there was no need to cancel the elections, because the Russian people rallied around Putin and his vows to seek revenge against ethnic Chechens. Russian troops began invading Chechnya on October 1. His approval ratings soared: from 31 percent in mid-August to 78 percent in November. As Dunlop notes: “The continuing upward movement in Putin’s rating was accompanied by an increase in the hatred, which soon became incandescent, on the part of ethnic Russians for Chechens.”

The evidence provided in The Moscow Bombings makes it abundantly clear that the FSB of the Russian Republic, headed by Patrushev, was responsible for carrying out the attacks. But who ordered them from on high? Dunlop concludes that it was most likely the three members of Yeltsin’s “inner circle”: Aleksandr Voloshin, Valentin Yumashev, and Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana, who were the closest to Yeltsin. But he does not address the possible role of Berezovsky.

After he left Russia, Berezovsky, on countless occasions, claimed publicly that the FSB had been behind the bombings. However, as the political observer Andrei Piontkovsky pointed out, Berezovsky himself must have had some knowledge of the impending terrorist attacks:

The highest authority in the land was the team in charge of Operation Successor (Berezovskii, Voloshin, Yumashev, Dyachenko) who were acting on behalf of an incapable Boris Yeltsin…. The aim [of the Family] was to avert a takeover of the Kremlin by the rival clan of Luzhkov and Primakov…. The shameful secret of how the Putin regime was conceived binds Putin and Berezovskii together with a single chain.

To be sure, these leading Kremlin figures had strong motives for wanting Putin to become Yeltsin’s successor. They could count on him to protect them and Yeltsin himself from charges of widespread corruption. Yet it is hard to imagine that they would have gone so far as to order bombings that they knew would kill so many innocent people. The more likely possibility is that the FSB was told by Yeltsin’s inner circle that violent acts were needed to destabilize Russia but that no specific instructions were given to blow up apartment buildings. The FSB , including its top leadership, responded by seizing the initiative.

What, then, was the role of Putin, who was prime minister at the time, and also secretary of the Security Council? In his “self-portrait,” First Person , published in 2000, Putin denied categorically that the FSB was involved: “What?! Blowing up our own apartment buildings? You know, that is really…utter nonsense! It’s totally insane. No one in the Russian special services would be capable of such a crime against his own people.” But of course the FSB , as Dunlop demonstrates, was indeed capable of committing this terrible act. And it is inconceivable that it would have been done without the sanction of Putin.

Yeltsin wrote in his memoirs Midnight Diaries that after Putin was appointed prime minister in August 1999, “Putin turned to me and requested absolute power…to coordinate all power structures.” This of course would have included the FSB . Furthermore FSB chief Patrushev was a very trusted longtime ally of Putin’s from St. Petersburg. Their ties dated back to 1975, when both joined the KGB in what was then Leningrad and worked together in the counterintelligence department. When Putin took over the FSB in July 1998, Patrushev served as his deputy, assuming Putin’s post after he became prime minister. Asked in an interview for First Person who he especially trusted, Putin named, among a few others, Patrushev.

When Putin and his wife, Lyudmila, flew by helicopter on a surprise visit to Chechnya on New Years Eve, 1999, they were accompanied by Patrushev and his wife. According to Mrs. Putin, at midnight, while en route, they drank champagne straight from the bottle. They had good reason to celebrate. Russian troops had penetrated deep into Chechnya, seizing the city of Gudermes, where Putin and his entourage were headed. Putin had just been named acting president by Yeltsin, with his victory in the upcoming March presidential contest assured. And Patrushev, with Putin’s protection, was securely in charge of the FSB , where he would remain for the next eight years. (He then moved on to the even more powerful post of secretary of the president’s Security Council, which he holds to this day.)

In the preface to his book, Dunlop cites Russian journalist Anton Orekh, who made the following observations about the Russian bombings just after the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States:

If those bombings were not accidental in the sequence of events which followed; if, to put it bluntly, they were the work of our [Russian] authorities—then everything will once and forever take its proper place. Then there is not and cannot be an iota of illusion about [the nature of] those who rule us. Then those people are not minor or large-scale swindlers and thieves. Then they are the most terrible of criminals.

Orekh’s comments were made just ten days before Putin announced that he would be running again for the Russian presidency, instead of the incumbent, Dmitri Medvedev. With Putin now set to remain in power until 2018, and possibly even six years longer, suspicions among Russians about his involvement in the 1999 bombings remain. Dunlop is convinced that the truth about September 1999 will eventually come out, although “that may take a decade or more to occur.” But as Sergei Kovalev observed in late 2007, most Russians are indifferent: “I have met people who were convinced that the accusations were true, and yet they voted for Putin with equal conviction. Their logic is simple: genuine rulers wield the kind of power that can do anything, including commit crimes.” 4 As more than twelve years of investigation, and now Dunlop’s book, have shown, Putin’s guilt seems clear, but it makes no difference.

November 22, 2012

Image of the November 22, 2012 issue cover.

The Politics of Fear

The Winner: Dysfunction

Election by Connection

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A year after the invasion of Ukraine, Russia is mired in a seemingly endless military conflict. Is Putin the master tactician underestimating his adversary?

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Amy Knight’s most recent book is Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder . She is a former Woodrow Wilson Fellow. (April 2023)

See Sergei Kovalev, “ Putin’s War ,” The New York Review , February 10, 2000. The first apartment bombing occurred in Buinaksk, a city in Dagestan, on September 4, followed by two in Moscow, on September 9 and September 13, and an explosion in the city of Volgodonsk on September 16. An earlier bombing at a Moscow shopping center on August 31, which killed one and injured thirty-nine, was not linked by Russian officials at the time to Chechen terrorists, as were the September attacks. In 2009, two men allegedly connected with Chechen separatists were convicted of this bombing.   ↩

As the book’s title suggests, Dunlop’s focus is on what happened in Moscow, but also addresses the other two bombings.  ↩

In addition to his own exhaustive research, Dunlop draws here and elsewhere on two key sources: Alexander Litvinenko and Yuri Fel’shtinsky, FSB vzryvaet Rossiyu (The FSB Blows Up Russia) (Liberty, 2002); and David Satter, Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State (Yale University Press, 2003). The book by Litvinenko and Fel’shtinsky appeared in English in 2007, a year after Litvinenko died of polonium poisoning in London.   ↩

See Sergei Kovalev, “ Why Putin Wins ,” The New York Review , November 22, 2007.  ↩

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Why Moscow Has Suddenly Been Filled with Tacky, Terrible Art

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By Masha Gessen

Its as if the city had been invaded by a horde of aliens with flamboyantly bad taste.

The center of Moscow changed gradually in the course of the past week. First, a few oddly shaped glass arches popped up along the central avenue, Tverskaya. They were vaguely reminiscent of eggs, or the outlines of eggs, with some decorative curlicues on top. Then pastel-colored eggs, slightly smaller than a person, began appearing, and then they sprouted rabbit ears. Across the street from Moscow city hall, tiny—but still huge—replicas of various churches, including Russian Orthodox and Armenian cathedrals, were plopped down. By Thursday, Moscow bloggers and journalists began asking questions. One checked the city's official purchasing register and learned that the decorations were part of something called the Moscow Spring Festival, and that they had cost the city roughly three million dollars. By Friday, the entire center of the city was covered with sculptures and installations, most of them far larger than life size. These included a plastic reproduction of the classic Russian painting “Bogatyrs” (featuring three Russian-superhero horsemen), the size of a two-story house; the head of a woman—also roughly the size of a house—in faux topiary, with a twisted hand growing out of the ground next to it; and a cartoon Soviet policeman, which was the height of a small apartment building. It was as if the city had been invaded by a horde of aliens with flamboyantly bad taste. The Moscow intelligentsia recoiled in horror.

The aesthetic assault is a logical part of Moscow's—and Russia's—political progression. Until about a year or two ago, Moscow, at least its central part, had spent half a decade or so refashioning itself as a town of hipsters. Its pose was a highly stylized recreation of Soviet life, as represented by old black-and-white films. Places like Gorky Park had been cleaned up and filled with faux Soviet shops and beach chairs, in order to create some magical Soviet land of peace and plenty, complete with artisanal sandwiches and WiFi. But peaceful as the hipsters were, they were also unmistakably Western and urban—precisely the demographic on which Putin blamed the mass protests of 2011 and 2012. They have been swept out of city government and its cultural institutions.

The new decorations, which include at least a dozen replicas of generic Soviet statues featuring young pioneers and athletes, harken back to a different Soviet legacy. The distinguishing characteristic of Soviet art and culture in the second half of the twentieth century was not so much its ideological content as its crude form: art was required to be accessible to everyone at first glance. In 1962, Nikita Khrushchev, then the secretary-general of the Communist Party, attended a large, officially sanctioned show of contemporary visual art, and railed against it by calling the artists “faggots” no fewer than eight times. To the extent that his insults could be interpreted as criticism, it was directed at the insufficient realism of the paintings. The show was dismantled and many of its participants were, like Ely Bielutin, gradually forced underground, or, like Ernst Neizvestny, into exile. The next large-scale group show of contemporary visual art was attempted in Moscow twelve years later, on a vacant lot, and this time the authorities used bulldozers to shut it down.

The situation was replicated across the arts: if writing, theatre, film, music, or architecture was not predictable and primitive, it was deemed “alien” and blocked or shut down. The current Moscow Spring decorations, eclectic as they may seem, with their mixture of themes, styles, and materials, have this in common: they are created for a public whose aesthetic senses have been profoundly dulled. To them, the hipsters, with their stylish nostalgia, are as strange as the “faggots” of the nineteen-sixties were to Khrushchev.

On Friday afternoon, Russian tourists were taking pictures near Red Square, in front of the three enormous plastic horsemen. These visitors from the small towns of Russia liked the sculptures very much. They told me that they thought they looked festive and beautiful. This was another way in which the change in Moscow's look matched a change in its outlook. As recently as a year ago, this area was covered with small stalls selling souvenirs for Western tourists: fur hats, nesting dolls, and hokey McLenin T-shirts. A few months ago, there was a marked shift in the merchandise on sale here and in other tourist vacation spots: everyone was selling T-shirts with Putin on them: Putin looking menacingly over his sunglasses, Putin and a tank, Putin cradling a tiger, bare-chested Putin, smirking Putin, and all other extant varieties of Putin. In December, I took a picture of an airport vending machine that was called a “Patriot Box” (in English), selling, exclusively, menacing-Putin merchandise. One had to wonder if this selection of souvenirs was meant as an insult to foreign tourists, or if foreign tourists were assumed to have mobilized behind Putin, like Russians, or to have exoticized him enough to want to wear his bare chest on their own.

The number of foreign tourists has been dwindling ever since Russia invaded Ukraine, more than two years ago, and now there are almost none left. The souvenirs are mostly gone, too. In their different ways, the fur hats and tanks were addressed to outsiders. The giant horsemen and the miniature cathedrals are meant for a domestic audience. After a period of external aggression, Russia is turning inward—you can see that on television broadcasts, which have stopped railing against Ukraine and even the United States, and are instead focussing on protecting Russian children (mostly from pedophiles and drugs) and preventing Russian crime (mostly pedophilia and drugs). Entrepreneurs and the bureaucrats who manage them—two groups that live by being supremely sensitive to the Kremlin's shifts of tone and focus—have adjusted. This period of inward orientation may prove short-lived—Russian politics have a way of zigzagging—but, if it lasts, the differently minded are likely to find a lot more than just their senses assaulted.

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Nadiya Savchenko Gives Russia the Finger

The Missing Piece of the Bob Marley Biopic

A new film about the reggae legend sanitizes his commitment to social justice—and loses what made him so magnetic.

Kingsley Ben-Adir as Bob Marley in “Bob Marley: One Love”

Nearly 20 years ago, during one of many family trips back to Ethiopia, I spent months wandering through the sprawling capital city. All summer, it seemed, the drivers and cyclists of Addis Ababa were blasting the Ethiopian pop star Teddy Afro ’s “Promise,” an infectious, reggae-inflected ode more often referred to by the name of the musician it lionizes: “Bob Marley.”

That 2005 song praised Marley for his commitment to Africa—and argued, more than 23 years after his death, that he be reburied in the motherland. (When he died, Marley was buried inside a small Ethiopian Orthodox–style church in Nine Mile, the hilltop Jamaican village where he was born.) Marley’s wife, Rita, told the press at the time that she intended to exhume his remains, explaining that he saw Ethiopia as his “spiritual resting place.” Though he’s most associated with Jamaica, Marley’s purview extended to a broader Pan-African ethos informed by his commitment to Black-liberation struggles—such as the fight to free Zimbabwe from British rule, which he helped commemorate with a 1980 concert. Crucial to his Rastafari worldview, which he embedded in his music, was a reverence for Africa as the source of Black life.

Thinking back to the Marley fanaticism I encountered in Ethiopia, and all that I’ve learned about his music and life in the years since, I found myself especially disappointed by his anodyne representation in a new film. Bob Marley: One Love bills itself as the story of the musician’s rise and overcoming of adversity. In practice, the movie flattens the revolutionary artist into a saintlike figure committed to peace. But “peace” wasn’t some generic aspiration for Marley. He was specifically interested in resisting the racist, colonial systems that Rastafari teachings identify as a source of suffering among Black people around the world. Sanitizing that kind of heady preoccupation with social justice might be typical for a mainstream biopic, but it does Marley’s rich legacy a tremendous disservice.

One Love begins with standard-issue fare for music movies: The fearless prodigy has complicated feelings about a big performance. In Marley’s case, it’s the Smile Jamaica Concert of 1976, an 80,000-person show and protest against political violence. Days before the performance, he and his band are targeted by gunmen, and Marley is shot in his Kingston home. He presses forward anyway, injured but undeterred. “His guitar is his machine gun,” a white record-label executive observes.

The Trinidadian British actor Kingsley Ben-Adir is charismatic and surprisingly capable as Marley, capturing the musician’s physicality with clear attention to his idiosyncrasies, like in the way he thrashes about onstage with zealous abandon. His accent doesn’t quite hit the mark, though, despite the actor’s diligent work to immerse himself in the signature lilt of Marley’s Jamaican patois. The dissonance is jarring at times, particularly during scenes that portray the music-making process: When the real Marley’s singing voice plays (Ben-Adir largely didn’t re-create his vocals), it’s hard not to wish we could hear the musician speak for himself, too. In the scenes when the music is more naturally integrated, Marley’s catalog helps keep the film afloat: Snapshots of archival performances that include real-life footage are more affecting than the many jam-session scenes in which Ben-Adir’s unfortunate dreadlock wig distracts from the unfolding musical alchemy.

One Love spends much of its runtime on the making of Exodus , the 1977 album that catapulted Marley and his band, the Wailers, to international superstardom. After the Smile Jamaica Concert, the band absconds to London, where they discover dreary weather, racist police, and a new punk sound that enlivens their music. This is where the screenplay (which is credited to four writers) most suffers in its elision of Marley’s Rastafarianism. Many of Marley’s most beloved records explicitly called for oppressed people, especially those in African and Caribbean countries, to rise up against harmful power structures. His songs reflected core beliefs he held, but the film muddles its portrayal of both the religion and the musical revolutions it inspired. Imagine a Malcolm X film that didn’t address his Muslim faith, which was inextricable from his push for civil rights and Black liberation.

Read: The teenage girl leading Jamaica’s new reggae scene

Instead of showing why a young Marley was drawn to the strident Afrocentricity of Rastafa ri, One Love positions his early search for spiritual belonging as the inevitable outcome of feeling abandoned by his absentee white father, Norval. Woozy flashbacks and dream sequences establish Norval as a mysterious figure appearing on horseback in a blazing field. By the end of the film, he’s replaced in these dream sequences by the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, whom some Rastafari deify as Jah, and whose embrace seems to cure Marley’s feelings of paternal rejection. These surrealist interludes are a lot to handle. But the film’s deeper sin is that it fails to round out the contours of Marley’s attraction to the religious practice that he imbued in all his music. Marley’s feelings about his family were part of what influenced his faith, by all accounts, and songs such as “Corner Stone” were a raw articulation of that deep wound.

In relegating Marley’s pacifism to the realm of interpersonal conflicts, One Love fails to establish crucial context: Jamaica’s fight against British colonialism, which tied into Marley’s Pan-African beliefs. The country gained its independence in 1962, when Marley was 17, and he died before witnessing its second full decade free of British rule. The gifted biracial crooner of the film serves as a bridge between rival gang leaders and politicians, between white and Black, championing a naive peace stripped of any real conviction about the roots of his people’s oppression. For the most part, he’s closer to the placid icon of dorm-room posters and branded weed paraphernalia, a caricature that arose in part because Marley’s Rastafari principles included using cannabis as a sacred rite. That’s a strange fit alongside Marley’s actual music, especially the searching hymn that plays toward the end of the film. “ Selassie Is the Chapel ” casts the African emperor as a savior from earthly terrors. The brooding ode was originally written and produced by Mortimer Planno, the Rastafari elder who greeted Selassie when he visited Jamaica four years into the country’s independence. To hear Marley sing of the “Conquering Lion of Judah” is to feel him invoke the weighty promise of that convergence between prophecy and fulfillment.

It might be tempting to instinctively blame the biopic’s haphazard hagiography on family involvement. That’s a common pitfall of musician-driven films, and several Marleys do have producing credits on One Love . But I’m not convinced that this alone explains its ideological blankness or its reluctance to address the more unsavory elements of Marley’s persona, such as his habitual womanizing. His son Ziggy was also an executive producer on the 2012 documentary Marley , a nearly exhaustive look at the artist’s life that included critical perspectives from his children and former bandmates. The legendary Bunny Wailer, one of Marley’s original two bandmates, spoke about his strained departure from the early group; Cedella Marley, one of his children with Rita, offered candid reflections on the difficulty of having him as a father.

Glossy artist biopics, which tend to use an accessible narrative structure propelled by recognizable actors, are understandably appealing to some viewers. But many of these films—such as the 2022 Whitney Houston movie , and the 2021 Aretha Franklin movie —fail to make much commercial impact, or burnish their subject’s legend. By contrast, the messy, contradictory revelations in Marley offered valuable insight into what the musician’s art demanded of other people—and what kinds of sacrifices are taken for granted when a musician produces a truly world-altering catalog.

Sinless deities don’t make art; real, flawed people do. For the casual Marley enthusiast, especially those without early memories attached to his work, One Love might offer a less daunting entry point than Marley , which can feel intimidating in its scope. But his music and ideas—and all the people who helped usher them into this fractured world—deserve better.

Schrafft's

In Eating My Words Mimi Sheraton fondly remembers childhood visits to Schraftt's where the “stern and precise schoolmarm waitresses” had Irish brogues. Mimi's standard lunch was an egg salad or cream cheese sandwich with the crusts cut off, washed down with hot chocolate with whipped cream in the winter or a peach ice-cream soda in summer. She also liked the hot butterscotch sundaes with vanilla ice cream and toasted almonds.

In April 1946 there were 34 Schrafft's in the metropolitan area. Work had begun on a new one at E. 57 th and Third Avenue in Manhattan, the first to be built since the war. According to The New York Times , it had translucent glass blocks on the exterior and light mahogany wood inside. The restaurants had been in Brooklyn as well since 1915. There was one on Flatbush Avenue and another downtown. Schrafft's also had a factory in the borough that turned out the wafer thin mints sold at the retail counter. But the main candy factory was in Boston. The bakery was on West. 23 rd St. in Manhattan next to the executive offices,

“Overheard at Schrafft's” was a frequent introduction to a humorous anecdote in The New Yorker in the day . They can be found here at the magazine's archives. Schrafft's was where the portly matrons that Helen Hokinson satirized in her cartoons in the magazine lunched. But the patronage was broader. In 1946 businessmen came in for oysters and theatergoers stopped in for a bite before or after a show. Matinée days particularly bustled. Taking the kids to Schrafft's for ice cream or for a mother/daughter lunch was a tradition in many middle-class families. At dinner time, you might find solitary women of modest means who had come in for a frugal night out. It was a popular spot for breakfast for both genders, a place to read the paper over eggs and bacon and a cup of coffee. Shoppers picked up candy or pastries from the retail counter to take home.

The image Schrafft's sought to project was of a genteel place that served “plain, clean, wholesome American cooking,” in the words of Frank Shattuck who had started the company's restaurant business. They had no ethnic dishes on their menu. Many Schrafft's had dark wood paneling and Colonial furniture. There were bud vases on the tables. But gentility in the first half of the 20th century had its dark side. Schrafft's discouraged black patrons. They would be seated politely without comment and then ignored by the wait staff. White women did not wait on black people back then. This was slowly changing.

A dainty, ladylike sandwich was a common lunch choice for Schrafft's patrons. The most popular were the chopped egg sandwich cut into thirds with the crusts removed and the chopped chicken sandwich with a thin layer of filling on crustless bread cut into quarters. Chicken a la king was a popular alternative. This was standard tearoom fare. The meal often would be followed by an ice cream sundae or other indulgent dessert. This disconnect did not escape commentators and wags of the time. It had a lot to do with the schizoid nature of the company. Schrafft's began as a Boston-based candy company but around the turn of the 20 th century its New York sales representative Frank G. Shattuck recognized the business opportunity in creating a place for women to dine economically and comfortably. The result was a cross between a tearoom and a soda fountain. Schrafft's candy and baked goods were available at a retail counter in the front of the store and the candy was displayed in the windows.

Most Manhattan Schrafft's also had bars. Earlier in the century the Temperance Movement promoted soda fountains as an alternative socializing opportunity to bars. Can you just see the guys meeting at a soda fountain after their shift at the factory or day at the office for a round of banana splits? In time the management of Schrafft's recognized that some Manhattan women wanted a respectable place to meet their lady friends for cocktails. The place bustled at cocktail hour, filling the business gap between lunch and dinner. Popular cocktails including Manhattans, martinis, grasshoppers, golden fizzes, pink ladies and old fashioneds.

The waitresses, many of whom were hired straight off the boat from Ireland, wore black dresses with crisp white collars and cuffs, dainty white aprons and hair nets. They carried food to the table on trays balanced on extended arms. The stores, which was what Schrafft's called their establishments, also had hostesses who wore street clothes rather than uniforms. One hostess stood in the front. The floor hostess would hold up fingers to show how many seats were available. She was also in charge of making sure the tables were quickly cleaned and reset. At the swanky, five-story Schrafft's at Fifth & 46 th St. the hostesses wore long gowns. At every store the waitresses had a morning lineup when they would be inspected for cleanliness and neatness. The company ran a tight ship. Chipped tableware was not tolerated. Coffee had to be discarded after 30 minutes.

Schrafft's was one of the first restaurant chains to hire women managers and most of the cooks were women, who Shattuck believed were better able to prepare food that tasted homemade, although they had to strictly follow the authorized recipes. A diner could not special order at Schrafft's. During the Depression the city instituted a regulation forbidding women from working in restaurants past 10 PM. As a result Schrafft's hired male waiters for the dinner shift. John Forsythe and Kirk Douglas were among the aspiring young actors who waited tables there. Men already had been employed at the bar and soda fountain. Schrafft's also ran company cafeterias and executive dining rooms. The rules were strict and there were no tips, but the hours were shorter. That's where some of the older waitresses ended up.

Not all Schrafft's followed the standard design. The one at 61 Fifth Avenue that opened in 1938 had a curved facade with windows in assorted sizes, a two-level interior decorated with murals and leather-covered chairs. The company also had a men's grill at their Bond Street location. There was a Schrafft's across the street from “21” and an elegant one in the Chrysler Building . Here is the one on West 57 th .

The stores continued to flourish during the War although they had to make menu revisions to accommodate shortages. Sometimes honey was used to sweeten baked goods. On the city-mandated meatless Tuesdays and Fridays in 1945, Schrafft's served vegetables a la king on hot johnny cakes with a slaw of shredded cabbage and orange sections. They reduced the butterfat content in their ice cream. Like Horn & Hardart they had a problem with patrons walking off with the sugar packets.

On October 1945, two months after the war had ended, the company announced it was reducing the work week for hourly personnel to 44 hours from 48 at the same weekly pay, with time and a half for overtime. They said this was expected to lead to more hiring. A help wanted display ad that ran in the Sunday News on April 14, 1946, offered positions in the dining room, kitchen and steam tables. Unlike most establishments, Schrafft's provided the uniforms. No experience was necessary.

In 1946 some foods were returning after a postwar absence. Jane Nickerson's food column in The New York Times in March noted the availability again at Schrafft's of Martha Ann spiced almonds and mint almonds. She also wrote in another column that month that hot cross buns were on sale through the Lenten season on Wednesdays and Fridays at the retail counter for 41 cents a dozen. Meat was an issue as it was everywhere. Restaurants were required under federal price control laws to maintain the same price on meat dishes that they had in 1943. Schrafft's would continue to grow in the postwar era through the 1960s then slowly fade away like many institutions of the era in the 1970s.

See When Everybody Ate at Schrafft's:Memories, Pictures, and Recipes from a Very Special Restaurant Empire by Joan Kanel Slomansen for more on the company and its history.

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