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The Lost Sons of Omaha, by Joe Sexton (Scribner). This anatomy of a killing in 2020, at a Black Lives Matter protest, tries to recover the essences of two men involved, who were “reduced to grotesques” in the distorting landscape of social media. During a struggle, James Scurlock was shot and killed by Jake Gardner, who died by suicide a few months later. Thanks to duelling political narratives and outright disinformation, Scurlock became “a hoodlum who provoked his own death” and Gardner a “bloodthirsty white supremacist.” Sexton marshals a remarkable volume of investigative material to disentangle fact from fiction, even though he fears that, in this moment, we may find it hard to see the genuine tragedy, which arises from “flawed characters caught up in disastrous circumstances.”
Natural Light, by Julian Bell (Thames & Hudson). The artist Adam Elsheimer, who was born in Frankfurt in 1578 and died in Rome at the age of thirty-two, left only a small corpus of paintings, all but one executed in oil on copper, and most of them diminutive. (In Rome, he was called “the devil for little things.”) Yet his expertise was revered, not least by his friend Rubens, who worked on a much larger scale, and Elsheimer’s reputation has endured. This study does discerning justice to his achievement. Bell’s focus is not just on Elsheimer’s registering of natural details, as the title suggests, but also on his evocation of the supernatural—never richer than in his final masterpiece, “The Flight Into Egypt,” with its miraculous interfusing of homeliness and immensity.
Read our reviews of the year’s notable new fiction and nonfiction.
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