david bowie is book review

David Bowie Is

Victoria broackes  ( editor ) , christopher frayling  ( contributor ) , howard goodall  ( contributor ) ...more.

320 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2013

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The 15 Best David Bowie Books

By Corey Seymour

Today marks four years since David Bowie died—two days after his 69th birthday, when he also released his final, monumental album, Blackstar . And while there was no shortage of books about him during his lifetime, the market has virtually exploded since his passing. It’s no big secret why: The nature of Bowie’s fame, genius, influences, and influence is an all-encompassing thing that’s relevant to art and photography, fashion, theater and performance, and every shade and school of critical analysis. (There’s also no dearth of scandalous tell-alls and tabloid-y, fly-by-night biographies, which we’re ignoring here out of respect—a man who orchestrated his passing with the level of discretion and artistic triumph that Bowie did doesn’t deserve to be feasted on by scavengers.)

Here’s our pick of the best Bowie books for every person, occasion, and special interest—whether you’re merely interested in looking at some pictures or have committed yourself to a self-taught course in Advanced Bowie Studies.

All products featured on Vogue are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

The Rise of David Bowie, 1972–1973 by Mick Rock

For pure visual splendor focusing on Bowie’s most well-known persona, Ziggy Stardust, nothing beats this volume of Bowie-blessed photographs from the artist’s official photographer and creative partner—with half of the photos in it published for the first time. For mesmerizing, fly-on-the-wall documentation of Bowie’s glitter-clad, glam-rock, his/her Ziggy, nothing beats this.

On Bowie by Rob Sheffield

Still personal—but less weird than Brooker’s search for meaning—is Rolling Stone contributing editor Rob Sheffield’s tribute, written at lightning speed in the immediate aftermath of Bowie’s passing. Like The Last Interview , it’s a slim volume that packs a punch: While Sheffield’s knowledge of Bowie runs deep, this is neither a showy book nor an academic one, and while his sense of loss is palpable, On Bowie isn’t maudlin or morose—it’s deeply informed, often hilarious, and properly celebratory.

The Age of Bowie: How David Bowie Made a World of Difference by Paul Morley

Morley, a veteran British rock critic, pours blood, sweat, and tears on the pages in this freewheeling, deeply informed, and, yes, ragingly personal admixture of biography, memoir, loving tribute, cultural theory, and enlightened self-help book. Pretentious? At times, wildly—but that’s part of its immense charm. Morley—who conjured the theoretical framework and title of the David Bowie Is exhibitions—states early on that “everybody has their own Bowie,” and it’s his refusal to put constraints on either Bowie or his own rococo rendering of him that that makes these 496 pages so indispensable.

Strange Fascination: Bowie: The Definitive Story by David Buckley

While this biography was published a decade before Bowie died—look elsewhere for coverage of his death, his legacy, and his last two albums—this is likely the most insightful critical biography we have, deeply learned about not just the songs, but the albums, the tours, the personas, and the artistic vision. You’ll have to put a bit more into it than most of the rest of these books, but you’ll reap more from it as well.

‘Me and Mr. Jones’ Is a First-Hand View of David Bowie’s Rise to Superstardom, in All Its Glory and Cruelty: Book Review

By Jem Aswad

Executive Editor, Music

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Considering the vast number of books published every year about David Bowie — or, for that matter, the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Prince — a new one had better have either fresh info or fresh insights. Thankfully, Suzi Ronson’s “Me and Mr. Jones: My Life with David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars” delivers on both counts.

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Through it all, Suzi Ronson not only spent many hours with Bowie – she handled his and the band’s wardrobes and was waiting with a cigarette and glass of wine when he came offstage every night – she had a front-row seat to the drama of his rise and its impact on him and everyone around him. Most fascinatingly, she experienced the fluctuations in his behavior, common to so many superstars: the way he could shift from cold and distant to intensely attentive from one day to the next — and how, on one night, a haircut appointment turned into an intimate dinner and the one time she slept with him (he and Angie famously had an open marriage).

Yet she also saw the brutal callousness he could display when it came to business (the musicians in the Spiders From Mars were notoriously underpaid) and when he sensed betrayal. When the group rebelled during the first American tour, after learning that guest pianist Mike Garson’s salary was literally ten times more than theirs, he launched a campaign that found him parting ways with all of the Spiders within a year. Drummer Mick “Woody” Woodmansey, who had spoken disparagingly to and about Bowie during the tour, and bassist Trevor Bolder were seemingly singled out for exceptionally cruel treatment: Bowie not only didn’t tell them he was breaking up the band — they didn’t find out until he announced onstage at the end of the tour’s last concer t — Woodmansey was told on his wedding day that he was fired.

Suzi did not begin a romantic relationship with Mick Ronson until the very end of his time with Bowie, but they would remain together from that point until his death from liver cancer in 1993 (the same disease that would take Bowie nearly 25 years later). Mick had a more agreeable parting with Bowie and Defries, the latter of whom was positioning him for solo superstardom. But despite the over-the-top tactics that had worked so well for Bowie – a billboard on Sunset Strip, limos, expensive hotels – Ronson, although an enormously talented and charismatic musician, was not a superstar frontman. The book also covers that era, and whether intentionally or not, the sense of entitlement Mick and Suzi felt during that time comes through.

As has happened countless times, the lofty treatment and talk of superstardom went to their heads, although it wouldn’t be long before they came crashing back down to earth (and realized that those limos and hotel rooms were recoupable from Ronson’s earnings). Ronson was back in his more-comfortable role as guitarist and collaborator before 1974 ended, and the book covers his subsequent work with Mott the Hoople, Ian Hunter and Bob Dylan – although it drops off, rather curiously and abruptly, in the late ‘70s.

Suzi, who would not see Bowie or Angie again after they parted ways late in 1973, is unvarnished and unforgiving in her opinions about the star’s cruelty. “He blamed [disloyalty and] cocaine for his bad behavior. I laugh when I
read this and don’t believe it for a second,” she writes. “It was raw, naked ambition, and a bloody-mindedness that is particular to a few people… It was revenge and control.

The talent, charisma, ego and survival skills it takes to become a superstar also tend to make people manipulative at best and cruel at worst, and this book displays all of the above in Bowie and more. “Me and Mr. Jones” is a first-hand view of the glory and brutality that comes with a rapid rise to stardom.

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The Books That Mattered Most to David Bowie, Bibliophile

Literary influences, from nietzsche to mishima.

David Bowie once recounted a story from the filming of The Man Who Fell to Earth in 1975. Relocating from Los Angeles to New Mexico for the shoot, he brought hundreds upon hundreds of books with him, a “traveling library” that he ported in cases large enough to hold an amplifier. His director, Nicolas Roeg, seeing Bowie sifting through piles of books, told him that “your great problem, David, is that you don’t read enough .” Bowie said he didn’t realize for months that Roeg was joking. Instead he berated himself, asking “What else should I read?”

Not the typical 1970s rock star anecdote. Throughout his life, Bowie was a colossal bibliophile, with books as the one habit he never relinquished. When he wasn’t recording or touring, he appears to have spent much of his days reading. Late in life, he was a regular sighting at his local bookstore, McNally Jackson in Soho, and a photograph taken of him in 2013 parallels his Man Who Fell to Earth story. Again, Bowie’s sitting on the floor surrounded by stacks of his books, here including Geeta Dayal’s Another Green World and Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled .

Many rock songs have been hatched from books: “Sympathy for the Devil” (Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita ); Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights”; the Mekons’ “Only Darkness Has the Power” (Paul Auster’s The Locked Room ) and so forth. But Bowie’s catalog is particularly rife with songs indebted to fiction and nonfiction, to short stories and (laughing) gnomic philosophical treatises. He even wrote lyrics via a literary device—William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin-style cut-up, where he’d scissor up a page from, say, a novel that he was reading and use randomly-selected text strips to kick-start a verse. (By the 1990s, he had software do the grunt work for him.)

It’s telling that among Bowie’s final public statements was a list of his Top 100 books, offered as part of the David Bowie Is museum exhibit. As Bowie has apparently left no memoir behind, the closest that he ventured to autobiography is this list of books. Some he chose because he wanted his fans to read them, but many selections have a deeper resonance in his work.

The following are some books that influenced Bowie’s songwriting, from his early records in the 1960s to his last albums.

Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

Bowie’s 1967 debut greatly consists of third-person narrative songs: the most “realist” work, lyrically, he’d ever do. At age 19, he was consumed with the “Angry Young Men” British authors, with John Braine’s Room at the Top , Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar and There Is a Happy Land and John Osbourne’s Look Back in Anger among his favorites (the latter two would title Bowie songs). But the most influential was Alan Sillitoe’s 1959 short story collection, which Bowie raided for early songs. He used the plot of Sillitoe’s “Uncle Ernest” for his “Little Bombardier,” while his own “Uncle Arthur” came from elsewhere in Sillitoe’s collection, “The Disgrace of Jim Scarfedale.”

Henrich Harrer, Seven Years In Tibet

Bowie discovered Buddhism in the mid-1960s, befriending exiled Tibetan lamas in London and devouring Heinrich Harrer’s 1952 memoir. Harrer had lived in Tibet at a time when few Westerners had ever ventured there, and documented its last days as an independent kingdom before the Chinese conquest. Harrer’s depictions of the Dalai Lama’s Potala palace would shape Bowie’s 1967 “Silly Boy Blue,” the song of a dreaming monk in Lhasa. And decades later, Bowie named a song on his Earthling album after Harrer’s book. In his own “Seven Years in Tibet,” Bowie returned in the mid-1990s to find a land still under the tyrant’s heel, still dreaming resistance.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Though he once joked that he’d only read the book jacket of Nietzsche’s ode to the overman, Bowie was being modest. Zarathustra would be central to shaping Bowie’s work in the late 1960s and early 1970s—he’d quarry images from it for songs including “All the Madmen,” “The Supermen,” “Quicksand,” and “Ashes to Ashes.”

Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End

Clarke’s 1953 SF novel of a race of alien beings who come to Earth to midwife the next step in human evolution has echoes in Bowie’s generational “changing of the guard” songs of the early 1970s, particularly “Oh! You Pretty Things” and “Changes.”

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

Though more inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film of Anthony Burgess’ novel, with Droog uniforms as a template for Spiders From Mars stage outfits, Bowie was also fascinated by Burgess’ invented “Nadsat” language for his narrator’s voice. It inspired his own attempts in the 1970s to create a “fake world…that hadn’t happened yet.” Decades later, on his last album, Bowie wrote a funny, nasty song chock full of Nadsat (“Girl Loves Me”).

“Violence and glamour and speed, gesture and combustion, these were the things he valued—none else.” Cohn’s 1967 portrait of a rock star/force of chaos, based in part on Elvis and P.J. Proby, heralds the plastic rocker “leper messiah” that Bowie created. Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane are inconceivable without it.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Up there with A Clockwork Orange in terms of books that Bowie couldn’t leave alone. He tried to write a musical based on it and though being denied the rights by Sonia Orwell, basically did it anyway with Diamond Dogs . He later said that Orwell’s world had felt like his own upbringing in postwar Brixton and Bromley, and throughout his life Bowie returned to images of people trapped in systems of control, whether those of religion or government.

Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

MIND YOUR BICAMERAL/ YOUR BICAMERAL MIND, Bowie etched into the runout groove of his 1979 “Boys Keep Swinging” single, along with a lyre symbol. Jaynes’ 1976 treatise argued that the brain’s two lobes were once isolated, so early humans “heard” thoughts from one lobe as the voices of gods—it was the sort of compelling crackpot theory that Bowie loved. “The speaker was an angel ,” he sang in “Look Back in Anger,” a possible reference to Jaynes’ claim that the emergence of angels, ca. 1000 BC, was a sign the barriers between the brain’s halves were breaking down.

Otto Friedrich , Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s

Bowie lived in West Berlin in the late 1970s and spent his time there as a literary reenactor. He yearned to be in the Berlin of Christopher Isherwood’s novels, to the point of even looking at times like Michael York’s character in Cabaret . One tourist guide was Friedrich’s portrait of Weimar Berlin, a doomed city of exiles, revolutionaries and artists. Bowie would later use a Vladimir Nabokov quote from Friedrich’s book in “I’d Rather Be High.”

Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art

When Bowie was cutting Scary Monsters in 1980, he had Dadaist artists on the brain, telling an interviewer that as the Dadaists had said art was dead in 1924, “what the hell can we do with it from there on”? This sense of “lateness” and struggle pervaded his album. He was taken with Dadaist artist Richter’s 1964 study, to the point where he nicked whole lines from it for “Up the Hill Backwards.”

Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor

Ackroyd’s novel, with its interwoven narratives of an occultist architect in 18 th Century London who consecrates his churches with human sacrifices, and a 20 th Century “rationalist” detective, is deep in the roots of Bowie’s “art murder” mystery album, 1.Outside .

Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow (The Sea of Fertility Quartet)

Japanese author Yukio Mishima was among Bowie’s favorites, with the former’s The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea found in everything from “Heroes” to Bowie’s regular internet pseudonym “sailor.” And “Heat,” the closing track of The Next Day , opens with a reference to Spring Snow , the first part of Mishima’s last work, the Sea of Fertility quartet, whose thematic concerns of reincarnation, glamour, decadence, death and transformation are in Bowie’s late albums as well.

Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders

It opens with Weschler stumbling upon David Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology, a storefront museum in Culver City, California, whose exhibits include “piercing devil” bats and horned African “stink ants.” Intrigued, Weschler chronicles the bizarre holdings of Wilson’s collection. He soon finds that listed details have little connection with scientific fact. Is Wilson a fraud? Is the collection itself Weschler’s fiction? Walking the thin line between magic and science, gifted con men and obsessive curators, strange truth and honest fakery, Mr. Wilson invokes the work of David Bowie as much as anything did.

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‘Moonage Daydream’ Review: David Bowie’s Sound and Vision

Brett Morgen’s new documentary about the singer uses archival material, not talking heads. But the film is more séance than biography.

By A.O. Scott

Listen to This Article

The usual way of making a documentary about a famous, no-longer-living popular musician is to weave talking-head interviews (with colleagues, journalists and random celebrities with nothing better to do) around video clips of the star onstage and in the studio. The story tends to follow a standard script: early struggles followed by triumph, disaster and redemption. Movies like this clog the streaming platforms, catering to eager fans and nostalgic dads.

Brett Morgen’s new film about David Bowie is something different. Titled “Moonage Daydream” after a semi-deep cut from Bowie’s “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars,” and showing in IMAX as well as other formats, it’s less a biography than a séance. Instead of plodding through the chronology of Bowie’s life and career, Morgen conjures the singer’s presence through an artful collage of concert footage and other archival material, including feature films and music videos. There are a lot of great songs, and thanks to Morgen’s dexterous editing, Bowie himself seems to provide the narration, a ghostly effect ( he died in 2016 ) that resonates with some of his ideas about time, consciousness and the universe. He is not so much the subject of the film as its animating spirit.

“Does it matter? Do I bother?” he asks at the beginning, musing on the transience of existence. For anyone who grew up following the iterations of his persona and the evolution of his music, the answer, at least as far as the movie is concerned, is emphatically yes.

Morgen, who has made documentaries about the Chicago 7 , Kurt Cobain, Jane Goodall and the Hollywood producer Robert Evans , subordinates the dry facts of history to the mysteries of personality. “Moonage Daydream” is interested in what it felt like to be David Bowie, and also, as a corollary, what it felt like, especially in the 1970s and ’80s, to be interested in him. Context and evaluation — the sources and influences of his music; its relation to what was happening in the wider world — are left to the viewer to supply or infer. The work, and the artist’s presence, are paramount.

For the most part, this approach works. Though Morgen bends and twists the timeline when it suits him, he traces an arc from the early ’70s into the ’90s, beginning in the Ziggy Stardust years and immersing the audience in Bowie’s otherworldly charisma at that moment. His bright orange hair, his brilliantly inventive fashion sense, his frank bisexuality and his almost casual mastery of divergent musical idioms made him an irresistible puzzle for the media and an idol to the restless and curious young.

Appearing onstage in dresses, flowing suits and shiny space gear, he undid gender conventions with insouciant ease. He changed his look and his sound from one album to the next, leading critics to question his authenticity and interviewers to wonder about his true self.

That mystery seems more easily solved now than it might have back then, and “Moonage Daydream” explains some of Bowie’s process and a lot of his thinking. The combined effect of the present-tense voice-over and the earlier interviews is to emphasize Bowie’s essential sanity. Perhaps more than most of his peers, he seems to have approached even excesses and transgressions with a certain intellectual detachment, taking an Apollonian perspective on an essentially Dionysian form.

His postwar childhood is dealt with quickly. He notes the coldness of his parents’ marriage, and the influence of his older half brother, Terry Burns, who introduced young David to jazz, outlaw literature and modern art. Mainly, though, “Moonage Daydream” tacks away from Bowie’s personal life, editing sex and drugs out of its version of rock ’n’ roll.

His first marriage, to Angie Barnett, isn’t mentioned at all. His second, to Iman, marks a transition from restless solitude to contented middle age. The emphasis, in both the narration and the images, is on Bowie’s work. His explanations of changes in style and genre are illuminating, and illustrated by shrewd musical selections. You don’t hear all the obvious hits — where was “Young Americans” ? — but you do get a sense of his range and inventiveness, and a taste of some less-well-remembered songs. I was glad to be reminded of the anthemic “Rock ’n’ Roll With Me.”

Watching Bowie move through the phases of his career, from the avant-garde to the unapologetically pop, it’s clear, at least in retrospect, that his creative life was a series of experiments in an impressive variety of media. Morgen devotes some time to Bowie’s painting and sculpture, and to his acting, in films like “The Man Who Fell to Earth” and “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” and in a Broadway production of “The Elephant Man.”

Bowie was a pretty good actor, and also — this is shown rather than said — an exceptionally good dancer. His devotion to his work, and the pleasure he took in it, are the themes of “Moonage Daydream.” It’s a portrait of the artist as a thoughtful, lucky man. And perhaps surprisingly, given the mythology that surrounds so many of his contemporaries, a happy one.

Audio produced by Tally Abecassis .

Moonage Daydream Rated PG-13. Rock ’n’ roll, the way it used to be. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. In theaters.

A.O. Scott is a critic at large for the Book Review. He joined The Times in 2000 and was a film critic until early 2023. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism." More about A.O. Scott

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THE RISE OF DAVID BOWIE, MICK ROCK BOOK

Tribute to David Bowie by his official photographer, Mick Rock. Compiled in 2015 with Bowie's permission, this collection reviews the musical, theatrical and sexual revolution that was the avant-garde Ziggy Stardust world tour of 1972 and 1973, with on-stage snapshots, backstage portraits and press clippings. A tribute to an exceptional artist. Language: English.

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• Albumography
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• Bowie on Film

Book by book, year by year, the ultimate literary trip through Bowie’s greatest decade.

Darkness looms in 1974. It could be the winter energy crisis. It could be The Exorcist. Or it could be the shock that Britain’s biggest pop star, David Bowie, is about to leave its shores for good.

Bidding the corpse of glam, Ziggy’s haircut and loyal ‘Bowietania’ farewell, the plan is to storm America with his highly theatrical Diamond Dogs tour. But by opening night he’s already wishing he was Barry White instead. Then there’s that nasty sniff he can’t get rid of. And that fly in his milk. And the suspicion that, much like every other teen idol named David, fame is driving him completely out of his mind …

London – Friday 10th May, book launch party for ‘Bowie Odyssey 74’

The London book launch will be held at The Social in the heart of London, on the 10th May. The New Cue hosts the launch of  Bowie Odyssey 74 , the fifth volume in Simon Goddard’s epic 10-book series following the Starman through the 70s. 

Simon will be talking to journalist and author Ted Kessler and signing copies.

Tickets available here.

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Pulitzer-winning writer David Mamet calls Hollywood’s diversity efforts 'fascist totalitarianism'

During the L.A. Times Festival of Books, David Mamet spoke out against the initiatives in Hollywood to create diversity, equity, and inclusion - referred to as DEI.

Legendary playwright, filmmaker and Pulitzer Prize-winning screenwriter David Mamet did not mince his words 

The scribe, who is behind The Untouchables , Glengarry Glen Ross , Oleanna , The Postman Always Rings Twice , and the very underrated Wag the Dog , talked about the entertainment industry’s efforts to drive greater diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in its ranks. And he's no fan. 

“DEI is garbage,” Mamet told the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.

He added the industry’s DEI efforts amounted to “fascist totalitarianism.”

The playwright and director, who has worked in Hollywood since the 1980s, was there to talk about his tell-all memoir "Everywhere an Oink Oink: An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood". 

He further lambasted the liberal establishment in Hollywood when talking about the inclusion rules the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has implemented for films to be considered in the Oscar Best Picture category.

About the new diversity rules, to help advance the representation of LGBTQ+, women, ethnic minorities and disabled people, Mamet said: “I can’t give you a stupid fucking statue unless you have 7% of this, 8% of that … it’s intrusive.”

In his book, Mamet describes the leaders of these diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives as “diversity capos" and “diversity commissars.”

“The (film industry) has little business improving everybody’s racial understanding as does the fire department,” Mamet said, further arguing that his colleagues are better off selling popcorn than trying to improve the representation marginalized groups.

Mamet also rejected that his children, including Zosia Mamet, who starred in HBO’s Girls and most recently in the dire Madame Web , are nepo babies . 

According to the prize-winning writer, his children ever got work because of their association with him.

“They haven’t benefited from any type of privilege,” insisted Mamet. “They earned it by merit... Nobody ever gave my kids a job because of who they were related to.”

David Mamet’s memoir "Everywhere an Oink Oink: An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood" is set to be published in the fall.

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New Book on David and Victoria Beckham Promises to Share Their ‘Compelling, Previously Untold Story’

'The House of Beckham: Money, Sex and Power' will be available to purchase in hardback, audiobook and eBook on June 20, 2024

Stephane Cardinale - Corbis/Corbis via Getty

A new book promising to give insight into David and Victoria Beckham ’s “private lives” is hitting shelves this June.

Harper Collins announced it has acquired the world rights to The House of Beckham: Money, Sex and Power , written by celebrated British investigative biographer, Tom Bower. It will be publishing the book globally in hardback, audiobook and eBook.

The book explores the pair's rise to “one of the most famous and influential couples in the world” and the establishment of their “multi-billion-dollar” global brand — much of which was introduced, along with an inside glimpse into their private lives — in their 2023 Netflix documentary Beckham .

In addition, Bower’s new book pledges to take fans behind the screens to answer questions raised in the documentary about their “success and personal relationship,” as well as the “ruthlessly successful management of their image” in the media. He said he seeks to answer the question, “Are their lives really as perfect as the Beckhams would like the world to believe?”

Bowers said in a press release that through “extensive research, expert sourcing and interviews with insiders,” he has new information that will shed “surprising insight” into the reality of “Brand Beckham.”

According to the publisher's synopsis, the book will take readers through the Beckhams' soccer and fashion careers, finances and new lives in Miami, among other things, in order to paint a picture of the "business-savvy cultural icons" and tell their story of "money, sex and power."

“When I started researching the Beckhams for the book, I was sure that an in-depth account of their lives would be a hugely entertaining and revealing read, but even I was surprised to discover such a compelling, previously untold story,” Bower said in a statement accompanying the release.

“The Beckhams have dominated headlines, social media feeds and watercooler conversations for over two decades and they remain a fascinating and enduring cultural phenomenon,” said Publisher Adam Humphrey, who oversaw the publication of the book in the U.K.

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“The House of Beckham is a hugely compelling behind-the-scenes account of their lives and there is simply no better writer than Tom Bower to tell it,” he added.

Bower, an investigative historian, broadcaster and journalist, has extensive knowledge of the lives of the rich, famous and royal. Having previously worked as a former producer and reporter for BBC Television for 25 years, he went on to publish several bestselling books including Revenge: Meghan, Harry and the War Between the Windsors , Rebel King: The Making of a Monarch and Dangerous Hero: Corbyn’s Ruthless Plot for Power .

The House of Beckham: Money, Sex and Power will be released on June 20 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.

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New Cold Wars review: China, Russia and Biden’s daunting task

David Sanger of the New York Times delivers a must-read on the foreign policy challenges now facing US leaders

R ussia bombards Ukraine. Israel and Hamas are locked in a danse macabre. The threat of outright war between Jerusalem and Tehran grows daily. Beijing and Washington snarl. In a moment like this, David Sanger’s latest book, subtitled China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West , is a must-read. Painstakingly researched, New Cold Wars brims with on-record interviews and observations by thinly veiled sources.

Officials closest to the president talk with an eye on posterity. The words of the CIA director, Bill Burns, repeatedly appear on the page. Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, surface throughout the book. Sanger, White House and national security correspondent for the New York Times, fuses access, authority and curiosity to deliver an alarming message: US dominance is no longer axiomatic.

In the third decade of the 21st century, China and Russia defy Washington, endeavoring to shatter the status quo while reaching for past glories. Vladimir Putin sees himself as the second coming of Peter the Great, “a dictator … consumed by restoring the old Russian empire and addressing old grievances”, in Sanger’s words.

The possibility of nuclear war is no longer purely theoretical. “In 2021 Biden, [Gen Mark] Milley, and the new White House national security team discovered that America’s nuclear holiday was over,” Sanger writes. “They were plunging into a new era that was far more complicated than the cold war had ever been.”

As Russia’s war on Ukraine faltered, Putin and the Kremlin raised the specter of nuclear deployment against Kyiv.

“The threat that Russia might use a nuclear weapon against its non-nuclear-armed foe surfaced and resurfaced every few months,” Sanger recalls.

The world was no longer “flat”. Rather, “the other side began to look more like a security threat and less like a lucrative market”. Unfettered free trade and interdependence had yielded prosperity and growth for some but birthed anger and displacement among many. Nafta – the North American Free Trade Agreement – became a figurative four-letter word. In the US, counties that lost jobs to China and Mexico went for Trump in 2016 .

Biden and the Democrats realized China never was and never would be America’s friend. “‘I think it’s fair to say that just about every assumption across different administrations was wrong,” one of Biden’s “closest advisers” tells Sanger.

“‘The internet would bring political liberty. Trade would liberalize the regime’ while creating high-skill jobs for Americans. The list went on. A lot of it was just wishful thinking.”

Sanger also captures the despondency that surrounded the botched US withdrawal from Afghanistan. A suicide bombing at the Kabul airport left 13 US soldiers and 170 civilians dead. The event still haunts.

“The president came into the room shortly thereafter, and at that point Gen [Kenneth] McKenzie informed him of the attack and also the fact that there had been at least several American military casualties, fatalities in the attack,” Burns recalls. “I remember the president just paused for at least 30 seconds or so and put his head down because he was absorbing the sadness of the moment and the sense of loss as well.”

Almost three years later, Biden’s political standing has not recovered. “The bitter American experience in Afghanistan and Iraq seemed to underscore the dangers of imperial overreach,” Sanger writes. With Iran on the front burner and the Middle East mired in turmoil, what comes next is unclear.

A coda: a recent supplemental review conducted by the Pentagon determined that a sole Isis member carried out the Kabul bombing. The review also found that the attack was tactically unpreventable.

Sanger also summarizes a tense exchange between Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel , over the Gaza war.

“Hadn’t the US firebombed Tokyo during world war two? Netanyahu demanded. “Hadn’t it unleashed two atom bombs? What about the thousands who died in Mosul, as the US sought to wipe out Isis?”

On Thursday, the US vetoed a resolution to confer full UN membership on the “State of Palestine”. Hours later, Standard & Poor’s downgraded Israel’s credit rating and Israel retaliated against Iran.

N ew Cold Wars does contain lighter notes. For example, Sanger catches Donald Trump whining to Randall Stephenson, then CEO of AT&T , about his (self-inflicted) problems with women. The 45th president invited Stephenson to the Oval Office, to discuss China and telecommunications. Things did not quite work out that way.

“Trump burned up the first 45 minutes of the meeting by riffing on how men got into trouble,” Sanger writes. “It was all about women. Then he went into a long diatribe about Stormy Daniels.”

Stephenson later recalled: “It was ‘all part of the same stand-up comedy act’ … and ‘we were left with 15 minutes to talk about Chinese infrastructure’.”

Trump wasn’t interested. Stephenson “could see that the president’s mind was elsewhere. ‘This is really boring,’ Trump finally said.”

On Thursday, in Trump’s hush-money case in New York, the parties picked a jury. Daniels is slated to be a prosecution witness.

Sanger ends his book on a note of nostalgia – and trepidation.

“For all the present risks, it is worth remembering that one of the most remarkable and little-discussed accomplishments of the old cold war was that the great powers never escalated their differences into a direct conflict. That is an eight-decade-long streak we cannot afford to break.”

New Cold Wars is published in the US by Penguin Random House

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May 9, 2024

Current Issue

Israel: The Way Out

May 9, 2024 issue

Mahmoud Issa/Reuters

Gaza City, April 3, 2024

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Most eyes are focused now on Gaza, for good reason. The catastrophe is there for all to see. But I want to begin with the Palestinian village of Mu‘arrajat, in the Jordan Valley on the occupied West Bank. In mid-March I stayed overnight there with other activists, in what we call “protective presence”—a concerted effort to protect Palestinian villagers from the rampages of armed Israeli settlers who are terrorizing them day and night. Mu‘arrajat now has two settler outposts at its throat, one deep in the grazing grounds of the Palestinian shepherds (forbidden territory for them since the war in Gaza began) and another on the hill above the village. In October settlers from these outposts were stopping Palestinians’ cars on the highway and telling their occupants that they had twenty-four hours to leave their homes and that they would be killed if they refused. A few weeks ago these settlers came into the village and dug a row of empty graves near the school—a sign of what they want to do to the people of Mu‘arrajat.

Violent intrusions by masked, heavily armed settlers, often together with soldiers, are by now routine. The honorific term “soldiers” in the Jordan Valley and the South Hebron Hills really refers to paramilitary units, in uniform, made up of settlers who have been armed by Itamar Ben-Gvir, the convicted criminal and Jewish supremacist whom Benjamin Netanyahu appointed minister of national security in November 2022. They are a law unto themselves.

The settlers’ mantra—“Get out or we will kill you”—has been repeated in nearly all the villages in the Jordan Valley and the South Hebron Hills. Most of our friends in the villages have heard it. Usually it is uttered in the course of attacks on Palestinian homes, sheep pens, food supplies, water tanks and wells, wind turbines, and anything else the invaders can wreck. Sometimes these settlers shoot at the villagers and kill sheep and goats. We know of at least sixteen Palestinian villages that have been evacuated over the last few months because of ceaseless settler violence backed by the army; many more are barely hanging on. International pressure has had some meaningful impact on the situation, but for the most part the settlers are winning this miniwar. They tend to be fanatical men or adolescent boys, brainwashed, apocalyptic, and messianic, who have emerged from the dark and brutal undercurrents of religious Zionism. They want to rid the West Bank of all non-Jews (and maybe some secular Jews as well) in order to hasten the arrival of the Messiah, who is scheduled to turn up as soon as this campaign of ethnic cleansing is completed. But the ideological motivation is only part of the story; we who have seen these people in action, who have met them in the field, can confirm that many of them are driven by sheer sadistic pleasure. 1

Is it even possible today to imagine an end to the occupation and to the settlement enterprise on the West Bank? Maybe not. The entire political system, with the exception of the tiny constituency on the far left, is mortgaged to that project. But none of this happened in a vacuum. Palestinians have to examine their own acts just as Israelis must examine theirs. The suicide bombers of the second intifada (2000–2005) more or less destroyed the Israeli peace camp—by far the Palestinians’ most important ally in the 1990s—and the atrocities of Hamas on October 7 probably wiped out most of the remaining pockets of moderation and hope in Israel.

Maybe when, or if, the Gaza war ends, this mood will change. But the present government and the man who heads it see the Gaza war, with its unthinkable losses and devastation, as instrumental in the long-term goal of maintaining Israel’s occupation. Netanyahu and his ministers are disconnected from reality; they live comfortably enough with the humanitarian disaster of Gaza, and they are incapable of conceiving of a viable future for the state of Israel. They are in denial when it comes to the very real possibility that Israel, under their direction, is on the fast track to self-destruction.

Reading the news these days is like watching a horror film, with the nontrivial difference that the horror ends when the film is over. For the last fifteen months, since this government was sworn in, we have watched the accelerating disintegration of the state and its institutions. No one, not even the most optimistic of our enemies, could have predicted this swift decline. We have a prime minister whose main talent is to contrive ever more unscrupulous schemes for his own political survival; an army bogged down in the dust and mud of Gaza with no exit strategy and subject to constant attack by Hamas guerrillas; a society hovering on the brink of civil war; a sick economy impoverished by unimaginably vast transfers of citizens’ tax money to the ultrareligious factions and their yeshivas; a civil service that has been gutted by the appointment of political hacks and sycophants in place of professionals; a legal system, once more or less functional, in danger of being destroyed by the minister of (in)justice, Yariv Levin; the once-banned, violent Kahanist extremists, relegitimized by Netanyahu, in the Knesset and high-ranking positions in the government; and in the occupied territories, the marauding gangs of Jewish settlers. This is the short list. I won’t ruin your day with the long one.

Were he not so incompetent, and if he had at least an iota of integrity, Netanyahu could almost be a tragic figure—an intelligent or at least cunning man who sold his soul to the devil. In a sense, he is a sinister accident of history. He had no business being in politics. At first his one credential was being the brother of Yoni Netanyahu, who was killed in the 1976 raid on Entebbe, in which Israeli commandos freed the hostages who had been hijacked to Uganda by Palestinian and German terrorists. In his six terms and more than sixteen years as prime minister, his record is, in a word, abysmal. His singular achievement has been resuscitating the existential threat to the state that had more or less disappeared since the peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan decades ago. But he has won several elections with a noxious blend of antidemocratic, racist-supremacist, and ultranationalist populism; it’s clearly a winning formula. Over a million Israelis voted for him in the last election in 2022, enabling him to cobble together the present government of thugs and thieves. At least a quarter of the electorate are “Bibists,” hypnotized by Netanyahu, whom they think of as a king; and they are filled with hatred for the secular liberals they see as a privileged elite.

By now there is no need to rehearse Netanyahu’s failings. They are evident to anyone with eyes. It is, however, relevant to the current debacle to state clearly that he bears responsibility for what has happened, and that he characteristically refuses to acknowledge that responsibility. He fomented profound internal divisions in Israel with his attempt to undermine the supreme court and, in effect, the entire legal system, which provoked mass protests and created the conditions for the Hamas attack—since Hamas correctly noted that Israeli society was unraveling. Netanyahu also chose to ignore urgent warnings from the highest echelons of the army and the security forces that such an attack was imminent.

He is now pursuing a deadly war that probably cannot be won, and there is good reason to think that every decision he makes—including in the negotiations for an agreement to release the Israeli hostages in Gaza—is tainted by his personal interests, namely his survival in power and his ability to evade the criminal charges he is facing. According to recent polls, roughly half the Israeli population thinks he is prolonging the war because of those interests. To make matters worse, he has bonded with Ben-Gvir, whose very presence in the government is the most shameful appointment in the entire history of the state. It is as if the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan had been appointed head of the FBI . But although deposing Netanyahu is a matter of utmost urgency, he is not the only problem we have. We need to look deeper.

If Israel is to survive, physically and spiritually, it needs to undergo, collectively, a sea change in its vision of reality—a change on the order of what the South African apartheid regime experienced, with much bloodshed, as it began to collapse. Israelis will have to face unpleasant though rather obvious facts:

Palestinians are human beings, no different from the Jews or anyone else. (They have a rotten political system, but so do we.)

They are not going anywhere.

There are two national movements in the territory west of the Jordan River, with their own legitimate claims and bloody record of atrocities; the two populations are now equal in size, some seven million each.

Israel cannot suppress Palestinian and other Arab resistance by force alone. (The foundational axiom of the Israeli polity has always been that only brute force works.)

Survival depends on sharing the land between these two peoples.

The settlement project in the West Bank has to end.

The barbarian extremists on both sides, as if colluding together, will, given half a chance, kill us all.

God, if there is a god, is unlikely to save us from ourselves.

None of these points is going to be easy for Israelis to swallow. I can attest that most people find it easier to sacrifice the lives of their spouses, siblings, and children in a futile cause than to change how they feel and how they understand the world.

We have wasted several blood-soaked decades on the obscene dream of annexing the territories and expelling the Palestinian population there. Israel steadfastly refused to make peace on the basis of the Saudi Initiative of 2002, unanimously endorsed by the Arab League, which could and should have led to a normalization of Israel’s relations with much of the Arab-Islamic world. The Saudi Initiative, also called the Arab Peace Initiative, offered an end to the Arab–Israeli conflict if Israel would withdraw from all the occupied territories (with minor territorial adjustments to be negotiated), a settlement of the Palestinian refugee problem on the basis of UN Resolution 194, and the creation of a Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem.

The Palestinian Authority accepted the plan immediately, as did the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, with its fifty-seven member states. (It describes itself as “the collective voice of the Muslim world.”) 2 There was never a good reason to reject that plan as the starting point for negotiations on final status—that is, peace. Instead, the right-wing governments of Ariel Sharon and later Netanyahu have done whatever they could to undermine the plan (this includes Netanyahu’s persistent funding for Hamas, via Qatar, as a way to divide Gaza from the West Bank, thus precluding the possibility of a Palestinian state). It’s not so hard to prevent peace from breaking out.

There is only one way out of the current morass. As it happens, it’s a good way and, in theory, feasible if we had a minimally rational government capable of articulating a way forward for the people of Israel. What we now call the Biden plan would revolutionize Israel’s place in the Middle East and in the world at large; at the very least it would reverse the present murderous escalation. Its guiding idea is that Israel would become part of a regional system bound together by ties of normalization and full diplomatic relations between it and each of the moderate Sunni states, thus creating a bulwark against Iran and its proxies; the new configuration would necessarily include, indeed depend upon, some acceptable solution to the Palestinian thirst for freedom. That means a demilitarized Palestinian state and the dismantling of the occupation. In the absence of some such systemic solution, Israel will continue to fight recurrent, catastrophic wars.

In the end, the state will be overwhelmed. That, in fact, is the Hamas plan, with Iranian backing. The Iranians think they can destroy Israel by 2040, if not earlier. 3 The most effective, perhaps the only antidote to that plan is for Israel to make a decent peace with those who share the land with us.

The irony is that Netanyahu, and the Israeli right in general, are the greatest allies of Hamas in this doomsday scenario. Netanyahu likes to say that there is no difference between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority: both have the same goal of destroying Israel. This politically convenient and utterly anachronistic excuse lumps together all Palestinians as a murderous (though nonexistent) nation. I suppose Netanyahu has no direct experience with living Palestinians, and I think he has no more than rudimentary Arabic. In any case, he remains locked in his idée fixe that a Palestinian state must be prevented at all costs. If he manages to survive in power until the next Israeli election, he will undoubtedly run on a platform built around this false premise. He may win, though only 15 percent of Israelis say they want him to remain as prime minister, according to polls from January.

Hardly anyone believes a word Netanyahu says. But I do believe him when he says that he will never allow Palestinians to have anything even remotely like a state—that is, some political framework that embodies their national aspirations, as the state of Israel does for the Jews. If he gets his way, we can expect the imminent Hamasification of the West Bank. Already Hamas is riding high in the Arab world and, according to the wartime polls, to some extent on the West Bank; it clearly aims at taking over the Palestinian national movement. Nothing would enhance its chances of doing that as much as a continuing Israeli refusal to make peace with the Palestinian mainstream, or whatever is left of it.

We will be lucky if this government doesn’t precipitate a full-scale war in Lebanon or beyond. So far it lacks any intelligible plan to end the fighting in Gaza and any political goal of some positive import. Even worse, from the start it has been playing into the hands of Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar: first draw the Israeli army into Gaza, then turn it into sitting ducks in a guerrilla war that can continue indefinitely; let Israel kill enough Gazans and wreak enough destruction to turn international opinion against it, while Hamas hangs out safely in the tunnels it has created until the Israelis go away, with nothing to show for their sacrifices. Wars are won only when they have an attainable political goal.

Meanwhile, Israel is well on its way to becoming a pariah state. The wave of anti-Israel feeling that is engulfing large numbers of people in the Western world has emerged not merely from the Gaza war, with its unbearable civilian casualties and now mass starvation. What that wave reflects, more profoundly, is the justified disgust with the ongoing occupation, its seemingly eternal and ever more brutal continuation, and the policies of massive theft and apartheid that are its very essence. It remains to be seen if the people of Israel and of Palestine have the resources, and enough remnants of the classical humanistic values of both Judaism and Islam, to extricate themselves from today’s terminal process of self-destruction.

There is another glimmer of light in this darkness. We have a new generation of committed Israeli activists in the territories. They embody the best of human virtues, including a nonchalant, ethically grounded courage. And there are the ordinary Israelis whom we meet in the antigovernment protests, week after week. They are sick of Netanyahu’s lies and capable of articulating the dream of equality, honesty, moderation, peace. They will fight for those goals. Little by little, recognition of the moral corruption of the occupation and of the need to put an end to it has seeped into these mainstream demonstrations. It is possible that they will slowly swell, like the demonstrations that nearly unseated Netanyahu a year ago, until millions join us in the streets.

—April 11, 2024

‘Who Shall Describe Beauty?’

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David Shulman is the author of Tamil: A Biography , among other books. He is a Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was awarded the Israel Prize for Religious Studies in 2016. He is a longtime activist with Ta’ayush, the Arab–Jewish Partnership, in the occupied Palestinian territories. (May 2024)

See my “A Bitter Season in the West Bank,” The New York Review , December 21, 2023.  ↩

For a detailed account of the Saudi Initiative and Israel’s negative response to it, see Matti Steinberg, “The Arab Peace Initiative, Its Significance and Implications,” Israeli European Peace Network, July 2010; and his In Search of Modern Palestinian Nationhood (Moshe Dayan Center, 2016), which I reviewed in these pages (“Israel’s Irrational Rationality,” June 22, 2017). Steinberg, for many years the adviser on Palestinian matters to the Israeli government, is the most insightful and authoritative of the Israeli Palestine experts.   ↩

See Thomas Erdbrink, “Iran’s Supreme Leader Says Israel Will Not Exist in 25 Years,” The New York Times , September 9, 2015. This prophecy has been reiterated many times.  ↩

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