Briefly Noted Book Reviews | The New Yorker

Every Valley, by Charles King (Doubleday). This history casts Handel’s “Messiah,” which King calls the “greatest piece of participatory art ever created,” as both quintessentially of its time and an oddity; when it premièred, in 1742, its blend of secular and sacred was unprecedented. Delving into the era’s political and social turmoil, King argues that the primary theme of Enlightenment art wasn’t the triumph of reason but, rather, “how to manage catastrophe.” That theme is evident in King’s astute reading of the libretto (a collection of Bible verses that move from despair to hope), but he also locates it in the lives of key figures who had a hand in shaping and popularizing “Messiah.” The result amounts to more than an account of a piece of music. It is also, as King writes of Handel’s composition, “a record of a way of thinking.”

The Migrant’s Jail, by Brianna Nofil (Princeton). Ellis Island may be the emblematic image of twentieth-century immigration to the U.S., but this academic history argues that a more accurate symbol is that of the county jail. Nofil’s book, dense with archival evidence, documents how the federal government has long warehoused immigrants in local jails, and, in so doing, evaded oversight and responsibility for horrific, even deadly, conditions. Small towns and county sheriffs have reaped benefits from agreements with immigration services, often building or expanding facilities to get contracts. In the early nineteen-hundreds, officials in northern New York constructed “Chinese jails” to “attract federal business”; in the late eighties, a sheriff in Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana, personally profited from an influx of Cuban refugees.

Illustration by Rose Wong

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