Innholdsfortegnelse for March 24, 2016 i The New York Review of Books

DAN CHIASSON ’s fourth collection of poetry is Bicentennial. STEVEN ENGLUND is the author of, among other books, Napoleon: A Political Life. MARK LILLA is Professor of Humanities at Columbia. His new book, The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction, will be published in September. JESSICA T. MATHEWS was President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from 1997 until last year and is now a Distinguished Fellow there. She has served in the State Department and on the National Security Council staff in the White House. ANKA MUHLSTEIN was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1996 for her biography of Astolphe de Custine, and has twice received the History Prize of the French Academy. Her books include Balzac’s Omelette and, most recently, Monsieur Proust’s Library. ANTONY SHUGAAR is a translator and…

Black Deutschland by Darryl Pinckney. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 294 pp., $26.00 Darryl Pinckney’s Black Deutschland begins and ends with a book, a book its protagonist Jed Goodfinch tells us from the start was “the wrong book”: Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories, whose vision of gay life in Weimar Berlin has imparted to this young black man “the daydream of being the rootless stranger in Berlin who seduced tough German boys.” The itinerary is declared from the first paragraph, as if to suggest that what awaits is a picaresque voyage of self-discovery, or indeed of self-reinvention. The time is “the awful 1980s” and the West Berlin to which Jed travels is the cold war outpost and bohemian magic kingdom of the Brezhnev era. The Chicago-born Jed informs us: “I may…

Constitutional Personae by Cass R. Sunstein. Oxford University Press, 171 pp., $24.95 1. Do we want our judges to be heroes? Liberals have bracing and inspirational memories of judicial heroism on the Supreme Court—justices who fought for racial equality and individual autonomy against legislators who wanted to restrict women’s reproductive rights and uphold segregation. They remember judges who took on the criminal justice system in the 1960s and 1970s, securing representation for indigent defendants and protecting them from coercive interrogation. There were some who fought heroically and—for a time—successfully against the death penalty. And there were the heroes on the Court last year in Obergefell v. Hodges who held that the US Constitution forbids bans on same- sex marriage. These were justices who were prepared to keep faith with what…

I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems, 1975–2014 by Eileen Myles. Ecco, 356 pp., $29.99 Chelsea Girls by Eileen Myles. Ecco, 274 pp., $16.99 (paper) Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) by Eileen Myles. OR Books, 271 pp., $16.00 (paper) 1. Eileen Myles’s new and selected poems are titled I Must Be Living Twice, a phrase that any poet past the midpoint and looking back might utter, surprised to find a fund of work on the page as robust and spontaneous as any “real” life she lived. But Myles’s poems set a bar for openness, frankness, and variability few lives could ever match; and so in her work, the surprise second life is actually the one lived off the page, refracted through decades of Myles’s astonishingly vivid lines. The solemnities…

Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts. Viking, 926 pp., $45.00 Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny by Michael Broers. Pegasus, 585 pp., $35.00 Bonaparte: 1769–1802 by Patrice Gueniffey, translated from the French by Steven Rendall. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1,008 pp., $39.95 Andrew Roberts recounts yet another tale about Napoleon. A month after Waterloo, the British prime minister, Lord Liverpool, wrote to his foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, in Vienna, to suggest that St. Helena was suitably distant and isolated as a place of exile for “General Bonaparte,” such that “all intrigue would be impossible; and, being so far from the European world, he would soon be forgotten.” Yes, nobody will notice him—well, except maybe Goethe, who thought this life “the stride of a demigod.” Lately, the monstre sacré can be seen and…

Vigée Le Brun an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, February 15–May 15, 2016; and at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, June 10–Sepember 11, 2016. Catalog of the exhibition by Joseph Baillio, Katharine Baetjer, and Paul Lang. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 278 pp., $50.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) “Mundus Muliebris”: Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, peintre de l’Ancien régime féminin [“Mundus Muliebris”: Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Female Painter of the Ancien Regime] by Marc Fumaroli. Paris: Fallois, 102 pp., €12.00 (paper) It comes as something of a surprise that we have had to wait until 2015 for a comprehensive exhibition in France of the work of Madame Vigée Le Brun— perhaps the most gifted French portraitist of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth…

In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. Knopf, 233 pp., $26.95 Many readers will be aware of Jhumpa Lahiri as the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning collection of short stories The Interpreter of Maladies (1999), elegant, unsettling tales that invariably draw the reader into a state of anxiety for the welfare of a group of characters living for the most part between two worlds: Calcutta, where Lahiri’s Bengali parents grew up, and New England, where they later moved and made a family. Her two novels—The Namesake (2003), The Lowland (2013)— and a further collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth (2008), all present lives tensed between freedom and entrapment. Typically, the immigrants, or children of immigrants, with whom we are invited to identify are simultaneously…

1. The Constitution gives control over matters of war and peace to the president and Congress, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, as a “joint possession.” This pretty much guarantees continuing strife between the two branches. Yet after two centuries of a seesawing contest for primacy, lines have been crossed in the last year that take the relationship between the two branches into new territory. What has happened raises the question of whether the structure of political power in the United States today dangerously restricts what the country can aim to achieve abroad. Never before has Congress openly tried to undermine a president in the midst of negotiation with a foreign adversary. In 2015 it did so twice: by inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to attack President Obama’s policy…