Innholdsfortegnelse for October 8, 2015 i The New York Review of Books

GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE (1880–1918) was a French poet, fiction writer, playwright, art critic, and editor of erotica. RON PADGETT’s Collected Poems received the Los Angeles Times Prize for Best Book of Poetry in 2014. His translation of Apollinaire, Zone: Selected Poems, will be published in November by New York Review Books. CHRISTOPHER BENFEY is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke. He is the author, most recently, of Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay. ISAIAH BERLIN (1909–1997) was a philosopher and historian of ideas who held the Chichele Professorship of Social and Political Theory at Oxford. The final volume of his correspondence, Affirming: Letters 1975–1997, in which the letter in this issue appears, will be published in December. CHRISTOPHER R. BROWNING is Frank Porter Graham Professor of History Emeritus at the…

Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, February 12– May 25, 2015; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, June 30–October 4, 2015. Catalog of the exhibition by Richard Ormond, Elaine Kilmurray, Trevor Fairbrother, Barbara Dayer Gallati, Erica E. Hirshler, Marc Simpson, and H. Barbara Weinberg. Skira Rizzoli, 256 pp., $60.00 At the age of fifty-one, with his work in high demand on both sides of the Atlantic, John Singer Sargent swore off painting portraits. He had been eager for some time to escape the confines of the studio, the pressures of multiple sittings, and society portraiture altogether. “No more paughtraits,” he wrote to a friend in 1907. “I abhor and abjure them and hope never to do another especially of…

We publish here for the first time T. S. Eliot’s review of two books by the English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861– 1947). The following headnote, textual note, and footnotes are by Frances Dickey, Jennifer Formichelli, and Ronald Schuchard, coeditors of Literature, Politics, Belief, 1927–1929, volume 3 of the forthcoming eight-volume edition of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, in which all essays will appear with scholarly annotation and apparatus. The first two volumes (1905– 1926) were published online in September 2014; volumes 3 and 4, English Lion, 1930–1933, edited by Jason Harding and Ronald Schuchard, will be published this fall on Project MUSE by Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber and Faber. —The Editors “The Return of Foxy Grandpa,” T.S. Eliot’s unpublished review…

The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime by Harold Bloom. Spiegel and Grau, 524 pp., $35.00 At eighty-five, Harold Bloom is among the foremost literary critics at work today; he is also, surely, one of the strangest. He has seemed at times an impassioned guardian of the acknowledged masterpieces of The Western Canon (the title of his book of 1994), reaffirming the preeminence of Dante or Shakespeare (whom he credits, in his hyperbolic way, with “the invention of the human”) against what he dismissively calls the School of Resentment, critics who, in his view, adopt a coercive political agenda (“Stalinism without Stalin”) for judging literary works, combing through books for evidence of racism, gender bias, and other social evils. “Literature is not an instrument of social change or…

Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home an encyclical letter by Pope Francis. Vatican Press, 184 pp., available at w2. vatican. va Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment and capitalism, Laudato Si’, is an eloquent description of the natural world and its relationship to human societies.1 An appreciation of its poetic and epic qualities is completely absent from secondhand accounts, most of which are devoted to explaining why the pope got it right (about climate science) or wrong (about climate science). In reading the encyclical, one senses the struggle of an ancient institution, immersed in its doctrine and history, slowly and incompletely adapting to modern science. Most commentaries have focused on the pope’s endorsement of climate science, but my focus here is primarily on the social sciences, particularly economics.…

On Tuesday, September 19, 1989, two long-standing friends of the columnist and commentator Joseph Alsop, Washington Post journalist Robert Kaiser1 and British historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin, were in the congregation at Alsop’s memorial service at St. John’s Church, Lafayette Square, Washington, D.C. Kaiser’s father was an old friend of Berlin’s, and Kaiser had known Berlin for many years. On October 6, Kaiser wrote Berlin a letter that he described as “the product of ruminations about Joe Alsop, ruminations that leave me baffled.” He told Berlin that he had known Alsop best in 1969–1970, when they were both reporting the Vietnam War, about which Alsop thought he “knew all the answers.” “One of my most vivid memories is of him getting drunk twice a day. Too much before and at…

Philosophy of Language: The Classics Explained by Colin McGinn. MIT Press, 225 pp., $35.00 Academic philosophy often draws ire. The complaints are twofold and not altogether consistent with each other. The first is that philosophers can’t seem to agree on anything, with dissension descending to such basic questions as the nature of the field itself, both its subject matter and its methodology. The lack of unanimity implies a lack of objectivity and suggests that any hope for progress is futile. This complaint often comes from scientists and culminates in the charge that there is no such thing as philosophical expertise. Who then are these people employed in philosophy departments, and what entitles them to express subjective viewpoints with the pretensions of impersonal knowledge? The second complaint is that academic philosophy…

OUTRAGEOUS UNIVERSITIES To the Editors: Professor Andrew Delbanco is likely to mislead readers with his unqualified affirmation [“Our Universities: The Outrageous Reality,” NYR, July 9]: “given the proven advantages for the college-educated in the form of higher wages and lower unemployment. . . . ” A college degree does confer advantages over a high school degree. But this so-called college premium is not because the income of college grads has increased over the years. Instead, the median earnings of those with a bachelor’s degree have steadily decreased for more than a decade. But the wages of high school graduates have decreased even more. Thus, the differential economic consequences of a college degree ought to be called the “high school discount.” There is more to this matter than the correct name…

Here you are close to me again Memories of my companions killed in the war The olive of time Memories that make just one As a hundred pelts make just one fur coat As these thousands of wounds make just one newspaper article Somber impalpable appearance that has taken on The changing shape of my shadow An Indian crouching in ambush for eternity Shadow you creep up close to me But you don’t hear me anymore You will no longer know the heavenly poems I sing But I hear you I still see you Destinies Multiple shadow may the sun watch over you You love me enough to never leave me You who dance in the sun without raising any dust Shadow ink of the sun Handwriting of my light…

Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder. Tim Duggan Books, 462 pp., $30.00 How does Timothy Snyder’s Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning differ from previous histories of the Holocaust? Like many other historians, Snyder begins with a careful analysis of Hitler and his ideology, but he is not concerned with the broader, long-term context of German and European culture and the anti-Semitic tradition that provided the milieu in which Hitler’s views found resonance. His geographical focus, as in his previous book Bloodlands (2010), is on Eastern Europe, rather than Germany. His political focus is first on East European diplomacy, then Soviet and Nazi policies of occupation and state destruction, rather than on Nazi decision-making and Jewish policy per se. The people at the…