Innholdsfortegnelse for September 24, 2015 i The New York Review of Books

JOAN ACOCELLA is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her most recent book is Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints. JOHN BANVILLE ’s novel The Blue Guitar is published this month. ROBERTO CALASSO , President and CEO of Adelphi in Milan, is the author of Ardor and The Art of the Publisher, which is to be published in November. DAN CHIASSON ’s fourth collection of poetry is Bicentennial. R. J.W. EVANS is a Fellow of Oriel College and Regius Professor of History Emeritus at Oxford. His books include Austria, Hungary, and the Habsburgs: Central Europe, c. 1683–1867. JIM HOLT ’s most recent book is Why Does the World Exist? DIANE JOHNSON is a novelist and critic. Her latest book is the memoir Flyover Lives. NICHOLAS KENYON is Managing Director of…

Time to Get Tough: Make America Great Again! by Donald J. Trump. Regnery, 216 pp., $29.99; $16.99 (paper) The Donald Trump situation, as anxious Republicans and mystified commentators sometimes call it, only grows more anxiety-producing and mystifying by the week. His performance in the August 6 debate was not considered world-beating. Then, in the wake of it, he was widely perceived as having made reference in a CNN interview to the menstrual cycle of Fox News host and debate moderator Megyn Kelly, which was supposed to finish him off. It was about the fourth such dose of poison but, Rasputin-like, Trump has survived each one.1 After the debate, he maintained his large lead over the field. Then on August 11, Trump held his first real campaign-style press conference, in a…

Two hummingbirds visit the privet, Flickering your eyes, drumming your heart, Here and gone before you blink.You walk airborne toward the start. Fifteen minutes’ drive to the beach and ocean, Ten to Long Beach and the bay.Jimmy the dog is asleep in a flower bed.The sprinklers mist a rainbow in the Garden of Eden. It’s the hiss of the hose in the heatHosing down the sidewalk, fresh and neat, And releasing the delicious odor of hot concrete.It’s dripping out of a swimming pool onto hot-under-your-feet. You’re a minute away from Main StreetAnd minutes away from the vulgar, sweet, Tiny downtown, no bigger than a Twitter tweet, And the American Hotel porch where you’ll eat.…

Nicolas Nabokov: A Life in Freedom and Music by Vincent Giroud. Oxford University Press, 562 pp., $39.95 Nicolas Nabokov was a Russian composer, exiled at sixteen, a year and a half after the October Revolution, and best known for his career as secretary-general of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an international organization created in 1950 for the purpose of sponsoring festivals, conferences, and magazines that would exemplify Western artistic and intellectual freedom in contrast with Soviet censorship and conformity. Nabokov brought unique gifts of energy and generosity to the job. Working for the congress—often working against his bureaucratic colleagues—he conceived and organized the first large-scale international festival of music, drama, and the arts, a far more complex and ambitious affair than pre-war local festivals like those presented at Salzburg or…

The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution a film directed by Stanley Nelson Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence by Bryan Burrough. Penguin, 585 pp., $29.95 The Day the ’60s Died: The Kent State Shootings a PBS documentary directed by Jonathan Halperin; produced and written by Jonathan Halperin and Anna Bowers The Black Revolution on Campus by Martha Biondi. University of California Press, 356 pp., $34.95; $29.95 (paper) 1971 a film directed by Johanna Hamilton Many Americans were drawn into political activism during the 1960s, and many became dissatisfied with the established and accepted means of protest. By the end of the decade, such doubts were widespread in both of the great overlapping movements of the time. Opponents of the Vietnam…

Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917–1947 by Bruce Hoffman. Knopf, 618 pp., $35.00 The Reckoning: Death and Intrigue in the Promised Land—A True Detective Story by Patrick Bishop. Harper, 299 pp., $26.99 In the early morning hours of July 31 this summer masked men torched two houses in the West Bank village of Duma. One of the houses was empty. In the other, the Dawabsheh family lay sleeping. Saad, his wife Riham, and their four-year-old son Ahmad were severely injured as flames spread through their bedroom. Eighteen-month-old Ali burned to death, and Saad died a week later of his wounds. A year ago three Jewish extremists kidnapped sixteen-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir outside his East Jerusalem home. They drove him to a forest where, after beat-ing him, they poured gasoline…

Walter B., an affable, outgoing man of forty-nine, came to see me in 2006. As a teenager, following a head injury, he had developed epileptic seizures —these first took the form of attacks of déjà vu that might occur dozens of times a day. Sometimes he would hear music that no one else could hear. He had no idea what was happening to him and, fearing ridicule or worse, kept his strange experiences to himself. Finally he consulted a physician who made a diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy and started him on a succession of antiepileptic drugs. But his seizures—both grand mal and temporal lobe seizures—became more frequent. After a decade of trying different antiepileptic drugs, Walter consulted another neurologist, an expert in the treatment of “intractable” epilepsy, who suggested…

The Priest, the Prince, and the Pasha: The Life and Afterlife of an Ancient Egyptian Sculpture by Lawrence M. Berman. MFA Publications, 207 pp., $24.95 The lives of museum objects almost always span cultures, places, and times. On occasion, they stride across entire civilizations, continents, epochs: gigantic movements distilled in some little bit of matter worked by human hands. Like human lives, the histories of artifacts may end too soon, like the Caravaggio paintings incinerated in the Allied bombing of Berlin in World War II, or the Assyrian sculptures shattered recently by the Islamist vandals of ISIS. Other objects have lived lives of tranquil obscurity, like the little bronze Etruscan piglet that the archaeologist Kyle Phillips noticed in the National Archaeological Museum in Florence in the early 1980s, one tiny…

The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, December 14, 2014–April 5, 2015. Catalog of the exhibition by Laura Hoptman. Museum of Modern Art, 184 pp., $50.00 Like the reports of the end of history that we have been hearing, the many reports of the death of painting have no basis in reality. Painting flourishes— in the studios of artists, in galleries in New York’s Chelsea, Lower East Side, Williamsburg, and Bushwick, as well as in galleries around the world. Museums, whatever their ever-deepening engagement with installation and performance art and the cavernous spaces designed to accommodate such work, are hardly neglecting contemporary painting. Since last summer, the Museum of Modern Art has presented a vast Sigmar Polke…

Therigatha: Poems of the First Buddhist Women translated from the Pali by Charles Hallisey. Murty Classical Library of India/ Harvard University Press, 290 pp., $29.95 The History of Akbar, Volume 1 by Abu’l-Fazl, edited and translated from the Persian by Wheeler M. Thackston. Murty Classical Library of India/ Harvard University Press, 614 pp., $32.95 The Story of Manu by Allasani Peddana, translated from the Telugu by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman. Murty Classical Library of India/ Harvard University Press, 602 pp., $32.95 Like some procession of tireless penitents, much of the academic community continues to beat its collective breast and bewail its sins when it comes to Eastern studies. This attitude has persisted at least since 1978, when Edward W. Said published Orientalism, a book of which it can…

Mayakovsky: A Biography by Bengt Jangfeldt, translated from the Swedish by Harry D. Watson. University of Chicago Press, 610 pp., $35.00 When Vladimir Mayakovsky committed suicide on April 14, 1930, the news sent shock waves through the Soviet Union. Ilya Ehrenburg, who knew of Mayakovsky’s notorious gambling habit, thought he might have been playing Russian roulette with his beloved Mauser pistol and lost his bet. But Mayakovsky’s suicide note, written two days before his death, suggested otherwise. Asking his mother and sisters to forgive him and sardonically asking for there to be no gossip (“the deceased hated gossip”), Mayakovsky had appended a few lines from an unfinished poem: The game, as they say, Is over.The love-boat has come to griefOn the reefs of convention.Life and I are quitsAnd there’s no…

Nothing can be known about the future, thought Hitler, except the limits of our planet: “the surface area of a precisely measured space.” Ecology was scarcity, and existence meant a struggle for land. The immutable structure of life was the division of animals into species, condemned to “inner seclusion” and an endless fight to the death. Human races, Hitler was convinced, were like species. The highest races were still evolving from the lower, which meant that interbreeding was possible but sinful. Races should behave like species, like mating with like and seeking to kill unlike. This for Hitler was a law, the law of racial struggle, as certain as the law of gravity. The struggle could never end, and it had no certain outcome. A race could triumph and flourish…

Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee. Harper, 278 pp., $27.99 1. Since its publication in 1960, Harper Lee’s best-selling To Kill a Mockingbird has been described as America’s favorite book. It is required reading in many high schools and junior high schools and in schools in some foreign countries, and continues to sell more than a million copies a year. In it, a charming, combative child, Scout Finch, growing up safe and unconstrained in the small, old-fashioned, southern town of Maycomb, Alabama, glimpses some ugly realities of black– white relations and worships the exemplary behavior of her father, Atticus Finch, as he defends a black man falsely accused of rape and eloquently articulates many of our highest principles. For American readers, Atticus Finch has become an icon of lawyerly…

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them by Joseph E. Stiglitz. Norton, 428 pp., $28.95 Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity by Joseph E. Stiglitz. The Roosevelt Institute, 114 pp., available at www.rewritetherules.org Creating a Learning Society: A New Approach to Growth, Development, and Social Progress by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Bruce C. Greenwald. Columbia University Press, 660 pp., $34.95; $24.95 (paper) The fundamental truth about American economic growth today is that while the work is done by many, the real rewards largely go to the few. The numbers are, at this point, woefully familiar: the top one percent of earners take home more than 20 percent of the income, and their share has more than doubled…

Four Novels of the 1980s: City Primeval, LaBrava, Glitz, Freaky Deaky by Elmore Leonard, edited by Gregg Sutter. Library of America, 1,010 pp., $37.50 Four Novels of the 1970s: Fifty-Two Pickup, Swag, Unknown Man No. 89, The Switch by Elmore Leonard, edited by Gregg Sutter. Library of America, 809 pp., $35.00 Charlie Martz and Other Stories: The Unpublished Stories by Elmore Leonard. William Morrow, 237 pp., $31.99 Elmore Leonard, who died two summers ago, aged eighty-seven, became famous as a crime novelist, but he didn’t like being grouped with most of the big names in that genre, people such as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett or, indeed, any of the noir writers. He disapproved of their melodrama, their pessimism, their psychos and nymphos and fancy writing. He saw in crime…

Phantom Terror: Political Paranoia and the Creation of the Modern State, 1789–1848 by Adam Zamoyski. Basic Books, 569 pp., $35.00 In the years after the Congress of Vienna, whose final act was signed almost exactly two centuries ago, on June 9, 1815, the flamboyant English Romantic poet Lord Byron had more followers across Europe than any of his contemporaries. Quite a few of them followed him literally: he was being watched by a legion of spies and informers. They noted his “libidinous and immoral” way of life; they denounced his ruinous politics; they claimed he protected himself with artillery; they even observed the seal on his watch chain, with its suspicious secret symbols. In their incompetent zeal they regularly reported his presence in several places at once. Adam Zamoyski’s Phantom…

Poetry Notebook: Reflections on the Intensity of Language by Clive James. Liveright, 238 pp., $24.95 Latest Readings by Clive James. Yale University Press, 180 pp., $25.00 In the introduction to his most substantial and perhaps his finest book, Cultural Amnesia, Clive James explains that over the forty years of its composition, he gradually came to realize that this collection of “Notes in the Margin of My Time,” as the subtitle has it, could be true to the pattern of his experience only if it had no pattern. There could only be “a linear cluster of nodal points,” working in the same way that the mind does as it moves through time: “a trail of clarities variously illuminating a dark sea of unrelenting turbulence, like the phosphorescent wake of a phantom…