Innholdsfortegnelse for April 7, 2016 i The New York Review of Books

ANNE APPLEBAUM is a columnist for The Washington Post and Slate, and runs the Transitions Forum at the Legatum Institute. Her most recent book is Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956. SVEN BIRKERTS is Director of the Bennington College Writing Seminars and Editor of AGNI. His book Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age was published last year. DAVID BROMWICH is Sterling Professor of English at Yale. Moral Imagination, a collection of his essays, will be published in paperback in September. IAN BURUMA is a professor at Bard. His new book, Their Promised Land: My Grandparents in Love and War, was published in January. C. M. CLARK is Regius Professor of History at Cambridge. His books include The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in…

Broad Influence: How Women Are Changing the Way America Works by Jay Newton-Small. Time Books, 232 pp., $27.95 My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency by Doug Henwood. OR Books, 182 pp., $15.00 (paper) When Hillary Clinton started losing young women voters to Barack Obama in the Democratic primaries of 2008, the common wisdom among her supporters was that she had messed things up by not “running as a woman.”1 She had refused to grant any particular significance to her gender; she had sought out the endorsements of generals; she had projected “masculine” commander-in-chief qualities at the expense of showing her warm, emotional, “feminine” side. And the result of all this, it was said, was that she had fatally squandered the inspirational appeal of her bid to be the first…

Dorothy Parker: Complete Broadway, 1918–1923 edited by Kevin C. Fitzpatrick. iUniverse, 483 pp., $34.95 (paper) Complete Stories by Dorothy Parker, edited by Colleen Breese, with an introduction by Regina Barreca. Penguin, 447 pp., $18.00 (paper) Complete Poems by Dorothy Parker, edited by Marion Meade. Penguin, 390 pp., $18.00 (paper) Dorothy Parker: In Her Own Words edited by Barry Day. Taylor Trade, 203 pp. (2004) Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? by Marion Meade. Penguin, 460 pp., $22.00 (paper) The Portable Dorothy Parker edited and with an introduction by Marion Meade. Penguin, 626 pp., $20.00 (paper) Constant Reader by Dorothy Parker. Viking, 157 pp. (1970) You Might as Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker by John Keats. Simon and Schuster, 318 pp. (1970)…

To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914–1949 by Ian Kershaw. Viking, 593 pp., $35.00 Between April 6 and October 31, 1913, the city of Ghent in northern Belgium hosted an Exposition universelle et internationale. For this provincial city it was a stupendous effort. The Gent-Sint- Pieters station, still the city’s main railway terminus, and the Central Post Office, with its eclectic mix of Gothic Revival and neo- Renaissance styles, were finished just in time for the festivities. A special airmail service was laid on as a publicity gimmick (a practice pioneered two years before, at the United Provinces Exposition in Allahabad, British India). Across 320 acres, the architects of the exposition assembled a panoply of national pavilions and themed displays focused on every conceivable product of human ingenuity, from locomotives, telegraph…

The Big Red Book of Modern Chinese Literature: Writings from the Mainland in the Long Twentieth Century edited by Yunte Huang. Norton, 606 pp., $39.95 Dragon in Ambush: The Art of War in the Poems of Mao Zedong by Jeremy Ingalls, compiled and edited by Allen Wittenborn. Lexington, 405 pp., $90.00 At the annual meeting of Book-Expo America that was held in New York last May, to which most leading US publishers sent representatives, state-sponsored Chinese publishers were named “guests of honor.” Commercially speaking, this made sense. China’s book industry, with sales now reported at $8 billion annually, is the second-largest in the world.* But for US publishers there are troubling problems, high among them Chinese censorship. When Chinese publishers publish translations of foreign works, it often happens that certain…

Laura Poitras: Astro Noise an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, February 5–May 1, 2016 Astro Noise: A Survival Guide for Living Under Total Surveillance by Laura Poitras and others. Yale University Press, 241 pp., $45.00 (paper) Installation art is a mixed genre. It can be contemplative in ways denied to a picture hanging on a wall or a film projected on a screen. At the same time it lends itself to provocation, to “confrontational” ambitions: the spectator may be startled by light or noise, or subjected to a calculated deprivation of stimuli. “These objects,” it seems to say, “are chosen and reconstructed pieces of your world. Taken together, do they somehow change your idea of the world?” Laura Poitras’s “Astro Noise,” now installed at…

The Door by Magda Szabo, translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix, with an introduction by Ali Smith. New York Review Books, 262 pp., $16.95 (paper) Magda Szabo, who died in 2007 at the age of ninety, was acclaimed and widely read in her native Hungary. She wrote in many forms—poetry, novels, plays, memoir, essays, and screenplays—and her work has been translated into many languages. Between 1949 and 1956 both she and her husband, the writer Tibor Szobotka, were prevented by the regime from publishing, and the award of an important prize to her was revoked on the same day it was bestowed. The Door, first published in 1987 in Hungarian, is unmistakably a work of fiction, with fiction’s allusive and ambiguous purposes and effects, but it is narrated in…

Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts by William H. Gass. Dalkey Archive, 349 pp., $17.95 (paper) Eyes: Novellas and Short Stories by William H. Gass. Knopf, 238 pp., $26.00 As he enters into his tenth decade, his sixth of literary production, it seems safe—but also important—to nominate William Gass as our greatest living champion of the sentence. A scholar of its innumerable variations, he has devoted untold numbers of pages to pondering its metaphysics. And he has himself, of course, practiced everything he has preached. He writes, he says, for the ear, and does so contagiously, working the sources of rhythm and cadence as he rolls out his variegated verbal brocades. He is never unaware of his materials, and never afraid to go for effects that might, in W.H. Auden’s…

Charles Rosen: The Complete Columbia and Epic Album Collection Sony Classical, 21 CDs, $60.00 Record companies are rarely confused with charitable organizations. How then to explain the recent release in a boxed set of twenty-one CDs corresponding to the twenty-one LPs that the pianist and writer Charles Rosen recorded for the Columbia and Epic labels between 1959 and 1972 (around eighteen and a half hours of music), at a price unthinkable even a decade ago? Tokyo-based Sony— now the keeper of grand old labels that include former behemoths CBS and RCA— has released this collection from an artist whose sales at the time of his death in 2012 were modest at best. What changed? Transitions from one technology to another are inevitably laced with ironies, and the shift in musical…

To the Editors: Psychology originated as a branch of philosophy, and for centuries the two areas of inquiry have richly informed each other. Some of history’s greatest moral philosophers have written on the moral implications of “human nature,” “moral sentiments,” and “the crooked timber of humanity,” while psychologists have probed how concepts elucidated by philosophers are implemented in ordinary minds. As psychologists we have continued to profit from this dialogue, particularly since we have found philosophers to be the best reasoners in the academy: the scholars most likely to read carefully, summarize accurately, respect distinctions, and expose fallacies. As such we were surprised to read a long essay in the February 25 issue of The New York Review by Tamsin Shaw (a professor of European and Mediterranean studies and philosophy…

Last July a German doctoral student named Matthias Wesel made a remarkable discovery. He was examining the papers of the late Swiss publisher Emil Oprecht for a dissertation on Arthur Koest ler’s transition from writing in German to writing in English at the end of the 1930s. Oprecht was a leftwing fellow traveler who had founded his famous publishing house Europa Verlag in Zurich in 1933, and was well known for his anti- Nazi views and support for writers in exile, including Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Ignazio Silone—and the young Arthur Koestler. Wesel told me that at the time, “I was looking for letters and royalty reports, because I wanted to know how many copies were printed of the first German edition of Koest ler’s Spanish Testament.” He failed to…

What are we to make today of this famous woman who, beginning almost a century ago, has fascinated generations with her wit, flair, talent, and near genius for self- destruction? For some, what registers most strongly is her central role in the legend of the Algonquin Round Table, with its campiness of wisecracks, quips, and put- downs—a part of her life she would come to repudiate. For others, it’s the descent into alcoholism, and the sad final years holed up in Manhattan’s Volney Hotel. Pick your myth. As for her writing, it has evoked ridiculous exaggeration from her votaries, both her contemporaries and her biographers. Vincent Sheean: “Among contemporary artists, I would put her next to Hemingway and Bill Faulkner. She wasn’t Shakespeare, but what she was, was true.” John…

Winter by Christopher Nicholson. Europa, 269 pp., $17.00 (paper) From time to time, instead of creating characters, writers have kidnapped real people and imprisoned them in novels. In the last century the preferred method was to write a roman a clef. You collected a group of relatives, acquaintances, friends, and enemies, gave them new names and sometimes different physical traits, and told a story about them, often one with parallels in life. Sometimes the author of a roman a clef also appeared in it, more or less disguised: Thomas Mann as Gustav von Aschenbach in Death in Venice, Mary McCarthy under many different aliases in many of her stories and novels. Sophisticated readers enjoyed discovering the real people behind the (often rather transparent) disguises, exchanging this knowledge with friends, and…

The Lives of Frederick Doug lass by Robert S. Levine. Harvard University Press, 373 pp., $29.95 Picturing Frederick Doug lass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American by John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste- Marie Bernier. Liveright, 288 pp., $49.95 1. Some years ago, after giving a talk at a college in Louisiana, I was approached at the podium by a middle- aged white man who said, with a genial smile, “Since you mentioned Frederick Doug lass, I thought you’d be interested that my family used to own him.” His matter- of- factness was a shock to this Yankee clueless in Dixie. I couldn’t tell if I was meant to congratulate or, perhaps, commiserate, as if his forebears had misplaced some rare collectible. So I said something…

The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: The Life and Times of Jacob Fugger by Greg Steinmetz. Simon and Schuster, 283 pp., $27.95 After more than twenty years of relative neglect, the history of capitalism is once again of high interest to scholars and their students. The new interest has many sources, but the chief impetus is surely the recognition that the world we know is rapidly changing under the pressure of a global capitalist system that is moving away from the forms it has taken since its early modern beginnings in Europe. Theorists such as Adam Smith are again on students’ reading lists, along with writers as different as Karl Marx, David Ricardo, Joseph Schumpeter, and Friedrich Hayek. New studies of the United States’ emergence as a capitalist power, of…

WHY REAGAN FELL SHORT To the Editors: Nicholas Lemann makes many interesting points in his review of two books about Ronald Reagan [“Reagan: The Triumph of Tone,” NYR, March 10]. But one statement may leave a misimpression for those who don’t follow elections. Lemann says Reagan had “two landslides . . . in the electoral college—in the presidential elections of 1980 and 1984. No presidential candidate . . . since Reagan has been as popular on election day as he was.” By discussing the electoral college results and “popularity” in this way, Lemann leaves out the fact that Reagan won only 50.7 percent of the popular vote in 1980. Still enough to win, but not a landslide in the popular tally. Reagan was hardly the overwhelming choice of the voters.…