Innholdsfortegnelse for May 26, 2016 i The New York Review of Books

JOHN BANVILLE ’s most recent novel is The Blue Guitar. CHRISTOPHER BENFEY is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke. He is the author, most recently, of Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay. ANDREW BUTTERFIELD is President of Andrew Butterfield Fine Arts. He is the author of The Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio, among other books. ROGER COHEN is a columnist for The New York Times. His most recent book is the memoir The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family. MARK DANNER is Chancellor’s Professor of English and Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard. His new book, Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War, will be published in June. Last month…

Our Young Man by Edmund White. Bloomsbury, 282 pp., $26.00 1. In his 2004 essay “Writing Gay,” Edmund White tells how his father, coming to see one of his plays, asks him beforehand, “‘What is it about—the usual?’ which was his way of referring to a gay theme.” His new novel, Our Young Man, is about “the usual,” from an Edmund White we’ve met before but are always happy revisiting—smart, worldly, erudite, well-connected, and funny, in this case writing about gay society in early 1980s New York as seen from the point of view of a newly arrived French male model. It’s a witty reversal of a reliable Jamesian formula White has used elsewhere—the naive American going to a sophisticated foreign place, often France, making endearing gaffes, his goodness and…

The Lady with the Borzoi: Blanche Knopf, Literary Tastemaker Extraordinaire by Laura Claridge. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 400 pp., $30.00 In the opening paragraph of The Lady with the Borzoi, Laura Claridge provides a highly compressed and useful explanation of why one might want to read a biography of Blanche Knopf, who profoundly and permanently influenced the American public’s ideas about, and taste in, literature. In the early years of the twentieth century, Blanche began scouting for her fledgling publishing house quality French novels she’d get translated, such as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Prévost’s Manon Lescaut. Soon she would help Carl Van Vechten launch the literary side of the Harlem Renaissance, publishing works by Lang ston Hughes and Nella Larsen, while she also nurtured and often edited such significant authors…

Negroland: A Memoir by Margo Jefferson. Pantheon, 248 pp., $25.00 The house Negro, according to Malcolm X, looked out for his master’s interest and put the field Negro back in his place on the plantation when he got out of line. The house Negro lived better than the field Negro, Malcolm X explained. He ate the same food as the master, dressed and spoke just as well. The house Negro loved the master more than the master loved himself, while the field Negro prayed for a strong wind to come along should the master’s house catch fire. Malcolm X said that he was a field Negro and for him the black establishment, the black upper class, became synonymous with the house Negro. “You’re nothing but an ex-slave. You don’t like…

Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College, 1933–1957 an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, October 10, 2015–January 24, 2016; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, February 21–May 14, 2016; and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, September 17, 2016–January 1, 2017. Catalog of the exhibition by Helen Molesworth with Ruth Erickson. Institute of Contemporary Art/Yale University Press, 400 pp., $75.00 Intersecting Colors: Josef Albers and His Contemporaries an exhibition at the Mead Art Museum, Amherst, Massachusetts, August 28, 2015–January 3, 2016. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Vanja Malloy. Amherst College Press, 99 pp., $20.00 (paper) 1. Of the self-styled “progressive” liberal arts colleges founded between the world wars—including Bennington and Sarah Lawrence, Goddard and a reconceived Antioch—Black Mountain College was among the most distinctive, and…

A History of Balance, 1250–1375: The Emergence of a New Model of Equilibrium and Its Impact on Thought by Joel Kaye. Cambridge University Press, 519 pp., $140.00 Joel Kaye’s first book, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought (1998), was a revised version of his doctoral dissertation. Academic theses can make for dreary reading, but Kaye’s advanced a bold, sweeping, and closely argued theory, designed to explain a major shift in the thought of the later Middle Ages. In the dialectically structured thoughtworld of the late-thirteenth-and earlyfourteenth-century universities (Latin scholae or schools, hence the adjective “scholastic”), the understanding of nature and the practice of natural science underwent profound change. A universe governed by hierarchically fixed and absolute values, Kaye argued, gave…

Hume: An Intellectual Biography by James A. Harris. Cambridge University Press, 621 pp., $55.00 David Hume, who died in his native Edinburgh in 1776, has become something of a hero to academic philosophers. In 2009, he won first place in a large international poll of professors and graduate students who were asked to name the dead thinker with whom they most identified. The runners-up in this peculiar race were Aristotle and Kant. Hume beat them by a comfortable margin. Socrates only just made the top twenty. This is quite a reversal of fortune for Hume, who failed in both of his attempts to get an academic job. In his own day, and into the nineteenth century, his philosophical writings were generally seen as perverse and destructive. Their goal was “to…

SECRET DOCUMENTS ‘WITHHELD WITHOUT EXPLANATION’? To the Editors: I’m writing to request a correction to Robert Kaiser’s article “The Disaster of Richard Nixon” [NYR, April 21]. In the third sentence of the concluding paragraph, Mr. Kaiser states, “Some of this material is still classified; some involves personal records of the Nixon family; some is being withheld without explanation.” The phrase “being withheld without explanation” is incorrect. The archival staff of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum (part of the National Archives’ Presidential Libraries system) follow a very clear protocol for processing and withdrawing materials. The Richard Nixon Presidential Library processes materials according to federal statutes and deeds of gift, as described here: nixonlibrary.gov/aboutus/processing/index .php. Restricted materials are identified by withdrawal sheets at the front of each folder. I believe…

I had told Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone that I would cover the Patty Hearst trial, and this pushed me into examining my thoughts about California. Some of my notes from the time follow here. I never wrote the piece about the Hearst trial, but I went to San Francisco in 1976 while it was going on and tried to report it. And I got quite involved in uncovering my own mixed emotions. This didn’t lead to my writing the piece, but eventually it led to—years later—Where I Was From (2003). When I was there for the trial, I stayed at the Mark. And from the Mark, you could look into the Hearst apartment. So I would sit in my room and imagine Patty Hearst listening to Carousel. I had…

For Two Thousand Years by Mihail Sebastian, translated from the Romanian by Philip Ó Ceallaigh. London: Penguin, 231 pp., £9.99 (paper) In his Journal 1935–44, Mihail Sebastian, lawyer, journalist, novelist, playwright, left a profound and moving record of some of the most terrible years in the history of Europe. His native Romania may have been on the geographical periphery, but it was, no less than Spain, one of the cockpits in the struggle between totalitarianism and democracy that was to lay waste to entire countries, and cause uncountable millions of deaths and the near annihilation of European Jewry. The wonder of it is that the Journal (not published in Romania till 1996 and in English till 2000) is not only an invaluable historical document, fully as significant as the diaries…

Lyman Allyn Art Museum, 625 Williams Street, New London, CT 06320; (860) 443-2545; www.lymanallyn.org. June 16 through August 11, 2016: "For All the World to See: Visual Culture and The Struggle for Civil Rights" examines the role that visual culture played in shaping and transforming the struggle for racial equality in America from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s. Compelling assortments of photographs, television clips, art posters, and other historic artifacts, trace how images and media disseminated to the American public. This is a traveling exhibition on loan from NEH on the Road and the Mid-America Arts Alliance. Shepherd / W & K Galleries, 58 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10075; (212) 861-4050; Fax: (212) 772-1314; shepherdny@aol.com; www.shepherdgallery.com. Tuesday– Saturday, 10am–6pm. March 29–June 11, 2016: "The Human Form: Works…

Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror by Michael V. Hayden. Penguin, 448 pp., $30.00 1. When Michael Hayden was a young air force officer in the 1980s, the military stationed him as an intelligence attaché in Bulgaria. There, the man who would rise to the top of the American intelligence community in the post– September 11 era lived under constant surveillance: he and his wife, believing their apartment to be bugged, kept toy erasable pads scattered around it so they could converse in writing. Against that tense cold war backdrop, Hayden was once talking with a political officer in the Bulgarian government and became frustrated, blurting out, “What is truth to you?” The Communist Party ap -paratchik supposedly answered, “Truth? Truth is what serves the…

The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes. Knopf, 201 pp., $25.95 In Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), his bestknown novel, Julian Barnes recounts the scene in L’Éducation sentimentale where Frédéric, its hero, “wanders through an area of Paris wrecked by the 1848 uprising” and notices “amid the chaos” things that have survived by chance: He sees a clock, some prints—and a parrot’s perch. It isn’t so different, the way we wander through the past. Lost, disordered, fearful, we follow what signs there remain; we read the street names, but cannot be confident where we are. All around is wreckage. The scene is reminiscent of The Noise of Time, Osip Mandelstam’s prose work of 1925, from which the title of Barnes’s latest novel is, it seems, derived. The problem of remembering across the…

Because of Sex: One Law, Ten Cases, and Fifty Years That Changed American Women’s Lives at Work by Gillian Thomas. St. Martin’s, 291 pp. $26.99 In full public view, on the floor of the House of Representatives during the debate on what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964, sex was added to the list of characteristics to be protected from employment discrimination. But why this addition was made remains an intriguing mystery. Representative Howard W. Smith of Virginia, chairman of the House Rules Committee and a diehard segregationist who had done his best to kill the bill, introduced a floor amendment that added sex to a list that prominently included race, religion, and national origin. What was he trying to accomplish? Recent scholarship displays a surprising lack of consensus…

Lion of the Senate: When Ted Kennedy Rallied the Democrats in a GOP Congress by Nick Littlefield and David Nexon. Simon and Schuster, 505 pp., $35.00 I should have suspected that Nick Littlefield had a career on Broadway before he entered politics. Littlefield was the Kennedy aide who brought me to the senator’s attention in the 2000s based on my articles in these pages and others. My task was generally to write speeches and later to collaborate on a book; the focus of both was the importance of government in America in a period when anti government ideology was powerful. It was hard to resist Littlefield’s charm and enthusiasm, just as it would be hard to resist the Kennedy who loved to sing a Broadway song almost as much as…

Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again by Donald J. Trump. Threshold, 193 pp., $25.00 Like Hercules, Donald Trump is a work of fiction.1 Primed for miracles and wonders, Trumpsters in their thousands tilt their heads up toward the blue-black Florida sky. Behind the approaching thwackthwack-thwack the electronic fanfare soars and above it now we hear the booming carnival barker’s come-on: “Now arriving out of the northwest sky, DONALD. . . J . . .TRUMP!” Thousands of upturned mouths gape as the three floating lights, turning slowly, majestically resolve themselves into the shape of the big helicopter, the inevitable TRUMP in signature Akzidenz-Grotesk font just visible on its tail. Six thousand roaring voices—or is it seven thousand, or eight, or nine?— crash in a wave of sound against the…