Innholdsfortegnelse for June 23, 2016 i The New York Review of Books

JOAN ACOCELLA is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her most recent book is Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints. She is writing a biography of Mikhail Baryshnikov. ANTONY BEEVOR is a Visiting Professor at the University of Kent. His latest book is Ardennes 1944: The Battle of the Bulge. G.W. BOWERSOCK is Professor Emeritus of Ancient History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His most recent book, with Gideon Avni, is The Lod Mosaic: A Spectacular Roman Mosaic Floor. STEVE COLL is Dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. ROBERT DARNTON is…

Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide by Charles Foster. Metropolitan, 235 pp., $28.00 Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal. Norton, 340 pp., $27.95 What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins by Jonathan Balcombe. Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 288 pp., $27.00 In his classic essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” the philosopher Thomas Nagel attempts to enter the pteropine mind. Bats, he notes, spend a lot of their time dangling upside down. At night, they swoop around, searching for bugs and issuing high-pitched chirps that allow them to navigate in the dark. A person can imagine what it’s like to hang by his toes from a rafter. He may also be able to…

1. At the climax of Aristophanes’ comedy Frogs, a tartly affectionate parody of Greek tragedy that premiered in 405 BCE, Dionysus, the god of wine and theater, is forced to judge a literary contest between two dead playwrights. Earlier in the play, the god had descended to the Underworld in order to retrieve his favorite tragedian, Euripides, who’d died the previous year; without him, Dionysus grumpily asserts, the theatrical scene has grown rather dreary. But once he arrives in the land of the dead, he finds himself thrust into a violent literary quarrel. At the table of Pluto, god of the dead, the newcomer Euripides has claimed the seat of “Best Tragic Poet”—a place long held by the revered Aeschylus, author of the Oresteia, who’s been dead for fifty years.…

Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind by George Makari. Norton, 656 pp., $39.95 The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Mind by A. C. Grayling. Bloomsbury, 351 pp., $30.00 There are three things that might be meant by “the emergence of the modern mind”: first, the emergence of modern ways of thinking about the universe; second, the emergence of modern conceptions of the mind; and third, the emergence of the mind itself with its distinctive human characteristics. A.C. Grayling, in his new book The Age of Genius, deals with the first of these questions, arguing that the seventeenth century was the pivotal century during which modern thought took its rise, particularly with respect to physics and astronomy. George Makari, in Soul Machine,…

In Anna Karenina, the day after the fateful ball, resolved to forget Vronsky and resume her peaceful life with her son and husband (“my life will go on in the old way, all nice and as usual”), Anna settles herself in her compartment in the overnight train from Moscow to St. Petersburg, and takes out an uncut English novel, probably one by Trollope judging from references to fox hunting and Parliament. Tolstoy, of course, says nothing about a translation— educated Russians knew English as well as French. In contrast, very few educated English speakers have read the Russian classics in the original and, until recent years, they have largely depended on two translations, one by the Englishwoman Constance Garnett and the other by the English couple Louise and Aylmer Maude,…

The old language is the old language with its lance and grieves, broken shields and hammered vowels; a stairway ascending into a mirror—see it climb the old helix, beneath a scarred and chipped northerly sky, rotunda blue. Sing genetic cloud forms mirroring the syntax in reflection, and what would you have? Paving stones, rhetoric, the coping of bridges, leanings, what is taken from res? To reconstruct? To recognize the categories have failed? That the index was a lyre. The lists have grown lonely, far from home, houses of worship, roofs, toy stores and liquor stores, names, historical furniture, descriptions of architecture, patina in a fanfare city. I have eaten the air of that city.…

They May Not Mean To, But They Do by Cathleen Schine. Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 290 pp., $26.00 Over the past thirty-three years, Cathleen Schine has been one of our most realistically imaginative, dependably readable novelists. Starting with Alice in Bed (1983), her ten books comprise a sly, illuminating corpus that seems more related to the English comic novel than to most contemporary American fiction. Her work is as shapely and precisely structured if more generously cluttered than Barbara Pym’s, one of her avowed models; as ruefully satiric though less tart than Muriel Spark’s, another acknowledged influence; as buoyant though less panoramic than Anthony Trollope’s (a favorite); as sharply observant though gentler and not as grim as Anita Brookner’s. Schine often writes about educated New Yorkers—editors, academics, book…

Germaine de Staël: A Political Portrait by Biancamaria Fontana. Princeton University Press, 296 pp., $35.00 Two hundred years ago, Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker de Staël-Holstein put her finger on a phenomenon that is upsetting the American presidential race today. She called it “public opinion,” but she used that term in a new way to characterize the difficulty faced by a new breed of political leaders: How could they maintain the tie that bound them to the general public? Constitutions could be designed, electoral procedures devised, she said, but all kinds of representative government would founder if the political class failed to keep a grip on the “moral power” that connected it with the citizenry. Mme de Staël did not present this problem as a matter of political philosophy. Although she frequented philosophers,…

“Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination by Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf. Liveright, 370 pp., $27.95 Conventional wisdom has it that there are more books written about Abraham Lincoln than any other American figure. If so, then Thomas Jefferson must be running a close second. Over the past several decades there has been a never-ending profusion of works about him and his various interests. Since 1990 the University of Virginia Press alone has published sixty-eight books on Jefferson. At the same time other publishers have also been turning out numerous books on the man who is widely understood to be the apostle of America’s democracy. That the spokesman for our democracy should be a slaveholding aristocrat is surely the greatest irony in…

Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry by Paul Celan, translated from the German and with commentary by Pierre Joris. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 654 pp., $40.00 On July 25, 1967, postwar Germany’s greatest poet paid a call on its greatest philosopher. Such a meeting would be historically significant no matter what else was at stake; but the encounter of Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger was also haunted by the ghosts of Germany’s terrible recent history. Heidegger was a well-known early supporter of Nazism, who as rector of Freiburg University eagerly sought to align the academy with the new values of Hitlerism. Though he later retreated from this public position, he never came out with the open apology and explanation for his actions that many of his admirers sought. To…

The Secret War: Spies, Ciphers, and Guerrillas, 1939–1945 by Max Hastings. Harper, 610 pp., $35.00 Over the last twenty years, the huge differences between national accounts of World War II have at last started to diminish. This is largely due to the opening of archives, international conferences, and the hiring of foreign historians by most major universities. The secret war probably produced more misleading myths than any other aspect of the conflict. The outcomes of most clandestine efforts are virtually impossible to quantify, so specious assertions have abounded. It has been claimed, for example, that Ultra, the British project to decode German messages, shortened the war by months if not years. For these reasons alone, we badly needed a reliable reassessment to put the secret war in perspective, and this…

To the Editors: On July 20, 2000, The New York Review published a letter by Peter Matthiessen, Kurt Vonnegut, William Styron, Rose Styron, and E. L. Doctorow supporting a parole application for Leonard Peltier, who had served twenty-three years behind bars for the murder of two FBI agents, Ron Williams and Jack Coler, at Oglala on Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota, on June 26, 1975. The parole application was denied.* Mr. Peltier, age seventy-one, has now served thirty-nine hard years, including six in solitary confinement. We have filed a petition for clemency with President Barack Obama, only the fourth president who has visited an Indian reservation and the first to visit a federal prison, and who has spoken out against the use of solitary confinement. Viewing the case, a picture…

The 2016 Republican nomination contest is over. Donald Trump stands alone. This has surprised pundits, political scientists, and journalists alike. But why is it surprising that a candidate who led the race from July 2015 is going to be the Republican nominee? Talk of a Trump “ceiling” was rampant from the time that he entered the GOP contest. His ceiling was 25 percent; later it was 30 percent; and then later it was 40 percent. Obviously, for many political observers, it was inevitable that the anti-Trump vote would coalesce around one of his opponents. However, as we saw with the abortive John Kasich– Ted Cruz alliance prior to the Indiana primary on May 3, it was impossible for even two of Trump’s opponents to coordinate their attacks on the front-runner.…

Once and for All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz edited by Craig Morgan Teicher and with an introduction by John Ashbery. New Directions, 293 pp., $17.95 (paper) The myth of Delmore Schwartz is a variant on the myth of the visionary modern poet, at once preternaturally gifted yet unable to live in the world. This Romantic image starts, perhaps, with Thomas Chatterton, the eighteenth-century prodigy from Bristol who wrote counterfeit medieval texts and committed suicide at seventeen. It gained intensity in the life stories of John Keats and Percy Shelley, who both died in their twenties, and most spectacularly with the Frenchman Arthur Rimbaud, who made himself a seer through “the derangement of all the senses” before he stopped writing at twenty. “We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;/But…

Looking at Pictures by Robert Walser, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky, with additional translations by Lydia Davis and Christopher Middleton. Christine Burgin/New Directions, 143 pp., $24.95 If only the word “bibelot” had been a diminutive of “biblio-,” book, instead of a cognate of “bauble,” then I could have described Looking at Pictures as an ideal bibelot, a robust little hardback to slip into the pocket and take out to read in the elevator, say, without spoiling the line of the suit: wellprinted, on stout, almost stiff, paper, copiously illustrated with well-colored and surprisingly assertive plates of paintings by Fragonard, Bruegel, Cézanne, and others, all glued down in the old manner like stamps and no bigger than postcards. And so I would have paid a little homage to the…