Innholdsfortegnelse for July 14, 2016 i The New York Review of Books

HILTON ALS is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the coauthor, most recently, of Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor. JAMES ARTHUR is an Assistant Professor at the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and the author of Charms Against Lightning. PETER BROOKS , Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale, teaches at Princeton. He is currently at work on a book called Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris. JERRY BROWN is Governor of California. PETER BROWN is the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton. His latest book is Treasure in Heaven: The Holy Poor in Early Christianity. DAVID COLE is the Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at the Georgetown University Law Center. His new book, Engines…

Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art by Nancy Princenthal. Thames and Hudson, 288 pp., $39.95 Agnes Martin an exhibition at Tate Modern, London, June 3–October 11, 2015; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, November 7, 2015–March 6, 2016; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, April 24–September 11, 2016; and the Guggenheim Museum, New York City, October 7, 2016– January 11, 2017. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Frances Morris and Tiffany Bell. D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, 271 pp., $55.00 London. Late summer, 2015. The city’s habitual pearly gray daylight adds, it seems, an extra layer or patina of ardor and melancholy to the Canadian-born Agnes Martin’s extraordinary mid-tolate-career paintings—images made, for the most part, on square canvases measuring seventy-two inches, and filled with stripes of varying widths and hues that remain, twelve years after…

The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens by Paul Mariani. Simon and Schuster, 481 pp., $30.00 The poetic imagination projects a world, says the poet Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) in a letter from 1940, but it is difficult to make that world believable to everyone: It is impossible to project a world that will not appear to some one to be a deformation. This is especially true when the projection is that of the volcano Apostrophe, the sea Behold: poetry. Adopting a slightly sardonic tone, Stevens translates his metaphors personally: A man who spouts apostrophes is a volcano and in particular the volcano Apostrophe. A man full of behold this and behold that is the sea Behold. A volcano, unpredictably exploding with smoke and fire, manifests the dormant underlying violence…

My Journey at the Nuclear Brink by William J. Perry, with a foreword by George P. Shultz. Stanford Security Studies, 234 pp., $85.00; $24.95 (paper) I know of no person who understands the science and politics of modern weaponry better than William J. Perry, the US Secretary of Defense from 1994 to 1997. When a man of such unquestioned experience and intelligence issues the stark nuclear warning that is central to his recent memoir, we should take heed. Perry is forthright when he says: “Today, the danger of some sort of a nuclear catastrophe is greater than it was during the Cold War and most people are blissfully unaware of this danger.” 1 He also tells us that the nuclear danger is “growing greater every year” and that even a…

Even the Dead by Benjamin Black. Henry Holt, 287 pp., $27.00 “Death,” writes Walter Benjamin, “is the sanction of everything the storyteller has to tell.” And also: the storyteller “borrows his authority from death”; the endstop of death creates the meaning of a life recounted. The classic detective story shares this belief. It starts from a dead body. As the story moves forward in the inquest, it reaches back to reconstruct the events that lead up to that death: the narrative exists only to unearth and make present that past story, the story of the crime. I sense that the Irish novelist John Banville’s turn to detective fiction in the persona of Benjamin Black, whom he calls “Banville’s dark brother,” has to do with this obsession with death as the…

The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election by John Sides and Lynn Vavreck. Princeton University Press, 331 pp., $19.95 (paper) Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government by Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels. Princeton University Press, 390 pp., $29.95 We are plunging into what will almost surely be the most vicious presidential campaign since the early days of the republic, when Thomas Jefferson’s allies accused John Adams of having a “ hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” I don’t believe that particular charge has been made since in an American presidential campaign, but we can’t say with any certainty that Donald Trump might not end up there.…

In which a newborn cricket walks across a field, unable to reply to the greetings of the mantis, the moth, and the dragonfly, until his rubbing of wing on wing becomes a sound that can speak for him. When the last page turns, the book itself makes a chirruping. Here is the church, and the steeple. Here is the coffee table where the child lines up a squad of plastic people. Can the child tell the difference between himself and other things? He totters back and forth on a tractor mounted on a spring. Here’s the tension of a string pulled tight, and the child’s father rolling over and over and over in the night: the cricket book, after much rough reading, now chirrups nightly on its own. Finally the…

Not Pretty Enough: The Unlikely Triumph of Helen Gurley Brown by Gerri Hirshey. Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 500 pp., $27.00 Enter Helen: The Invention of Helen Gurley Brown and the Rise of the Modern Single Woman by Brooke Hauser. Harper, 462 pp., $28.99 Sex and the Single Girl by Helen Gurley Brown. Barricade, 267 pp., $16.95 (paper) The Single Girl Goes to Town: A Knowing Guide to Men, Maneuvers, Jobs and Just Living for Big City Women by Jean Baer. Macmillan, 273 pp. (1968) Somewhere back in the day Helen Gurley Brown said that after a certain age the only thing a woman could rely on to improve her appearance was good posture and expensive jewelry. At least that is my recollection, though I no longer recall the…

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking, and the Future of the Global Economy by Mervyn King. Norton, 430 pp., $28.95 1. The Bank of England, founded in 1694, isn’t the oldest central bank in the world, an honor that belongs to Sweden’s Riksbank, founded a quartercentury earlier. But the “Old Lady of Threadneedle Street” arguably invented the art of central banking—the visible hand, operating through the money supply, lending policies, and more—that all modern economies, no matter how much they may talk about free markets, rely on to provide monetary and financial stability. These days, of course, the pound sterling is much less widely used than the dollar, the euro, or even the yen or the yuan, and the Bank of England is correspondingly overshadowed in many ways by its…

Oreo by Fran Ross, with a foreword by Danzy Senna and an afterword by Harryette Mullen. New Directions, 230 pp., $14.95 (paper) Google wasn’t around when Oreo was first published in 1974. You are hit with Greek mythology and Yiddish right away and just the look of the pages of Fran Ross’s novel about an Afro-Jewish girl’s quest to find her white father can discourage or intimidate. Oreo, by an African-American writer who died in 1985, promises a degree of difficulty; the chapter titles, paragraph titles (“Helen and Oreo shmooz”), different font sizes, a graph showing shades of blackness, letters, an elaborate five-page menu of a daughter’s homecoming meal, footnotes, and mathematical equations say this is no naturalistic tale of two ghettoes. The protagonist is called “Oreo” not because of…

To the Editors: I am sorry that Kenneth Roth found the book of mine that he reviewed, Who Rules the World? [NYR, June 9], “infuriating.” I have of course looked with interest at his reasons, but do not find them convincing. His first case charges “sloppiness” in my observation that the Obama administration was considering reviving military commissions while in fact they continued to operate. The observation was accurate: it referred, explicitly, to what the Obama administration was considering in 2009, citing the news reports of May 2009. The second example is that I was “simply confused” in quoting Jessica Mathews [NYR, March 19, 2015], attributing to her the view quoted “when in fact she was criticizing that perspective.” Roth does not take into account the sentence that immediately follows…

THE CRITIC’S SENSE & SENSIBILITY To the Editors: Jed Perl cloaks his dismissal of the art historical and critical work of Yve-Alain Bois with a caution about the straitjacket of systematic discourse, which he believes must close off the work in question to the “accidents, coincidences, escapades . . . even outright mistakes” in the practice of a given artist [“Which Matisse Do You Choose?,” NYR, May 12]. He goes on to demonstrate the reliance on system in Bois’s work on Matisse, Kelly, and the contemporary art informed by the writer Georges Bataille (“Formless”). In his masterly essay on aesthetics, “Music Discomposed,” Stanley Cavell speaks of great criticism as insisting on asking “why the thing is as it is, and characteristically . . . put[ting] this question, for example, in…