Innholdsfortegnelse for October 13, 2016 i The New York Review of Books

NEAL ASCHERSON is the author of The Struggles for Poland, Black Sea, and Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland. He is an Honorary Professor at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. COLIN B. BAILEY is Director of the Morgan Library and Museum. His books include Patriotic Taste: Collecting Modern Art in Pre- Revolutionary Paris, which was awarded the 2004 Mitchell Prize, and Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting. APRIL BERNARD ’s most recent books are Brawl & Jag, a collection of poems, and Miss Fuller, a novel. FREEMAN DYSON is Professor of Physics Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His most recent book is Dreams of Earth and Sky, a collection of his writing in these pages. ORLANDO FIGES is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University…

John le Carré: The Biography by Adam Sisman. Harper, 652 pp., $28.99 The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life by John le Carré. Viking, 310 pp., $28.00 What happens when a biography collides with an autobiography? Adam Sisman’s careful, comprehensive life of “John le Carré” (his real name is David Cornwell) has been followed within months by the novelist’s own memoir. It covers many of the same anecdotes and characters. Did Sisman realize that David Cornwell was going to do this? I don’t know the answer, but at some stage he probably did. More to the point, would Cornwell have written the book if he hadn’t read Sisman’s take on his life first? I am pretty certain he would not. So there’s a causal relationship between these two books. But…

I look past the big face of my computer At what was once New York Outside my window And now is a plateau Of smiling bra-less Breasts of the contestants. It’s time to wake From this cryogenic sleep In which I’ve been preserved, and vote. The endlessness of America ends. And what an ending. A second-stage booster rocket ascending From the one below that’s downward-trending. Enough protein to get you there— But not beyond— Required rebirth Into another form of life. Namely, Donald Trump. I turn the TV off Which comes back on All on its own. It’s all about climate change And fracking girls. And every bidet is transgender Or ought to be. Trans is the time of day. Many people these days are Trump or trans or gay.…

From the New World: Poems 1976–2014 by Jorie Graham. Ecco, 359 pp., $29.99 Some writers prompt us to respond in kind, to reply—speaking out loud to the page, or scribbling notes, or, if we are writers ourselves, riding the energy of the words we have read to make our own. Among poets, surely Walt Whitman has always been one of those prompters—for good and ill—to his enthusiasts. Not only is it almost impossible to read Whitman quietly to oneself; as well as declaiming him about the house, or reading him aloud in a group, writers and would- be writers almost always leave a session with Whitman by running to the page or screen or soap box to spew. And although Whitman’s specifically King James Bible cadences have been taken up…

John Davis Gallery 362 ½ Warren Street, Hudson, NY 12534; (518)828-5907; art@johndavisgallery.com; www.johndavisgallery.com Leonid Lerman Touched by Verses and Related Works, 10.15 - 11.6 "The Last Man… What a loaded combination! The more I thought about it, the more I felt irresistible desire to see the face of that ‘’last man’’, to read the topography of the face, that encrypted an entire life; a face that one cannot add anything to. This is when I started to sculpt him… What a tall order..!” - Leonid Lerman Judy Ferrara Gallery 16 S. Elm St., Three Oaks, MI, 49128; (574)-276-6001 www.judyferrara.gallery. Joyce Polance was born in New York City in 1965. She attended Wesleyan University and received a BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology. Polance is primarily known for her figurative…

The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century by Daniel Oppenheimer. Simon and Schuster, 403 pp., $28.00 The Limousine Liberal: How an Incendiary Image United the Right and Fractured America by Steve Fraser. Basic Books, 291 pp., $27.50 Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank. Metropolitan, 305 pp., $27.00 As a reviewer of political books, I get a lot of them unbidden in the mail. I remember vividly, one day in 2003, opening a package from a publisher, finding Arianna Huffington’s anticorporate screed Pigs at the Trough, and thinking: finally, after all these years, somebody has moved from right to left! Through the 1990s, Huffington had been a fairly dutiful Republican—at one point, even a Republican political wife. She…

When the financial industry—banks, hedge funds, loan companies, private equity—gets too involved in any particular activity of the economy or society, it’s usually time to worry. The financial sector, which represents a mere 4 percent of jobs in this country but takes a quarter of all private sector profits, is like the proverbial Las Vegas casino— it always wins, and usually leaves a trail of losers behind. So perhaps alarms should have been raised among both financial regulators and educational leaders when, two decades ago, forprofit colleges began going public on the NASDAQ and cutting deals by which private equity firms would buy them out. Apollo Group, the parent company of the University of Phoenix, was one of the first, becoming a publicly traded corporation in 1994, at a time…

Hubert Robert, 1733–1808 an exhibition at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, March 9–May 30, 2016; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., June 26–October 2, 2016. Catalog of the exhibition by Margaret Morgan Grasselli and Yuriko Jackall, with contributions by Guillaume Faroult, Catherine Voiriot, and Joseph Baillio. National Gallery of Art/Lund Humphries, 281 pp., $60.00 Currently on view at the National Gallery of Art, a retrospective of the work of Hubert Robert is the first of this prolific, protean, and outstandingly inventive eighteenth- century artist to be mounted in America. It is a reduced version of the more comprehensive exhibition that was shown in Paris last spring under the title “Hubert Robert, 1733–1808: Un peintre visionnaire.”* The greatest painter of antiquities in eighteenth- century Europe, Robert would likely have…

To the Editors: We, the undersigned, oppose an economic, political, or cultural boycott of Israel itself as defined by its June 4, 1967, borders. We believe that this 1967 armistice line, the socalled Green Line, should be the starting point for negotiations between the Israeli and Palestinian parties on future boundaries between two states. To promote such negotiations, we call for a targeted boycott of all goods and services from all Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories, and any investments that promote the Occupation, until such time as a peace settlement is negotiated between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. We further call upon the US government to exclude settlements from trade benefits accorded to Israeli enterprises, and to strip all such Israeli entities in the West Bank from…

Seven weeks to go; can the unthinkable happen? We believe that surely it cannot. We can read the polls, which are more reassuring than not, and Nate Silver’s probability calculations, which have consistently shown since the summer, with fluctuations, that Hillary Clinton is far more likely to be elected than Donald Trump. We exhale and even allow ourselves to daydream a little when we read reports that Clinton is close or occasionally ahead in states like Arizona and even Georgia, where wins would ensure a resounding rejection of Trumpismus. But these points are somehow never quite as reassuring as they ought to be. They struggle for traction in a media environment that helped Trump during the primary season and that has continued to do so, not because any leading news…

He heard God coughing in the next apartment, his life a hospital, he moved from bed to bed with us and Baudelaire, except he always had Finnegans Wake tucked in his pajamas, which must mean, sure as chance, the human race is God’s phlegm. Penitent, I say a prayer in God’s throat: “Mister, whose larynx we congest, spit us into the Atlantic or Hudson . . . let us be dropped into the mouth of the first fish that survived by eating its young— drink hot tea and honey Your mother brings You till You are rid of Your catarrh, well again. Let us swim back to our handiwork.” Far from the world of Howth Castle, Delmore died in a bed-bugged hotel, unclaimed for three days. A week before, by…