Innholdsfortegnelse for November 10, 2016 i The New York Review of Books

MARCIA ANGELL is a member of the faculty of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine. RUSSELL BAKER is a former columnist and correspondent for The New York Times and The Baltimore Sun. His books include The Good Times, Growing Up, and Looking Back. G.W. BOWERSOCK is Professor Emeritus of Ancient History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His next book, The Crucible of Islam, will be published in the spring. JOHN BREWER teaches in the Humanities and Social Sciences Division at the California Institute of Technology. He is currently working on a book on Vesuvius in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. DAVID BROMWICH is Sterling Professor of English at Yale. Moral Imagination, a…

Mark Danner All American elections tend to be touted as historic, for all American culture tends toward the condition of hype. Flummoxing, then, to be confronted with a struggle for political power in which, for once, all is at stake. We have long since forfeited the words to confront it, rendering superlatives threadbare, impotent. No accident that among so many other things Donald J. Trump is the Candidate of Dead Words, spewing “fantastic” and “amazing” and “huge” in all directions, clogging the airtime broadcasters have lavished upon him with a deadening rhetoric reminiscent of the raving man hunched beside you on the bar stool. “This country is a disaster.” “We’re in big trouble, folks.” “Our leaders don’t know what they’re doing.” Or his favorite declarative closer to those 140- character…

Franz Liszt: Musician, Celebrity, Superstar by Oliver Hilmes, translated from the German by Stewart Spencer. Yale University Press, 353 pp., $38.00 1. In 1881, Franz Liszt visited Raiding, the small Hungarian town where he had been born nearly seventy years before. He was arguably the most famous musician in the world. Trailed by local dignitaries, he arrived at the modest house where he had grown up. Inside he was amazed to find the remains of an old stove. He recalled that, as a small boy, he had destroyed the stove and nearly killed himself when he threw a pouch of gunpowder onto it, curious to see the result. “Already it was apparent that I had a feeling for mass effects,” he said. There was a rueful edge to this joke.…

The Long Game: A Memoir by Mitch McConnell. Sentinel, 278 pp., $28.00 The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell by Alec MacGillis. Simon and Schuster, 141 pp., $14.00 (paper) 1. In 1977, a bored Republican lawyer from Louisville named Mitch McConnell, then thirty- five, decided the time had come to act on a life long dream to become somebody important—in this case, county judge of Jefferson County, Kentucky, which surrounded the city of Louisville. “Judge” was the archaic title for the county’s chief executive. The last Republican to hold the job had become Senator Marlow Cook, a figure on the national stage, precisely what McConnell dreamed of becoming. He had been running for office since high school, winning nearly every contest he entered. Now he hoped this could be…

This Trusted house, its doors and windows set, stands ready with, instead of a verandah and the old furniture I still forget, racks for the brass of trumpeting allamanda, a copious front yard and our gramophone playing one of my mother’s singles “Please don’t say ‘no’ say ‘maybe’” the scratchy record sounding like far rain, to Derek, Pam and Roddy and Pam’s baby, the little golden Nigel, they fill our home again, including Uncle Ozzie who wrote endless sermons in his small room upstairs, Mama’s sewing machine, a Singer, pedaled and steered the house’s human freight and a great kannang tree lit every scene up and down Chaussée Road. For all those who have been, my eyes’ windows brim, as I unlatch the gate.…

WHEN PHILOSOPHERS DISAGREE To the Editors: I am grateful to Professor Nagel for the attention he has paid to my book The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy [NYR, September 29], and for his qualified recommendation of it. He writes that I am “not a philosopher but a philosophical fellow traveler,” alluding, presumably, to the fact that I am not (nor have I ever been) a card-carrying member of the professoriat. Although the term “fellow traveler” is usually pejorative, I rather enjoy the thought of playing poputchik to Professor Nagel’s Trotsky. Most of the thinkers in my book were not academics either, and would probably have been puzzled to learn of some of the ways in which their work is presented in universities today. Professor Nagel rightly notes…

Russell Baker What is to be done about the Republican Party? Sixty years ago it was the party of Dwight Eisenhower and a dynamic suburban middle class putting an end at last to the long reign of the New Deal Democrats. This summer it became the pathetic captive of Donald Trump, a television performer professing to speak for a discontented and sullen middle class. From Eisenhower to Trump in sixty years—this was a real trip to the bottom, make no mistake, a humiliation indeed for a once-powerful party. The Republicans had had ample time to avoid it. There had long been warning signs of a party slipping into irrelevance, but there seemed to be no Republican leader shrewd, charismatic, or brave enough to shake it out of its intellectual slumber.…

Charles LeDray Works an exhibition at the Craig F. Starr Gallery, New York City, September 9–October 29, 2016. Catalog of the exhibition by Susan Lubowsky Talbott. Craig F. Starr Gallery, 40 pp., $40.00 (paper) For some twenty-five years, Charles Le-Dray has been surprising and delighting, and sometimes mystifying, the audience for contemporary art. Now fifty-six, Le-Dray is a kind of realist sculptor whose pieces—in part because his subjects are familiar but not what we would expect in a gallery setting, and in equal measure because he works with such small, essentially miniaturist sizes—have the power of making almost every object he handles seem new to our eyes. When his art was getting underway, in the late 1980s, he altered the idea we generally have of stuffed animals. Using bears mostly,…

Kierkegaard: Exposition and Critique by Daphne Hampson. Oxford University Press, 344 pp., $44.95; $28.00 (paper) Around 1840, Niels Christian Kierkegaard began a sketch of his second cousin Søren. The face remains, like the portrait itself, unfinished. Though the sitter was already twenty-seven you would swear he was still an adolescent. The gaze is intense, the eyes innocent and preternaturally large. You can just glimpse the light sideburns he grew to cover his cheeks after the fashions of mid-nineteenth-century masculinity. But the mouth, held firm in conviction, betrays him: the lips are too delicate, sensuous, petulant. A year later he would cancel his engagement to Regine Olsen to begin a life of celibacy that would also mark the start of his philosophical career: “My engagement to her and the breaking of…

Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire by Carla J. Mulford. Oxford University Press, 426 pp., $65.00 Benjamin Franklin in London: The British Life of America’s Founding Father by George Goodwin. Yale University Press, 365 pp., $32.50 There could hardly be two more different treatments of Ben Franklin than the studies by Carla Mulford and George Goodwin.* Mulford’s Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire is the fruit of a lifetime’s study of the statesman and polymath, a polemically engaged and bold attempt to lend coherence to a famously multifaceted career. Goodwin’s Benjamin Franklin in London is altogether more modest. Elegantly written, it serves as an enjoyable introduction to Franklin’s time in the imperial metropolis. Replete with anecdote, it is short on analysis, and tends to defer to the scholars…

Jessica T. Mathews Judging from the lack of attention to foreign policy in this campaign, one might conclude that few security challenges loom. Other than immigration policy (more a domestic than an international issue), trade, and, occasionally, the Iran nuclear deal, the rest of the world has been largely invisible. Yet overwhelmingly, the Republican leaders most distraught by Donald Trump’s candidacy are foreign policy and international security experts. In March, 121 of them stated their “united . . . opposition” to someone “so utterly unfitted” to the job. A second group signed another such letter in August. Others, including former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and former chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, have independently announced their…

The Novel: A Survival Skill by Tim Parks. Oxford University Press, 185 pp., $24.95 (paper) Where I’m Reading From: The Changing World of Books by Tim Parks. New York Review Books, 239 pp., $19.95 Life and Work: Writers, Readers, and the Conversations Between Them by Tim Parks. Yale University Press, 308 pp., $35.00 Author of fifteen novels, nine books of nonfiction, and countless articles and translations, the prodigious Tim Parks is what used to be called a man of letters. He coolly sums up his multivalent reputation: I am known in England mainly for light, though hopefully thoughtful nonfiction; in Italy for polemical newspaper articles and a controversial book about soccer; in Germany, Holland, and France for what I consider my “serious” novels Europa, Destiny, Cleaver; in the United States…

The Poetry of Derek Walcott, 1948–2013 selected by Glyn Maxwell. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 617 pp., $40.00 1. The first poem in this substantial selection of the work of the St. Lucia–born poet Derek Walcott was written when he was only eighteen. It initially appeared in a privately printed volume entitled 25 Poems (1949), a selfpublishing venture subsidized by Walcott’s widowed mother (who worked as a seamstress and a teacher) to the tune of $200—a stake she eventually recouped after the young poet sold enough copies to friends to break even. The poem is set at twilight, and opens: The fishermen rowing homeward in the dusk, Do not consider the stillness through which they move. So I since feelings drown, should no more ask What twilight and safety your strong…