Innholdsfortegnelse for November 24, 2016 i The New York Review of Books

Over the past few decades, ordinary US citizens have increasingly been denied effective access to their courts. There are many reasons for this. One is the ever greater cost of hiring a lawyer. A second factor is the increased expense, apart from legal fees, that a litigant must pay to pursue a lawsuit to conclusion. A third factor is increased unwillingness of lawyers to take a case on a contingent- fee basis when the anticipated monetary award is modest. A fourth factor is the decline of unions and other institutions that provide their members with free legal representation. A fifth factor is the imposition of mandatory arbitration. A sixth factor is judicial hostility to class action suits. A seventh factor is the increasing diversion of legal disputes to regulatory agencies.…

When I was sixteen and growing up in New Orleans, I stole a bottle of liquor from a supermarket and was caught. The judge sentenced me to the mild punishment for white teens, a tour of the Louisiana State Penitentiary. “Go up to Angola, son,” he said, “then after that your record’s wapped clean.” With twenty other boys I took a bus three hours upriver from New Orleans to Angola, the 140- year- old prison farm on the Mississippi. We did not know that the prison was once a cotton plantation owned by Isaac Franklin, a slave trader. We did not know that three quarters of the five thousand inmates were black, and that they worked as forced labor on the jailhouse farm. I remember the black gangs bent low…

If you saunter or dream your way along the narrow streets running east of London’s Covent Garden, drifting like a ghost amid the late- summer tourists, you may eventually come to the Cafe Murano at 36 Tavistock Street. Look carefully upward, and you will notice on the wall above, half- hidden between two tall windows, a discreet blue commemorative plaque that makes a startling and possibly sinister announcement. It was in this building (actually in a set of rooms at the back) that Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) wrote his disturbing masterpiece, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, in 1821. Today this elegant quarter of bars and restaurants seems an unlikely location for opium eating. Yet it was behind this solid London brickwork that De Quincey first opened up his astonishing…

A horse lay on the ground, ringed by sentinel horses of the same dark brown like a monochrome drawing, only not a drawing, early morning, a cold morning, beside the county road. I walked down the ditch and up to the fence and as no animal moved I became certain of death. The horses bowed their heads to sniff the dead one. Frost rimed the mud, dully, lit by the dull low sun. Seven years ago my friend died and I am still outraged. I have been shaking my stupid fist of outrage at the gods for so long they must have a nickname for me, like Dryope, for the black poplar tree, or else Sophia, as a joke, since I have no wisdom. Only petty malevolence could have dreamed…

The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe by Elaine Showalter. Simon and Schuster, 303 pp., $28.00 Nobody can know another’s marriage from the inside. Even with people we know well, the relationship we see is merely the deceptive outward show, the public illusion; at home the marriage shifts into some other mode entirely, with intimate deployments of coldness or affection, manipulation or control, altering the balance at every moment. No outsider can tell with any certainty what is really going on. Faced with this reality, Elaine Showalter has bravely taken on the task of examining the inner workings of a marriage that ended nearly a century and a half ago. That she succeeds as well as she does is a tribute not only to her scholarly diligence, but also to…

GRANDPARENT PAPER TIME CAPSULE Whether your grandchild is still a baby or all grown up, share your stories with them in this keepsake collection of twelve letters. Fill each letter with words of wisdom that only a grandparent can impart, then postdate, seal, and gift this paper time capsule for future opening. Your grandchild—and generations to come—will treasure this heirloom forever. #05-GPPTC • $14.95 TEACUP NECKLACE The necklace is presented on a card imprinted with C.S. Lewis’ famous tea lovers quote, “You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.” The nickelfree silver-plated teacup and saucer charm is decorated with an antique-tone floral pattern. The charm is approx. 0.6" and the delicate chain approx. 18" long. Made by hand in Somerset England.…

Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison an exhibition at Reading Prison, Reading, England, September 4–December 4, 2016 The exterior of Reading Prison in Berkshire, formerly known as Reading Gaol, where Oscar Wilde spent almost two years in confinement between 1895 and 1897, is impressive in a grandiose Victorian, mock- Medieval- Tudor- Gothic way. Designed by George Gilbert Scott and William Moffatt in the 1840s, the prison was made to look like a grand fortress inspired by Warwick Castle, built in the eleventh century. When Wilde was a prisoner there, as punishment for having had sex with men (“gross public indecency”), Reading Gaol was still run according to the then- modern principles pioneered at Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia. Inmates were locked up for twentythree hours a day in complete solitary…

MÁIRTÍN Ó CADHAIN, Graveyard Clay: Cré na Cille, translated from the Irish by Liam Mac Con Iomaire and Tim Robinson ?? “Corrosively satirical and darkly comic. . . . A tour de force of a gabfest.”—Mark Harman, Los Angeles Review of Books ?? “[This] translation . . . is remarkably elegant.”—William Brennan, The New Yorker ?? Paper CZESLAW MILOSZ, The Mountains of Parnassus, translated from the Polish by Stanley Bill ?? “This is a little jewel of science fiction–like musings on the difficulties of modern life. For a reader of Milosz’s works, this is a splendidly recognizable book.”—Irena Grudzinska Gross, Princeton University MIGUEL DE CERVANTES, Exemplary Novels, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman and edited by Roberto González Echevarría ?? “For most English-language readers, Cervantes is a one-book wonder.…

Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 571 pp., $28.00 Some two hundred pages into Here I Am, Jonathan Safran Foer’s third novel, the film director Steven Spielberg materializes in a restroom at an airport Panda Express. Or at least Jacob Bloch, the forty- two- year- old onetimewunderkind writer whose anxieties give the book a fretful pulse, suspects that the man standing next to him is Spielberg, which prompts a small crisis. The cause is not proximity to greatness, although Jacob seems to have squandered his own, having won the National Jewish Book Award at age twenty- four (like Foer) and then frittered away his talent writing episodes of a TV show about dragons. What unsettles him is a quick glance that suggests that Spielberg— who,…

The Terror Years: From al- Qaeda to the Islamic State by Lawrence Wright. Knopf, 366 pp., $28.95 Lawrence Wright is one of the most lucid writers on the subject of Islamic extremism. His articles for The New Yorker have done a great deal to educate Americans who likely knew little about terrorism in the Middle East before September 11 and still are confused by it. His much- admired book The Looming Tower (2006) showed how al- Qaeda managed to carry out what is still the most audacious and powerful act of terrorism in history. In his new book, The Terror Years, a collection of essays, Wright again helps us understand Islamic extremism and the West’s reaction to it. From al-Qaeda, formed in 1988, to the Taliban, which came into being…

CREATESPACE 4900 LaCross Road, North Charleston, SC 29406; www.createspace.com. KEEPING TIME 70 Little Stories by John Elsing Adventures—large and small—of a dad and his daughter through four decades. Witty, thoughtful, a poetic gem not to be missed. Creates a larger picture of loving and spirited lives. 9781500862565 • Paper, $12.75 E-book, $5.95 272 pages • Memoir Also available on www.amazon.com. AMANDA’S BOAT by Don McGarva A little girl’s childish whim takes three generations of people on a life-changing journey of discovery, intrigue, love, and redemption as their year-long adventure unfolds against the backdrop of the culture and changing seasons of upstate Maine. A true gem of a story. 9781530806829 • Paper, $12.95 eBook, $6.00 335 pages • Literary Fiction Available at www.amazon.com and www.barnesandnoble.com GHOST HAMPTON by Ken McGorry A…

The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen by Aileen M. Kelly. Harvard University Press, 592 pp., $39.95 To some, Alexander Herzen commands respect as “the first Russian socialist,” to others as the best debunker of revolutionary dreams. Born in 1812, he was the illegitimate son of a wealthy aristocrat, who gave him the German surname Herzen (meaning “of the heart”) in tribute to the boy’s mother, a German girl he had smuggled into Russia disguised as a boy. Trained at Moscow University in physics and biology, Herzen decisively shaped what we have come to know as the Russian intelligentsia. As a young man, he wrote passable fiction and some splendid meditations on the implications of scientific thinking, but his real career began when he went abroad…

We have a new government. Our new government includes many gifted ministers. One of our ministers speaks English. Our new government has set to work energetically. Unfortunately, it is less than aggressive in a situation permitting so many unregenerate liberals to persist: in some cities they even outnumber traditional Catholic families. What else should our government do? It cannot be guided by the sentimental views typical of Western politicians. Some night it should execute several movie directors, not sparing women. All professors of constitutional law should be interned for life. Poets may be left in peace since no one reads them anyway. Penal camps are necessary, but should be lenient, so as not to provoke the UN. Most journalists should be sent to Madagascar. Hungary, on the other hand, should…

Remarking on a painter he had hired to decorate his house, a man whose habit was to fill in the empty spaces around his central painting with “odd fantastic figures without any grace but what they derive from their variety,” Montaigne draws a comparison with his own writing. “And in truth,” he says, “what are these things I scribble, other than grotesques and monstrous bodies, made of various parts, without any certain figure, or any other than accidental order, coherence, or proportion?” By way of corroboration, he tosses in a line from the Roman poet Horace, Desinit in piscem mulier formosa superne (a fair woman in her upper form ends in a fish), then winds up observing that while at least the painter begins with a strong, clear picture and…

The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Andres Resendez. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 431 pp., $30.00 An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 by Benjamin Madley. Yale University Press, 692 pp., $38.00 The European market in African slaves, which opened with a cargo of Mauritian blacks unloaded in Portugal in 1441, and the explorer Christopher Columbus, born in Genoa ten years later, were closely linked. The ensuing Age of Discovery, with its expansions of empires and exploitations of New World natural resources, was accompanied by the seizure and forced labor of human beings, starting with Native Americans. Appraising that commercial opportunity came naturally to an entrepreneur like Columbus, as did his sponsors’ pressure on him to find precious metals and his…