Innholdsfortegnelse for December 22, 2016 i The New York Review of Books

IAN BURUMA is a Professor at Bard. His latest book is Their Promised Land: My Grandparents in Love and War. ROBERT COTTRELL is Editor of The Browser. He has served as a Moscow bureau chief for both The Economist and the Financial Times. MARK DANNER is Chancellor’s Professor of English and Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard. His most recent book is Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War. MICHAEL DIRDA is a columnist for The Washington Post Book World. His most recent book is Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books. MARTIN FILLER is the author, most recently, of Makers of Modern Architecture, Volume II: From Le Corbusier to Rem Koolhaas, a…

1. Literature that takes a wistful backward glance at the outmoded manners and mores of the previous forty or fifty years—most famously Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu—has a direct parallel in architecture. Time and again we have seen reawakened interest in the disdained buildings of two generations earlier, a span still within living memory but not quite yet history. For example, Oxford aesthetes of the 1920s (a coterie that included John Betjeman, Osbert Lancaster, and Evelyn Waugh) discovered new charm in ornate Victorian monuments that their parents’ contemporaries dismissed as eyesores. The bizarre, protopsychedelic fantasies of the Catalan outlier Antoni Gaudí emerged from a half-century of oblivion in the 1960s and enthralled an international counterculture. And the 1970s saw a new vogue for the jazzy modernistic riffs of…

Moonglow by Michael Chabon. Harper, 430 pp., $28.99 On his deathbed, a cantankerous old Jewish guy, his habitual reticence disarmed by a painkiller, tells his life story to his grandson, a writer named Michael Chabon. This scenario, the premise of Chabon’s new novel, may make Moonglow sound more syrupy, more gimmicky—and less entertaining— than it is. In fact it’s engrossing to witness the feisty grandfather’s final days with his entranced Boswell of a grandson, and to watch Chabon avoid the pitfalls of tedium and—the greater risk here—sentimentality. Whatever initial resistance we may have to the notion of dying Grandpa, high on Dilaudid, looking back on his long and colorful career is rapidly overcome by Chabon’s obvious pleasure in storytelling, by his gift for writing dialogue with the snap of a…

Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner by Mark Ford. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 305 pp., $27.95 To call Thomas Hardy half a Londoner may sound rather like suggesting that William Faulkner was something of a New Yorker. Didn’t Hardy invent the English realm of “Wessex,” or at least rescue it from a thousand years of disuse? Wasn’t he a native of that place, born in a tiny village near Dorchester? He “ventured,” he said in a preface to a new edition of Far from the Madding Crowd, “to adopt the word . . . from the pages of early English history, and give it a fictitious significance as the existing name of the district once included in that extinct kingdom.” Then things got a little out of hand, and what Hardy…

The Third Reich in History and Memory by Richard J. Evans. Oxford University Press, 483 pp., $29.95 There was a time, hard though it is now to remember it, when Germany did not pose a great problem for other nations—or at least no more of a problem than anywhere else. Long divided among principalities and regional powers such as Prussia and Bavaria, the country was unified only in the nineteenth century. But Germany at the start of the twentieth century was in many ways an ordinary country, albeit one with a strong economy and musical tradition, and thinkers of worldwide influence; there was, outside its borders, little interest in its recent history. It took the Nazis and World War II to change that. When British political warfare specialists were looking…

Frank Ramsey (1903–1930): A Sister’s Memoir by Margaret Paul, with a foreword by Brian McGuinness and an afterword by Gabriele Taylor. Cambridgeshire: Smith-Gordon, 304 pp., £20.00 (paper) “Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train.” Thus, in the New Year of 1929, was Ludwig Wittgenstein’s return to Cambridge announced by John Maynard Keynes in a letter to his wife, Lydia Lopokova. Wittgenstein had previously been at Cambridge before World War I as a student of Bertrand Russell, but had acquired his godlike status through the publication after the war of his first and only book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which was very quickly recognized as a work of genius by philosophers in both Cambridge and his home city of Vienna. Wittgenstein himself was initially convinced that it provided definitive…

The Face of the Earth and Other Imaginings by Algernon Blackwood, edited and with an introduction by Mike Ashley. Stark House, 222 pp., $19.95 (paper) The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories The Listener and Other Stories by Algernon Blackwood, with an introduction by Storm Constantine. Stark House, 352 pp., $19.95 (paper) Pan’s Garden Incredible Adventures by Algernon Blackwood, with introductions by Mike Ashley and Tim Lebbon. Stark House, 440 pp., $23.95 (paper) The Lost Valley The Wolves of God by Algernon Blackwood, with an introduction by Simon Clark. Stark House, 442 pp., $23.95 (paper) Julius LeVallon The Bright Messenger by Algernon Blackwood, with an introduction by Mike Ashley. Stark House, 440 pp., $23.95 (paper) The Complete John Silence Stories by Algernon Blackwood, edited and with an introduction by S.T.…

EVOLUTION & THE BIBLE To the Editors: Professor G. W. Bowersock summarily dismissed our book The Good Book of Human Nature: An Evolutionary Reading of the Bible, in which we seek the triggers for the beliefs found in the Scriptures [NYR, October 27]. Unfortunately, he criticized a gross caricature of our book. Here we briefly explain what our book really said, and highlight the underlying difference in approaches that led to Bowersock’s reflexive rejection. Our point of departure is the view, based in natural science, that humans are the product of both biological and cultural evolution, in which culture evolves in interaction with human nature, innovations, and external events. We synthesize the extensive recent research on paleoanthropology, archaeology, and quantitative ethnography to reconstruct the deep history that shaped our mind.…

Concrete Concept: Brutalist Buildings Around the World by Christopher Beanland. London: Frances Lincoln, 192 pp., $30.00 Brutalism Resurgent edited by Julia Gatley and Stuart King. Routledge, 145 pp., $155.00 This Brutal World by Peter Chadwick. Phaidon, 224 pp., $49.95 Raw Concrete: The Beauty of Brutalism by Barnabas Calder. London: Heinemann, 406 pp., £25.00 Heroic: Concrete Architecture and the New Boston by Mark Pasnik, Michael Kubo, and Chris Grimley. Monacelli, 335 pp., $50.00 Space, Hope, and Brutalism: English Architecture, 1945–1975 by Elain Harwood, with photographs by James O. Davies. Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art/Yale University Press/Historic England, 703 pp., $125.00 Brutalist London Map by Henrietta Billings, with photographs by Simon Phipps. London: Blue Crow Media, £8.00 (paper)…

A talk given in Berlin on November 10 on receiving the 2016 Welt Literature Prize. First I would like to acknowledge the absurdity of my position. Accepting a literary prize is perhaps always a little absurd, but in times like these not only the recipient but also the giver feels some sheepishness about the enterprise. But here we are. President Trump rises in the west, a united Europe drops below the horizon on the other side of the ocean—but here we still are, giving a literary prize, receiving one. So many more important things were rendered absurd by the events of November 8 that I hesitate to include my own writing in the list, and only mention it now because the most frequent question I’m asked about my work these…

My Dear Li: Correspondence, 1937–1946 by Werner and Elisabeth Heisenberg, edited by Anna Maria Hirsch- Heisenberg and translated from the German by Irene Heisenberg. Yale University Press, 312 pp., $40.00 Almost as soon as World War II ended in Europe, and with redoubled intensity after the bombing of Hiroshima, physicists all over the world began to ask how close the Germans had come to making an atomic bomb. But it was not clear whom to ask. Everything to do with development of the bomb was cloaked in secrecy and ten of the leading scientists involved in German atomic research had gone missing. One of them, Otto Hahn, the first to explain the fission process that made bombs possible, was on November 15, 1945, awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for…

Then there was the time I tried to learn to swim in a deep lake, but once in, shot straight to the floor, out of sight, out of mind, a good hour or more. Nice & cold down there as I went looking for fish with my nose-tip, but then I fell for her hook, line & sinker and that sweet little stinker snared me like a common thief, she whom I held so dear to heart, causing me all this untold pain & grief. Not smart on my part. Had she only died some time before, she who still poses such a threat, which I realized as I rode toward Hungary, still in love, still alone still accident-prone. The weather rainy all the way there, me learning a…

Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. Bloomsbury, 355 pp., $18.00 (paper) Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll. Penguin, 685 pp., $19.00 (paper) Exxon: The Road Not Taken by Neela Banerjee, John H. Cushman Jr., David Hasemyer, and Lisa Song. InsideClimate News, 88 pp., $5.99 (paper) What Exxon Knew About the Earth’s Melting Arctic an article by Sara Jerving, Katie Jennings, Masako Melissa Hirsch, and Susanne Rust. Los Angeles Times, October 9, 2015 How Exxon Went from Leader to Skeptic on Climate Change Research an article by Katie Jennings, Dino Grandoni, and Susanne Rust. Los Angeles Times, October 23, 2015 Big Oil Braced for Global Warming While It…

The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy by Michael McCarthy. New York Review Books, 262 pp., $24.95 Early last May, I sold my old farm and moved about ten miles west. Both places, old and new, belong to what appears to be the same New York landscape: gravel roads, rolling hills, masses of trees—the usual, you might say. But ten miles make more difference than I thought. I live on a glacial drumlin now, not an outcropping of ledge. The soil is heavy with clay, not porous with river rock. There are oaks and ashes and tall black cherry trees instead of beeches and hickories and hemlocks. Singing in the hedgerows in May were birds I’d never heard before— prairie warblers, for instance, whose song sounds like an upward laddering descant.…

Nearly any anthology of classic eerie fiction—from the old Modern Library Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural to the compact New York Review Books paperback Shadows of Carcosa— will include Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows.” Sometime early in the last century, two men are canoeing down the Danube when they stop to camp on a small island thick with willow trees. From the first, the narrator feels uneasy, as if they were interlopers. In fact, they are. The pair have stumbled upon the threshold to some other dimension or realm of being utterly alien to ours. Once the campers are detected by the island’s hostile entities, escape becomes impossible—unless there is a sacrifice. To many, including H. P. Lovecraft, “The Willows” is the finest story in the canon of supernatural…