Innholdsfortegnelse for May 7, 2015 i The New York Review of Books

DAVID COLE is the Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at Georgetown University Law Center. FREEMAN DYSON is Professor of Physics Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His new book, Dreams of Earth and Sky, a collection of his writings in these pages, will be published in April. MARK FORD ’s Selected Poems and a volume of essays, This Dialogue of One, were published last year. He teaches in the English Department at University College London. IAN FRAZIER is the author of ten books, including Great Plains, Family, On the Rez, and Travels in Siberia. ANTHONY GRAFTON teaches European history at Princeton. His most recent book is The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe. EDITH HALL is a Professor in the Department of…

God Help the Child by Toni Morrison. Knopf, 178 pp., $24.95 The title of Toni Morrison’s new novel echoes that of the sly, langorous Billie Holiday ballad “God Bless the Child.” But while the child in the song is blessed, or deserves to be blessed, because he’s “got his own”—something, presumably money, that will enable him to thrive regardless of what “Mama may have”—the children in God Help the Child have nothing: no power, no agency, no protection from the unfeeling or predatory adults around them. The novel begins with a woman who calls herself Sweetness absolving herself for having had a daughter whose skin is much darker than her own, and explaining why she has mistreated little Lula Ann: It’s not my fault. So you can’t blame me. I…

A number of recent books provide essential background on Ukraine. Conflict in Ukraine: The Unwinding of the Post–Cold War Order by US academics Rajan Menon and Eugene B. Rumer (MIT Press, 2015) is a short and insightful primer that concentrates on the current crisis to give readers a brief but useful introduction to the history of the country. Coming at the subject from a different angle is Ukraine Crisis: What It Means for the West by British scholar Andrew Wilson (Yale University Press, 2014), who in 2000 wrote The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation, which is now in its third edition (Yale University Press, 2009) and takes the country’s modern history up to 2009. For the new book he observed the Maidan revolution. To anyone who wants to delve deeper into the…

You were what made us cryin the light to start withwe could see you were thereand we saw what you werewe were hiding from youand would have been happyto go on with the dreamthat you could not find uscold flame sight without eyesline where both shores the seenand the unseen come downinto nothing to passbetween to separateto open to dividewhat had been once from whatonce it had been to tellapart bringing alwaysthe touch of the presentthough the dread of you flaresup far ahead of youand the memory ofyou lingers and goes onburning ahead of youwe plead with you who haveno ears for us we begin private and in vaindo not see us at allever we are not hereor if you see us donot touch us wherever youwere going to touch…

The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century by Jurgen Osterhammel, translated from the German by Patrick Camiller. Princeton University Press, 1,167 pp., $39.95 In 1903, in his Maxims for Revolutionists, George Bernard Shaw wrote, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” In his stunning book on the history of the nineteenth century, the German historian Jurgen Osterhammel suggests a different approach: the unreasonable Osterhammel set himself a seemingly impossible agenda, the reasonable historian executed it, and the combination yields a great work. It may well have seemed unreasonable for Osterhammel, at the beginning of his career, to turn to Asia as his principal field…

Einstein: His Space and Times by Steven Gimbel. Yale University Press, 191 pp., $25.00 Why would anybody want to write another book about Albert Einstein? Why would anybody want to read it? These are two separate questions, but both of them have satisfactory answers. In spite of the large number of books already written about Einstein, there is still room for one more. There were several good reasons for writing this book. Yale University Press is publishing a big series of short biographies under the heading “Jewish Lives.” Among the twenty already published are Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Sarah Bernhardt, Mark Rothko, and Leon Trotsky. Among the twenty-five announced as forth coming are Benjamin Disraeli, Bob Dylan, Jesus, and Moses. Einstein obviously belongs on this list. John Reed in his…

The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky an exhibition at the Musee du quai Branly, Paris, April 8–July 20, 2014; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, September 19, 2014– January 11, 2015; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, March 9–May 10, 2015. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Gaylord Torrence. Skira Rizzoli/Musee du quai Branly, 317 pp., $65.00 A kind of twilight invites silence in a show of Plains Indian art and material culture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that records their long moment of glory before the United States Army whipped them, as whites liked to say at the time, and confined them to reservations in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The twilight is easily explained. Much of the art in…

Ezra Pound: Poet: A Portrait of the Man and His Work, Volume II: The Epic Years, 1921–1939 by A. David Moody. Oxford University Press, 421 pp., $35.00 Ezra Pound’s only meeting with his great hero Benito Mussolini took place at 5:30 on the evening of Monday, January 30, 1933. Mussolini’s imposing “office” was the vast Sala del Mappamondo (sixty feet long, forty feet wide, forty feet high) on the first floor of the Palazzo di Venezia in Rome. Il Duce, or Capo del Governo as Pound liked to call him, worked in rigorously enforced silence at a desk, on which he kept a grenade, at the far end of this otherwise empty room. Il Poeta brought with him two items in which he hoped to interest Italy’s supreme leader: one…

“I Am a Phenomenon Quite Out of the Ordinary”: The Notebooks, Diaries, and Letters of Daniil Kharms selected, translated from the Russian, and edited by Anthony Anemone and Peter Scotto. Academic Studies Press, 586 pp., $69.00, $35.00 (paper) Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms edited and translated from the Russian by Matvei Yankelevich. Ardis, 288 pp., $16.95 (paper) The Old Woman by Daniil Kharms, adapted by Darryl Pinckney, directed by Robert Wilson, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, June 22–29, 2014 Moi Muzh Daniil Kharms [My Husband Daniil Kharms] by Marina Durnovo with Vladimir Glotser. Moscow: B.S.G. Press, 196 pp. OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism edited by Eugene Ostashevsky, translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky and Matvei Yankelevich. Northwestern University Press, 258 pp., $22.95…

Amnesia by Peter Carey. Knopf, 307 pp., $25.95 It is not hard to see Felix Moore, the supposed writer of Amnesia, as an alter ego of the novel’s actual author, Peter Carey. Moore is a muckraking Australian journalist, but also a sometime novelist, most notably of the soon-tobe-filmed satire Barbie and the Deadheads. He is, throughout the book, a writer in search of a character, attempting to construct from vague and contradictory impressions a life that could inhabit his pages. He types on an old Olivetti, as Carey did in his early days. He even refers to himself, ironically, as a national treasure—a description that applies without the irony to Carey himself. More importantly, Carey gives Moore aspects of his own biography. They seem to be roughly the same age…

EARLY ONE MORNING Here is Memory walking in the darkthere are no pictures of her as she isthe coming day was never seen beforethe stars have gone into another lifethe dreams have left with no sound of farewellinsects wake flying up with their feet wettrying to take the night along with themMemory alone is awake with meknowing that this may be the only time ONCE LATER It is not until laterthat you have to be young it is one of the thingsyou meant to do later but by then there issomeone else living there with the shades rolled downhow could you have been young there at that timewith all that was expected then what happened tothe expectations there is no sign of them therea shadow passes across the window shade…

A DOOR FOR CATHOLIC WOMEN To the Editors: In Eamon Duffy’s otherwise very wellinformed “Who Is the Pope?” [NYR, February 19], he remarks that “He [Pope Francis] has made clear his belief that Pope John Paul II’s 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacedotalis (Priestly Ordination) has settled ‘definitively’ the question of women’s ordination—‘that door is closed.’” And “so, it was asked, how did Papa Wojtyła know that the ordination of women was impossible . . . ?” Ordinatio Sacerdotalis deals only with the question of women’s ordination to the priesthood. This is an important distinction because it does NOT deal, in any way, with women’s ordination to the diaconate—female deacons exist in the New Testament (Romans 16:1–2), in the Anglican Church, and, closer to Rome, in the Armenian Apostolic Church and…