Innholdsfortegnelse for February 9, 2017 i The New York Review of Books

Fragonard: Drawing Triumphant— Works from New York Collections an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, October 6, 2016–January 8, 2017. Catalog of the exhibition by Perrin Stein, with contributions from Marie-Anne Dupuy-Vachey, Eunice Williams, and Kelsey Brosnan. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 302 pp., $65.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) In a letter of June 1847 to Theophile Thore, the art critic responsible for the rediscovery of Vermeer, the grandson of Jean- Honore Fragonard wrote that whenever his grandfather’s work appeared at auction and his name was announced, “Those sympathetic to his art would hear ‘People, pay honour to Fragonard!’ [Gens, Honorez Fragonard!] And the truth of the matter is, that in saying his name out loud, we realized how much he deserved it. ” Fragonard (1732–1806)…

Silence a film directed by Martin Scorsese Martin Scorsese’s beautiful new movie, Silence, based on Endō Sh􀇌saku’s novel, begins and ends in the same way: a dark screen filled with the noise of summer on the rural coast of southwestern Japan, cicadas rasping, waves crashing, thunderclaps exploding, and rain lashing the rocks. In between is played out, for almost three hours, the harrowing story of two young Portuguese Jesuit missionaries on a clandestine search for another priest who is rumored to have renounced his faith after torture and to be living as a Japanese Buddhist. The tale, based on historical events, is set in the 1640s. Half a century before, the Shogun Hideyoshi, who unified Japan after years of violent conflict between regional warlords, had embarked on a merciless campaign…

Chinese Politics in the Xi Jinping Era: Reassessing Collective Leadership by Cheng Li. Brookings Institution Press, 494 pp., $30.00 (paper) China’s Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay by Minxin Pei. Harvard University Press, 365 pp., $35.00 The Chinese were gloating over the flaws of the American political system long before the election of Donald J. Trump. Coming from an obsessively orderly system, they were again and again baffled by an institutional setup that flips control from party to party every four or eight years, bestows supreme power on novices like a former one-term governor who owned a baseball team and a one-term senator with prior experience in a state legislature, and allows each new ruling group to undo the policies of its predecessor. In a 2013 cartoon, Chinese propagandists…

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax. PublicAffairs, 282 pp., $25.99 Everyone I know seems a little ashamed of the compulsive phonechecking, but it is, circa 2017, our species- specific calling card, as surely as the bobbing head- thrust identifies the pigeon. No one much likes spending half the workday on e-mail, but that’s what work is for many of us. Our accelerating disappearance into the digital ether now defines us— we are the mediated people, whose contact with one another and the world around us is now mostly veiled by a screen. We threaten to rebel, just as we threaten to move to Canada after an election. But we don’t; the current is too fierce to swim to shore. There may, however, be…

One night in December, I was standing in heavy rain, under an umbrella, in a dark Manila alleyway, outside a house known to be a drug den, waiting with “the night shift,” the photographers and reporters on the crime beat, on the off chance of being shown upstairs to the scene of the killings. We knew the story in outline only: four men had been getting ready for a pot- smoking session on the second floor when a masked intruder burst in and shot them all dead. There was one witness, a sixteen-year-old boy, but he was said to be too shocked to speak. Now the police were examining the upstairs room, while we examined the alleyway. There wasn’t much to it. Someone had scrawled on the wall two local…

The Moravian Night: A Story by Peter Handke, translated from the German by Krishna Winston. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 312 pp., $27.00 The Moravian Night might seem like the inevitable English title for Peter Handke’s 2008 novel Die morawische Nacht, but it is actually rather misleading. Moravia is the eastern region of the Czech Republic, whose largest city is Brno; Mahren in German, it is called Moravia in English (and Latin) after the Slavic name of its major river, the Morava. But Handke’s title does not use the word mährische, and in fact it is not Moravia that he is writing about in this book. Instead, he is referring to a different Morava River, far to the south, in the heartland of Serbia. It is on this river that the…

What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves by Benjamin K. Bergen. Basic Books, 271 pp., $27.99 In Praise of Profanity by Michael Adams. Oxford University Press, 253 pp., $17.95 Obscene language presents problems, the linguist Michael Adams writes in his new book, In Praise of Profanity, “but no one seems to spend much time thinking about the good it does.” Actually, a lot of people in the last few decades have been considering its benefits, together with its history, its neuroanatomy, and above all its fantastically large and colorful word list. Jesse Sheidlower’s The F- Word, an OEDstyle treatment of fuck that was first published in 1995, has gone into its third edition, ringing ever more changes—artfuck, bearfuck, fuck the deck, fuckbag, fuckwad, horsefuck,…

Jesuits have never been shy about naming schools and other institutions after “Ours” (as they refer to each other)— Loyola, Xavier, Gonzaga, Canisius, Marquette. I went to Campion High School, where I was on the Bellarmine Debating Society, before entering St. Stanislaus Seminary—all three of them named for Jesuit saints. So one might have expected the first Jesuit pope to take his papal name from a Jesuit saint; there are, conveniently, two called Francis—Saint Francis Xavier and Saint Francis Borja (general of the order from 1565 to 1572). But Jorge Bergoglio took his name from Francis of Assisi, who was not a Jesuit, not a pope, and not even a priest. This is not surprising, since Bergoglio was not on good terms with his fellow Jesuits before his election to…