Innholdsfortegnelse for February 23, 2017 i The New York Review of Books

ROGER ALCALY is a hedge fund manager and the author of The New Economy. DAVID COLE is the National Legal Director of the ACLU and the Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at the Georgetown University Law Center. FREDERICK CREWS ’s new book, Freud: The Making of an Illusion, will be published in the fall. JASON DEPARLE , a reporter for The New York Times and an Emerson Fellow at New America, is writing a book about a family of immigrants. JAMES FENTON is a British poet and literary critic. From 1994 until 1999, he was Oxford Professor of Poetry; in 2015 he was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize. He lived in the Philippines from 1986 until 1989 and has previously written about the country for…

Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction an exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zürich, June 3– September 25, 2016; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, November 20, 2016–March 19, 2017. Catalog of the exhibition by Anne Umland and Cathérine Hug. Museum of Modern Art/ Kunsthaus Zürich, 368 pp., $75.00 For a number of artists, writers, museum curators, and others concerned with the way we think about contemporary art, few exhibitions have been as anticipated as the current Francis Picabia retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. In recent decades, not many historical figures have seemed as ripe not only for reevaluation but simply to have her or his work seen fully. When the French artist died, in 1953, at seventy-four, and in the…

Barkskins by Annie Proulx. Scribner, 717 pp., $32.00 I wonder what old-time tellers of stories about the American West would make of Annie Proulx. If you told writers like Owen Wister (The Virginian) or Willa Cather (O Pioneers!) or A. B. Guthrie (The Way West) or Jack Schaefer (Shane) or Dorothy M. Johnson (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence) that Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain,” about a bittersweet love affair between two cowboys, would revive the western genre at the end of the twentieth century, they might have been surprised. And if a time traveler had informed past masters of the western movie business—people like John Ford and John Wayne and Sam Peckinpah— that the movie based on that short story would become one of the most successful westerns in…

C&R PRESS 1869 Meadowbrook Drive. Winston, Salem, NC 27104; (615) 681-9977; sales@crpress.org THE COUPLE WHO FELL TO EARTH by Michelle Bitting “And in every one of Bitting’s diamondsharp verses, there is something to love. Readers should count themselves lucky if this sublime volume falls into their laps.” -Kirkus Reviews 9781936196548 • Paperback, $16.00 108 pages • Poetry PETERSON INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS 1750 Massachusetts Ave NW Washington, D.C. 20036; (212) 459-0600, ext. 7129; www.bookstore.piie.com WORLD ON THE MOVE Consumption Patterns in a More Equal Global Economy by Paolo Mauro and Tomas Hellebrandt, Assisted by Jan Zilinsky The authors detail how this changing global consumption patterns will serve warning to policymakers to prepare for profound effects on the planet and world economy. 9780881327168 • Paper, $23.95 166 pages • Economics Also…

The Prelude: 1805 by William Wordsworth, edited and with an introduction by James Engell and Michael D. Raymond. David R. Godine, 281 pp., $40.00 Wordsworth’s The Prelude—a meditative poem on the growth of the poet’s mind—is a unique document of modern consciousness in its constant mobility— of times, thoughts, feelings, prospect, and retrospect. The mode of other treatments of consciousness—expository essays on philosophy, political theory, psychology, and morals—is essentially one of formulated assertion (even if concealed by Socratic dialogue or Platonic myth). And although consciousness is represented in the characters of epic, drama, and the novel, those genres are primarily understood by readers with respect to plot and character, not as experiments in language (unless, like Tristram Shandy, they play so extravagantly with language that it demands primary notice). Strangely,…

The Face of Britain: A History of the Nation Through Its Portraits by Simon Schama. Oxford University Press, 603 pp., $39.95 Venetia Digby hadn’t been feeling unwell. She had gone to bed behind velvet curtains, as on every other night, wearing a cap to keep her curls in place. It was May Day, 1633, and the girls of Clerkenwell were gathering to dance their ribbons around the maypole. Sir Kenelm Digby was listening to Thomas Hawkins discuss his translation of Horace’s Odes: “Whilst we are talking, envious time doth slide: This day’s thine own; the next may be denied.” Then there was the cry of the maid; the rush to the bedchamber; his wife, her hand to her face, as though just asleep. But it was an illusion, Digby wrote…

Freud: In His Time and Ours by Élisabeth Roudinesco, translated from the French by Catherine Porter. Harvard University Press, 580 pp., $35.00 When the surviving directorate of Freudian psychoanalysis reassembled after the disruption and dispersal of World War II, its members faced a situation of combined opportunity and risk. Their movement’s center of gravity had long been shifting westward from Vienna and Berlin toward London and New York, reaching more potential clients and supporters but also fostering schisms that threatened to discredit the whole institution. What was needed, it was agreed, was a means of generating solidarity behind the figure of Freud, the departed leader whose discovery of the unconscious, with the Oedipus complex at its core, could be celebrated by all parties.1 The urgency of that task of establishing solidarity…

The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan by Sebastian Mallaby. Penguin, 781 pp., $40.00 Alan Greenspan served as chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the most powerful financial position in the world, for eighteen and a half years, from early August 1987 through the end of January 2006. The second-longest-serving Fed chairman, his tenure largely coincided with a period sometimes called the “great moderation,” when economic growth was relatively steady, inflation low, recessions short and mild, and serious crises defused without debilitating downturns. Under Greenspan’s leadership the Fed had an important and wellpublicized part in containing threats to the financial system and economy such as the stock market crash of 1987, the junk bond collapse a few years later, the Asian…

The One King Lear by Sir Brian Vickers. Harvard University Press, 387 pp., $45.00 Here is the problem: Shakespeare’s King Lear was first printed in 1608 in one of the paperback-size, inexpensive editions known as Quartos and then again in 1623 in the First Folio, the large, handsome, posthumously published collection of his plays, edited by two of his friends and fellow actors. The two texts of the tragedy are not identical. The Quarto Lear contains almost three hundred lines that do not appear in the Folio, while the Folio text includes around a hundred lines that are not in the Quarto. In addition there are hundreds and hundreds of variants, some of them trivial but many of them substantive and intriguing. If you care deeply about the play—if you…

Beryl Bainbridge: Love by All Sorts of Means: A Biography by Brendan King. Bloomsbury, 564 pp., $40.00 1. When the English writer Beryl Bainbridge died in 2010, The Guardian obituary began by noting that she was considered “one of the best novelists of her generation,” but the piece went on to say: No one was sure quite who the real Beryl Bainbridge was. Her life appeared rackety, her face ravaged, with wide eyes that looked (as the Daily Mail once noted) “as if they have seen something ghastly.” She was a great talker, a likable and amusing woman famed for falling over at parties. Though she wrote twenty novels, three books of criticism, and abundant stories and occasional essays, many people in America were not aware of her dark, funny,…

Andrei Kushnir Studio / American Painting Fine Art, 5125 MacArthur Blvd., NW, Washington, D.C. 20016, (202)-244-3244; www.andreikushnir.com; www.classicamericanpainting.com; Wednesday through Saturday, 11 AM to 7 PM, and by appointment or chance. Our gallery is dedicated to the finest work in landscape, still life, genre, urban and marine art by current traditional American painters, many with national reputations, including recent works by Andrei Kushnir (Landscape and Marine), Michele Martin Taylor (Post-Impressionist), David Baise (NYC Watercolors and Acrylics), Carol Spils (Archetypal), Michael Francis (Urban Landscape), and Ross Merrill (Eastern Shore, Western Landscape). Brighten your life with original art that will never go out of style. Shepherd / W & K Galleries 58 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10075; (212) 861-4050; Fax: (212) 772-1314; shepherdny@aol.com; www.shepherdgallery.com. Fifty years. To mark the occasion, the Gallery…

THE SIGN OF JOHN LE CARRÉ To the Editors: In Neal Ascherson’s review of the John le Carré biographies [NYR, October 13] there is mention that David Cornwell seems to have forgotten the origin of his nom de plume. If so, I can possibly help to refresh his memory as I had a chance encounter with him shortly after he finished his book The Naive and Sentimental Lover. It was in a Spanish parador that we were both staying at and over dinner with our respective female companions. During our conversation about the movie version of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, I learned that he had taught at Eton and had worked for British intelligence. He also stated that he had struck upon the name “le Carré”…