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

In December 2016, big billboards go up in Charleston that show an AR-15 assault rifle with a red bow tied around it and the line, “All I want for Christmas is You.” A gun store is pushing its Blackhawk brand military weapons. Guns are embedded in South Carolina culture, with every attempt at firearm regulation trampled by the state legislature. Fathers give their sons, and some daughters, guns in rites of passage. A ceremony that survives is the first-blood ritual for adolescent hunters: a boy accompanies his father on a hunt and washes himself in the blood of the first deer he kills. Dylann Roof got his gun. His father gave him money for it on his twentyfirst birthday. “Happy Birthday! Here is $400 for the gun and the concealed…

Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids by Nicholson Baker. Blue Rider, 719 pp., $30.00 A seventh-grader I know slipped a copy of Substitute from my bag and buried her nose in it through an entire restaurant dinner with her parents. When I retrieved the book, I asked what she thought. “The writer does a good job of communicating how despicable he thinks these children are,” she said darkly. This is patently 180 degrees wrong. But kids say the darnedest things, as Nicholson Baker reminds us many times in Substitute, his tightly focused account of twenty-eight days of substitute teaching in Maine public schools in the spring semester of 2014: “Smells like marshmallows in here.” “If you say Yankees in this class, it’s a swear.” “We have to go…

Mary Astor’s Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936 by Edward Sorel. Liveright, 167 pp., $25.95 The Purple Diaries: Mary Astor and the Most Sensational Hollywood Scandal of the 1930s by Joseph Egan. Diversion, 352 pp., $16.99 (paper) My Story: An Autobiography by Mary Astor. Doubleday, 332 pp. (1959) A Life on Film by Mary Astor. Delacorte, 245 pp. (1971) Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke was born in 1906. “Mary Astor” was born in 1921—that was the name that went up in lights for the first time, at Manhattan’s Rivoli Theater, where, not yet sixteen, she was playing in a short film called The Beggar Maid. Soon her Madonna-like face was spotted in a fan magazine by the great John Barrymore and she was commandeered by him to play his…

FREUD’S INFLUENCE To the Editors: I suppose that with recent political events in the United States it has become possible to believe that a complete fraud and mountebank could achieve worldwide status by manipulating public opinion. However, this is not the case with Sigmund Freud, Frederick Crews writes in “Freud: What’s Left?” [NYR, February 23]. Anyone who studies twentieth-century history soon realizes that psychoanalysis is one of the few great success stories of the century. Not the therapy in its original “pure” form but through its influence on the therapeutic revolution, on film, painting (surrealism!) and literature, sex roles and the family, the welfare state, and even on political thought. The reason is that Freud summed up what he called the “moral impulsions” of his age—a time in which the…

The Crown a Netflix television series created by Peter Morgan Even before British Prime Minister Theresa May had left Washington on January 27, having succeeded in her goal of becoming the first foreign leader received by President Trump, an argument erupted back home about the invitation she had left in his hands. She had not simply asked Trump to come to London. She had gone much further, inviting him not as a mere head of government but as head of state. For that kind of trip, his host would not be May, but a rather bigger draw: Queen Elizabeth II. When it comes to bestowing favors on foreign leaders, the state visit is the most precious trinket in the British government pouch. The visitor gets to parade through London in…

The Taming of Free Speech: America’s Civil Liberties Compromise by Laura Weinrib. Harvard University Press, 461 pp., $45.00 Free Speech and Unfree News: The Paradox of Press Freedom in America by Sam Lebovic. Harvard University Press, 334 pp., $39.95 “Civil liberties once were radical.” So begins Laura Weinrib’s important revisionist history of the origins of American civil liberties, provocatively entitled The Taming of Free Speech: America’s Civil Liberties Compromise. In her account, the fight began in the early twentieth century as a radical struggle for workers’ rights and redistributive justice. The central claim was for a “right of agitation,” which its proponents believed predated the Constitution and afforded workers the right to engage in direct collective action to pressure employers for higher wages and better working conditions. To these early…

Strolls with Pushkin by Andrei Sinyavsky, translated from the Russian by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Slava I. Yastremski. Columbia University Press, 237 pp., $19.95 (paper)1 The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship by Alex Beam. Pantheon, 201 pp., $26.95 Novels, Tales, Journeys: The Complete Prose of Alexander Pushkin translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Knopf, 484 pp., $30.00 Who was Alexander Pushkin? Russians regard him as their greatest writer, greater even than Lev Tolstoy. Edmund Wilson, once one of America’s best-known public intellectuals, pronounced him “the greatest poet of the nineteenth century.” But for those who do not know Russian, the reasons for this praise remain elusive. In fact, almost everything about Pushkin is elusive. When Isaiah Berlin formulated his…

The Marches: A Borderland Journey Between England and Scotland by Rory Stewart. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 354 pp., $27.00 On the face of it, Rory Stewart is one of the sturdiest pillars of the new British establishment. His name comes trailing clouds of ancient Scottish glory. He was educated at two of the poshest schools in England (the Dragon Prep School and Eton College). He served for a short while in one of the British army’s most famous and glamorous regiments, the Black Watch. He studied at Oxford, where he was briefly a tutor to the young Prince William and Prince Harry. He joined the Foreign Office and worked in Indonesia, Kosovo, and Iraq. He taught for a few years at Harvard, then returned to Britain and became a Tory MP.…

Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School by Stuart Jeffries. Verso, 440 pp., $26.95 Habermas: A Biography by Stefan Muller-Doohm, translated from the German by Daniel Steuer. Polity, 598 pp., $39.95 Adorno and Existence by Peter E. Gordon. Harvard University Press, 256 pp., $29.95 Marx argued that economic systems have always involved the exploitation of workers for the benefit of a privileged class that owns and controls “the means of production.” As a result, according to Marx, workers are “alienated” from their labor, from the products they make, from other people, and ultimately from their own humanity since their lives and labor are determined not by themselves but by the demands of a privileged class and impersonal market forces. Workers tolerate this apparent injustice, Marx explains, because exploitation…

How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking About Art by David Salle. Norton, 270 pp., $29.95 In an article on Andre Derain in How to See, his first collection of art writings, the painter David Salle says that, as “a former enfant terrible myself,” he has been drawn to the French artist’s story—that of a figure who was crucially a part of the beginnings of modern art and then notably came to reject the modern spirit. Salle’s point isn’t exactly that, like Derain, he was a pathbreaking painter who has become a traditionalist. Salle would seem to mean by “enfant terrible” (a term with which he refers to himself elsewhere in these pages) more that, as Webster’s Collegiate defines it, he was once a “young and successful person who is…

Transit by Rachel Cusk. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 260 pp., $26.00 Rachel Cusk has been a prominent novelist for over twenty years in Great Britain, since her first book, Saving Agnes, won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 1993. She has since published eight more novels, including her new book, Transit. Until recently, however, it is for her three memoirs that she has been chiefly known in the United States. The first, A Life’s Work (2001), is a witty and unsparing—some might say harsh—examination of the demands of new motherhood. The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy (2009) chronicles her family’s two-month sojourn in Tuscany: Adam Begley, reviewing the book in The New York Times, likened it to “a sour, highbrow pastiche of Peter Mayle’s books about Provence.” Her most…

The Grand Spas of Central Europe: A History of Intrigue, Politics, Art, and Healing by David Clay Large. Rowman and Littlefield, 465 pp., $35.00 The Habsburg Empire: A New History by Pieter M. Judson. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 567 pp., $35.00 There is a symbol for the late Habsburg Empire in its elegant spa of Carlsbad: a genteel center of society and culture in the heart of old Europe; a place where crowned heads of the continent and their chief advisers could meet informally, in the years before the World War that would be fought in their names. Carlsbad bespoke a confident, urbane, cosmopolitan, seemingly unshakable world of order and privilege. But it also—as Austrian politicians sometimes observed—evoked the multinational monarchy’s problems. For the placid promenade in the middle of…

Testimony by Robbie Robertson. Crown Archetype, 500 pp., $30.00 In rock and roll there is always an origin story, because whether in one’s own perceptions or in the world at large, there is always a time when there was no rock and roll and a time when there was. For Jaime Royal Robertson, born in Toronto in 1943, it was at the end of the summer of 1956 that—wham!—the world had changed overnight. . . . I would go on to learn that this new music had been seeping under the door for years with artists like Fats Domino, but to me it felt like it happened in the blink of an eye. Testimony, Robertson’s account of his life as a teenage member of the rockabilly band Ronnie Hawkins and…

Tamil: A Biography by David Shulman. Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press, 402 pp., $35.00 Tamil is spoken today by approximately 80 million people, mostly in India but also in Sri Lanka, Singapore, and Malaysia, and in an international diaspora. It is also one of the world’s oldest languages, with a continuous history stretching back to at least the late centuries BCE. It has served as a language of trade and statecraft, and as a medium for poetry, philosophy, linguistic science, visionary esotericism, and the expression of Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Muslim, and Christian religious cultures over the past two millennia. To attempt to give a comprehensive vision of the language within the compass of a brief book intended for nonspecialists might seem an impossible task. Yet Tamil: A Biography succeeds at…

In the Country of the Blind by Edward Hoag land. Arcade, 185 pp., $22.99 Sixty years have passed since the publication of Edward Hoag land’s first book, Cat Man, a novel that drew on his experience working with big cats in the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Since then, he has written more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction, essay collections and volumes of travel writing. The range of subjects he has addressed, with elegance and insight, is impressively wide: friendship and solitude, love and divorce, jury duty and circus clowns, literary fame and political assassination, the pain of personal humiliation, the challenges (and unexpected advantages) of having a severe stutter, the future of our cities, the threat of ecological disaster. Hoag land’s novels take place in…