Innholdsfortegnelse for April 20, 2017 i The New York Review of Books

Hitler: Ascent 1889–1939 by Volker Ullrich, translated from the German by Jefferson Chase. Knopf, 998 pp., $40.00 When the original German edition of Volker Ullrich’s new biography, Hitler: Ascent 1889–1939, was published in 2013, the current political situation in the United States was not remotely conceivable. The reception of a book often transcends the author’s intentions and the circumstances in which it was written, of course, but rarely so dramatically as in this case. In early 2017 it is impossible for an American to read the newly published English translation of this book outside the shadow cast by our new president. To begin I would stipulate emphatically that Trump is not Hitler and the American Republic in the early twenty- first century is not Weimar. There are many stark differences…

Moonlight a film directed by Barry Jenkins The Oscar- winning film Moonlight gives an impression throughout of being tinged with the color blue. Already in the beginning, after a blue car, its blue interior, white T- shirt and pillow tinted blue by morning light, blue sneaker soles, and blue plastic trash cans at the beach, comes an extraordinary scene of a black man holding a black boy’s body on top of the ocean, the camera lowered until it is fractionally submerged, enclosing the baptism by swimming lesson in pale sky and rolling water. “So your name is Blue?” the boy, Little, asks after he has learned that he can be free in the waves. “Naw,” Juan, his savior, answers. He has told the troubled boy that black people are everywhere,…

Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power by Howard W. French. Knopf, 330 pp., $27.95 China’s influence in the world has become a persistent theme of these early days of the Donald Trump era. During his campaign, Trump portrayed China (not entirely incorrectly) as the leading malefactor in the politics of international trade—holding its currency down in order to pump out exports, while making it hard for foreign companies to enter its own vast market. Then, after his victory, Trump as presidentelect came up with the provocative idea of accepting a congratulatory phone call from the Taiwanese president. His intent seemed to be to knock the Chinese off balance in hopes of starting trade negotiations on a more favorable footing. Predictably this angered…

William Faulkner: A Life Through Novels by Andre Bleikasten, translated from the French by Miriam Watchorn with the collaboration of Roger Little. Indiana University Press, 473 pp., $50.00 It would be a grave mistake for anyone trying to understand race in American history to overlook the novels of William Faulkner. Beneath their literary complexity can be found the clearest statement by anyone of the core abuse that has driven black– white conflict since slavery times, but first you have to pass a test. Faulkner’s French biographer, Andre Bleikasten, who devoted his life to understanding Faulkner, obviously passed the test himself, but it cannot have been easy for him. Bleikasten presents his readers with many examples of the test, but the one that seemed bluntest to me, impossible to mistake or…

The Constitution Today: Timeless Lessons for the Issues of Our Era by Akhil Reed Amar. Basic Books, 454 pp., $29.99 The subtitle of Akhil Amar’s book, “Timeless Lessons for the Issues of Our Era,” describes an interesting problem faced by a Constitution like ours. The Constitution has to be timeless, in the sense of straddling our history past and future, from its original framing in 1787 for as many centuries hence as we expect the republic to endure. But it’s not just an abstract inscription on a pediment. Every generation needs to bring it into focus to resolve controversies that erupt in the particular circumstances of a particular day. Our yearning for something like an immemorial Constitution compounds a desire for continuity, respect for a generation of statesmen at the…

Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character by Kay Redfield Jamison. Knopf, 532 pp., $29.95 New Selected Poems by Robert Lowell, edited by Katie Peterson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 243 pp., $18.00 (paper) Although Robert Lowell was born in 1917, Kay Redfield Jamison opens her new biography of the poet seventytwo years before his birth, in 1845, with a Lowell being committed to the “McLean Asylum for the Insane.” This was Harriet Brackett Spence Lowell, Lowell’s great- great- grandmother, who had been cared for at home until her manic behavior made hospitalization necessary. (Her doctor’s notes suggest mania: “She began to be more excited, which was shown in paroxysms of screaming. . . . [She] has had scarce any sleep.”) After three years…

The Genesis of Roman Architecture by John North Hopkins. Yale University Press, 254 pp., $65.00 Art of Empire: The Roman Frescoes and Imperial Cult Chamber in Luxor Temple edited by Michael Jones and Susanna McFadden. American Research Center in Egypt/ Yale University Press, 227 pp., $75.00 Rome 1600: The City and the Visual Arts Under Clement VIII by Clare Robertson. Yale University Press, 449 pp., $75.00 In 2010, archaeologists exploring a garden on Rome’s Capitoline Hill discovered the remains of an ancient votive deposit, a pit full of broken objects that had once been consecrated to the gods: offerings, pieces of architectural decoration, things too holy simply to throw away without risking a curse. Instead, the Romans buried their sacred objects on sacred ground, in this case the precinct of…

The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America by Frances FitzGerald. Simon and Schuster, 740 pp., $35.00 Every few years, it seems, conservative religious groups, quiescent or unnoticed, come blazing back onto the national scene, and the secular press reacts like the bad guy in the 1971 western Big Jake who says to John Wayne, “I thought you were dead.” Wayne drily answers, “Not hardly.” Now, in The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, Frances FitzGerald answers the recurrent question, “Where did these people [mainly right- wing zealots] come from?” She says there is no mystery involved. They were always here. We were just not looking at them. What repeatedly makes us look again is what she is here to tell us. “Evangelicals” is an elastic term, and FitzGerald intermittently shrinks…

Always Happy Hour by Mary Miller. Liveright, 244 pp., $24.95 The Last Days of California by Mary Miller. Liveright, 233 pp., $24.95; $14.95 (paper) Big World by Mary Miller. Short Flight/Long Drive, 230 pp., $11.98 (paper) If the novel, as Stendhal famously said, is a mirror moving along a roadway, a short story might be said to be a glimpse in a rearview mirror, small and intense in concentration, capturing what is fleeting, finite. In particular the subgenre of American short fiction known as minimalism captures what is small, fleeting, and finite; its most famous practitioners—Raymond Carver, Mary Robison, Frederick Barthelme, Amy Hempel, and the early Ann Beattie— wield sentences stripped bare of the inessential and polysyllabic. Work so studied and spare suggests the chiseled prose of Ernest Hemingway’s first…

The Kingdom by Emmanuel Carrere, translated from the French by John Lambert. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pp., $28.00 The current French intellectual scene has produced few such prolific and prodigiously talented personalities as Emmanuel Carrere. He has directed a film, La Moustache (2005), based on his novel of the same name, with a Hitchcockian though oddly inconclusive plot about a man whose sanity is called into question when he shaves off his mustache and no one notices or even recalls that he ever had one. He has worked on the script for sixteen episodes of a TV series, Les Revenants (The Returned), about the dead reappearing among the living as if they had never gone away. He has written, under the title Je suis vivant et vous etes morts…

The Kurds of Turkey: National, Religious and Economic Identities by Cuma Cicek. I. B. Tauris, 352 pp., $110.00 In the months following last July’s failed coup against him, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has mounted the biggest purge of public officials in a century. As has been widely reported, over 100,000 civil servants, teachers, prosecutors, judges, journalists, army officers, and police have been suspended or dismissed. Some four thousand are now in prison. Most of these are accused of links with the movement of Fethullah Gulen, the self- exiled Islamist who used to be Erdoğan’s ally in curbing the political power of the military in Turkey’s secular “deep state” but broke with him in 2013 and is accused of masterminding the coup. Yet amid the crackdown, the plight of one…

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. Random House, 343 pp., $28.00 From beyond the grave, a zombie named Aunt Bernie questions the nature of capitalism. “Why do some people get everything and I got nothing? . . . Why? Why was that?” she asks. Her nephew, the narrator of George Saunders’s story “Sea Oak” (1998), in which this query appears, has no answer to that perennial puzzle. He recognizes that she has every right to speculate, however. “She never had a life. Never married, no kids, work work work.” Later in the story, he wonders whether other zombies are speaking up here and there, troubling their relatives with pointed inquiries about the economic injustices they suffered in life. “Maybe there’s angry dead all over, hiding in rooms, covered with…

Music Chronicles: 1940–1954 by Virgil Thomson, edited by Tim Page. Library of America, 1,177 pages, $45.00 The State of Music and Other Writings by Virgil Thomson, edited by Tim Page. Library of America, 1,169 pages, $50.00 In 1942 the composer Ned Rorem, then nineteen, attended a panel at Northwestern University made up of various grandees from the world of music. One of them—a short, stocky bald man with a high-pitched voice and a face like an owl—was Virgil Thomson, a composer and the chief classical music critic for the New York Herald Tribune. The panel, as Rorem remembered it, began with an attempt to define music: The others were falling back on Shakespeare’s “concord of sweet sounds” when Thomson shrieked: “Boy, was he wrong! You might as well call painting…

A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman, translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen. Knopf, 194 pp., $25.95 1. David Grossman’s A Horse Walks into a Bar is not funny; in fact it might be one of the least funny novels I have ever read. True, it is about an aging Israeli stand-up comedian, Dov (aka Dovaleh) Greenstein, and in the course of chronicling his performance one night at a seedy comedy club in a small town in Israel, Grossman includes many examples of his patter. Some of it is of the reassuringly familiar kind, featuring schlemiels and schlimazels, schmendricks and schmucks, assembled in such collections as Michael Krasny’s recent anthology of Jewish jokes, Let There Be Laughter.1 “The angel of death,” Dov calls out to three law…