Innholdsfortegnelse for June 8, 2017 i The New York Review of Books

HILTON ALS is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the co author, most recently, of Alice Neel: Uptown. He received the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. DAN CHIASSON ’s fourth collection of poetry is Bicentennial. He teaches at Wellesley. 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. LINDA COLLEY is Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton. Her latest book is Acts of Union and Disunion: What Has Held the UK Together—and What Is Dividing It? ROBERT GOTTLIEB has been Editor in Chief of Simon and Schuster, Knopf, and The New Yorker. His most recent book is the memoir Avid Reader: A Life. SUE HALPERN is…

Martin Luther: Art and the Reformation an exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, October 30, 2016–January 15, 2017. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Anne-Simone Rous, Katrin Herbst, Ralf Kluttig-Altmann, and others. Dresden: Sandstein, two volumes, 998 pp., $69.96 Word and Image: Martin Luther’s Reformation an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York City, October 7, 2016–January 22, 2017 Law and Grace: Martin Luther, Lucas Cranach, and the Promise of Salvation an exhibition at the Pitts Theology Library, Atlanta, October 11, 2016–January 16, 2017 Renaissance and Reformation: German Art in the Age of Dürer and Cranach an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, November 20, 2016–March 26, 2017. Catalog of the exhibition by Jeffrey Chipps Smith and others. Prestel, 239 pp., $49.95 Martin Luther:…

The Egyptians: A Radical History of Egypt’s Unfinished Revolution by Jack Shenker. New Press, 538 pp., $32.50 Egypt and the Contradictions of Liberalism: Illiberal Intelligentsia and the Future of Egyptian Democracy edited by Dalia F. Fahmy and Daanish Faruqi. Oneworld, 388 pp., $35.00 (paper) On July 3, 2013, General Abdel Fattah el- Sisi, chief of staff of the Egyptian Armed Forces, appeared on national television. Clad in a military uniform and black beret, he announced that he was acting on “a call for help by the Egyptian people” and seizing power from the Muslim Brotherhood. Since winning parliamentary elections in 2011 and the presidential election the following year, the Brotherhood—a grassroots movement founded in Egypt in the 1920s—had stacked the government with Islamists, failed to deliver on promises to improve…

Diane Arbus: In the Beginning an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, July 12–November 27, 2016; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, January 21–April 30, 2017. Catalog of the exhibition by Jeff L. Rosenheim. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 269 pp., $50.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) Diane Arbus: In the Park an exhibition at Lévy Gorvy Gallery, New York City, May 2–June 24, 2017 Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer by Arthur Lubow. Ecco, 734 pp., $17.99 (paper) Diane Arbus: A Chronology, 1923–1971 by Elisabeth Sussman and Doon Arbus. Aperture, 177 pp., $29.95 (paper) In the mid- 1990s, when The New Yorker’s offices were a stone’s throw from the main branch of the New York Public Library, I worked down the hall from Joseph…

Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment by Carol S. Steiker and Jordan M. Steiker. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 390 pp., $29.95 When my older brother Jan David Rakoff was murdered in 1985, bolts of anger and outrage not infrequently penetrated the black cloud of my grief. Though I knew almost nothing about Jan’s confessed murderer except his name, I wished him dead. My brother, aged forty- four, had just begun to come into his own. His innovative educational theories were starting to attract attention, and, just as important, he had come to terms with his homosexuality, which for many years he had struggled to suppress. While on a trip to Manila, he engaged the services of a male prostitute, but at the end they quarreled over money. In…

Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy by Daniel Kreiss. Oxford University Press, 291 pp., $99.00; $27.95 (paper) Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters by Eitan D. Hersch. Cambridge University Press, 261 pp., $80.00; $30.99 (paper) Not long after Donald Trump’s surprising presidential victory, an article published in the Swiss weekly Das Magazin, and reprinted online in English by Vice, began churning through the Internet. While pundits were dissecting the collapse of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the journalists for Das Magazin, Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus, pointed to an entirely different explanation—the work of Cambridge Analytica, a data science firm created by a British company with deep ties to the British and American defense industries. According to Grassegger and Krogerus, Cambridge Analytica had used psychological data culled from…

Brother Bill: President Clinton and the Politics of Race and Class by Daryl A. Carter. University of Arkansas Press, 322 pp., $26.95 (paper) Bill Clinton by Michael Tomasky. Times Books, 184 pp., $25.00 Hillary and Bill: The Clintons and the Politics of the Personal by William H. Chafe. Duke University Press, 412 pp., $21.95 (paper) Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton by Joe Conason. Simon and Schuster, 486 pp., $30.00 Bill Clinton was eighteen years old and already set on a career in politics when, in 1964, the Democratic Party won its most substantial victory since the New Deal. Lyndon Johnson got more than 60 percent of the popular vote in the presidential election and carried fortyfour states. The Democrats ended up with sixty- eight seats…

“I can’t get over all the sexual imperialism in Haruki Murakami,” a writer friend complained recently, as she made her way through the Japanese novelist’s tales of passive, rather feckless men lusting after dewy, elusive young beauties. I didn’t know quite how to tell her that, by Japanese standards, Murakami’s obsessions are mild. The “male gaze” so frowned upon in the West these days has long been the dominant point of view in Japanese literature, and although some writers may claim that what they’re ogling is an emblem of a pure and virginal Japan in danger of being corrupted, that doesn’t begin to diminish the unsettling effect of seeing nymphets being doted on by much older men. The delicate, lyrical works of Yasunari Kawabata nearly always turn upon a male’s…

The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins by Catherine Peters. Princeton University Press, 502 pp., $185.00; $74.00 (paper) Wilkie Collins by Peter Ackroyd. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 252 pp., $25.00 There are novels that grip you despite inconsistencies of plot, failures of tone or characterization, lack of depth—you may not even like them, but you have to go on reading: their sheer force and urgency are irresistible. The Three Musketeers and Uncle Tom’s Cabin are not Middlemarch or Proust, but they’ve thrilled generations of readers. And regardless of its distressing historical attitudes and mundane prose, Gone with the Wind goes on selling in the tens of thousands because Margaret Mitchell just sweeps you along. One of the most enthralling of all popular novels is Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in…

A Visit to Don Otavio: A Mexican Journey by Sybille Bedford, with an introduction by Bruce Chatwin. New York Review Books, 368 pp., $18.95 (paper) Many twentieth- century British travel books and novels about Mexico, including D.H. Lawrence’s Mornings in Mexico (1927), Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory (1940), Evelyn Waugh’s Robbery Under Law (1939), and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), focus on the dark side of Mexican history, in a sense its violent night. But there is another, earlier tradition, much calmer and unfolding in the full light of day. The classic example of this is Life in Mexico by the Marquesa Fanny Calderón de la Barca (a Scotswoman born Frances Erskine Inglis, wife of the first Spanish ambassador to independent Mexico). The book is a collection…

DISCOVERY INSTITUTE PRESS 208 Columbia St. Seattle, WA 98104; 1-206-292-0401; cscinfo@discovery.org ZOMBIE SCIENCE More Icons of Evolution by Jonathan Wells “In Zombie Science, Wells gives a very informative and entertaining account of the problems surrounding Darwinian evolution. He makes a compelling argument that the case in favor of evolution is being driven by a commitment to materialistic philosophy and not by scientific evidence.” - Russell W. Carlson, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Dept. of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, University of Georgia. 9781936599448 • Paperback, $16.49 238 pages • Science Author Website: www.iconsofevolution.com, available on www.amazon.com. EVOLUTION Still a Theory in Crisis by Michael Denton More than thirty years after his landmark book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985), biologist Michael Denton revisits his thesis about the inability of Darwinian evolution to explain the history…

On All Hallow’s Eve of 1517, Martin Luther, Augustinian friar and professor of theology, posted a broadsheet on the faculty bulletin board of tiny, provincial Wittenberg University in the German state of Saxony (which happened to be the door of the church attached to the local lord’s castle). The poster was no Halloween prank; it proclaimed, according to academic custom, his willingness to debate a series of propositions in public. Although he also sent copies of the same broadsheet to important statesmen, churchmen, and academics outside Wittenberg, no one seems to have taken up his challenge to a formal discussion. His propositions were too explosive for that; in blunt, forceful language, they questioned the basic beliefs of the church to which, as a Hermit of Saint Augustine, he had vowed…

Some Prefer Nettles by Junichiro Tanizaki, translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker. Vintage, 202 pp., $15.00 (paper) Devils in Daylight by Junichiro Tanizaki, translated from the Japanese by J. Keith Vincent. New Directions, 95 pp., $17.95 The Maids by Junichiro Tanizaki, translated from the Japanese by Michael P. Cronin. New Directions, 176 pp., $22.95 The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki, translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker. Vintage, 530 pp., $16.95 (paper) Naomi by Junichiro Tanizaki, translated from the Japanese by Anthony H. Chambers. Vintage, 237 pp., $16.00 (paper)…

Martutene by Ramon Saizarbitoria, translated from the Basque by Aritz Branton, and edited by Cecilia Ross. Madrid: Hispabooks, 815 pp., $19.95 (paper) A middle- aged married mother flying from Heathrow to Bilbao becomes fascinated by a bearded man boarding the same plane. When a bag he’s holding breaks, spilling books into the aisle, she gives him a good strong Harrods bag and helps gather the books up. Grateful, and despite the crowd of frustrated passengers trying to get to their seats, the man reads a few words from one that has fallen open—“This book was written in good faith”—and offers it to the woman as a gift. For weeks and months afterward she will regret not having accepted the book, not having made contact with this “intellectual looking” man who…

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. European Paintings, Watercolors, drawings, and sculpture. 1770 – 1930 May 23rd through July 28th 2017. Swann Auction Galleries, 104 East 25th Street, New York, NY 10010; (212) 254-4710; www.swanngalleries.com. Upcoming Auction: “American Art,” June 7; Preview: June 10 through 15. Offering original works by American artists in a variety of media, with special offerings including landscapes by Milton Avery and Joseph Kleitsch, sculptures by William Zorach, and watercolors by Charles Burchfield. The highlight of the sale is an important painting from William Glackens’s time north of Paris: The Beach, Isle Adam is one of the artist’s most significant works from the mid-1920s. John Davis Gallery 362 ½ Warren Street, Hudson, NY 12534;…

HOW TO IMAGINE CONSCIOUSNESS To the Editors: Thomas Nagel’s review of From Bacteria to Bach and Back [NYR, March 9] clearly distills Daniel Dennett’s argument, which tends to get lost amidst the book’s digressions. And his critique homes in on the part that’s hardest to swallow—the idea that subjective experience (in Nagel’s words) “is just a belief, manifested in what I am inclined to say.” I agree with Nagel, along with probably 99.9 percent of humanity, that we really do experience “color, flavor, sound, touch, etc.” We don’t just say we do. But, probably along with 99.9 percent of neuroscientists, I don’t think “the trouble [with Dennett’s claim] is that . . . nothing whatever is revealed to the first-person point of view but a ‘version’ of the neural machinery.”…