Innholdsfortegnelse for June 22, 2017 i The New York Review of Books

You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn by Wendy Lesser. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 397 pp., $30.00 Kahn at Penn: Transformative Teacher of Architecture by James F. Williamson. Routledge, 204 pp., $163.00; $52.95 (paper) 1. How odd that the towering genius of architecture during the third quarter of the twentieth century—when his most conventionally successful colleagues prized innovation over tradition, analysis over intuition, and logic over emotion— was a mystically inclined savant who sought to reconnect his medium with its spiritual roots. Indeed, he ran wholly counter to prevailing images of the modern architect. Rather than casting himself as a technocratic superman along the lines of the young Le Corbusier, or a conduit between man and nature like the twinkling Frank Lloyd Wright, he made his name with…

The creation of an expansive, charming public space at the heart of a great commercial city is a rare event. Sydney’s Barangaroo Reserve, which opened in August 2015, joined New York’s High Line and London’s East End Olympic redevelopment as a landmark public park that helps define a major metropolis’s sense of place. Barangaroo forms the northwestern section of Sydney’s main business district and was previously part of the Port of Sydney. The relocation of industrial activities to nearby Botany Bay created the opportunity for redeveloping an area of a little over fifty- four acres in the downtown of a city with a population of 4.3 million. About fifteen acres of this site went to the creation of Barangaroo Reserve. The park includes an enormous subterranean arts space and a…

All That Man Is by David Szalay. Graywolf, 358 pp., $26.00 The noun in the title of David Szalay’s fourth book of fiction means something quite specific. All That Man Is: not humankind, or mankind, or people; still less women or children. No, he means men, Y-chromosomed adults, and yet the rhetorical sweep of that phrase does gesture toward some large summation. Man, as in Shakespeare’s seven ages—the lover, the soldier, and the decrepit as well. Szalay has a similar inclination to generalize, and his “man” takes the form of a set of typical specimens, though in practice they are all of a very particular kind. Szalay has said that his working title was Europa,* and while the men in his novels have different national origins each is a European…

The Four Books by Yan Lianke, translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas. Grove, 338 pp., $27.00; $16.00 (paper) The Explosion Chronicles by Yan Lianke, translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas. Grove, 457 pp., $26.00 The Seventh Day by Yu Hua, translated from the Chinese by Allan H. Barr. Anchor, 213 pp., $16.00 (paper) Modern China was built on the nearly thirty ruthless years of Mao’s rule. The country’s elite—the “literati” of educated small landowners who held the empire together at the local level— was brutally eliminated. Almost everyone’s personal life was destroyed: homes searched for incriminating books, thoughts remolded by struggle sessions, and streets inundated by the din of tinny propaganda. People still loved and lived, but their futures depended on a capricious and brutal state that tolerated…

Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art by Julian Barnes. Vintage, 278 pp., $20.00 (paper) I enjoyed an essay about Lucian Freud that Julian Barnes published in 2013—a piece brought together with sixteen others on art and artists in his collection Keeping an Eye Open. I confess that one reason I kept muttering “Well judged!” as I read it was that its comments about Freud’s work as a painter corresponded pleasingly to those in an essay on the artist that I myself contributed to these pages back in 2008. Remarking on Freud’s midcareer lurch toward the influence of Francis Bacon, or on the way that the tortuous stylisms of Freud’s later portraiture are thrown into relief by other people’s photographs of the sitters, or on his greater empathy with still…

Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration—and How to Achieve Real Reform by John F. Pfaff. Basic Books, 311 pp., $27.99 Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America by James Forman Jr. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 306 pp., $27.00 Few claims about contemporary American society are more widely accepted on the left than that the dramatic growth of our prisons and jails has been driven by the war on drugs. In July 2015, President Barack Obama maintained that “the real reason our prison population is so high” is that we have “locked up more and more nonviolent drug offenders than ever before, for longer than ever before.” In her widely read 2010 book, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander similarly argued that the war on drugs,…

The Last Shift by Philip Levine, edited by Edward Hirsch. Knopf, 79 pp., $26.95 My Lost Poets: A Life in Poetry by Philip Levine, edited by Edward Hirsch. Knopf, 210 pp., $26.95 The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography by Philip Levine. University of Michigan Press, 294 pp., $23.95 (paper) Three books, two of them posthumous and one from 2001, by one of our finest poets, Philip Levine, who passed away in 2015. With so many of his contemporaries dying of late, one gets the feeling that the United States they knew and wrote about is vanishing along with them. This experience was familiar to previous generations of readers and either lamented or taken in stride, but not experienced as such a radical break as it is today, when our…

The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty by Jonathan Morduch and Rachel Schneider. Princeton University Press, 233 pp., $27.95 Happiness for All?: Unequal Hopes and Lives in Pursuit of the American Dream by Carol Graham. Princeton University Press, 192 pp., $29.95 President Trump’s first federal budget proposal, unveiled in March, was a direct assault on the lives of millions of Americans. By sharply cutting or eliminating essential social programs to help pay for a dramatic increase in military spending, it would likely push many people into poverty and have damaging effects on many others who usually manage to stay above the official poverty line. The ten- year budget proposal Trump made public in late May is far harsher and calls for cutting hundreds of billions…

Women Against Abortion: Inside the Largest Moral Reform Movement of the Twentieth Century by Karissa Haugeberg. University of Illinois Press, 220 pp., $95.00; $24.95 (paper) About Abortion: Terminating Pregnancy in Twenty-First-Century America by Carol Sanger. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 304 pp., $29.95 If anyone thought that Donald Trump’s manifold inconsistencies might more or less randomly offer women some protection from the Mike Pence wing of the Republican Party—after all, Trump once said of himself, “I’m very pro-choice”—they were wrong. Trump, who was once in thrall to his resident misogynist Steve Bannon, remains dependent on Pence, his omnipresent minder, and women’s reproductive rights are in his sights. Women have always been subject to male domination, sometimes almost completely. Even in as enlightened a country as the United States, men created the…

Ernest Hemingway: A Biography by Mary V. Dearborn. Knopf, 738 pp., $35.00 Ernest Hemingway: A New Life by James M. Hutchisson. Pennsylvania State University Press, 292 pp., $37.95 Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway’s Secret Adventures, 1935–1961 by Nicholas Reynolds. William Morrow, 357 pp., $27.99 The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Hemingway Library Edition edited and with an introduction by Seán Hemingway, and a foreword by Patrick Hemingway. Scribner, 576 pp., $32.00 (to be published in July) I am not sure whether the National Rifle Association has ever thought of having an official Nobel literary laureate. But if it did there is no doubt that it would choose Ernest Hemingway. There is a coffee table book, published by Shooting Sportsman in 2010, called Hemingway’s Guns. It is a lovingly…

The Six- Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East by Guy Laron. Yale University Press, 368 pp., $28.00 The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine by Nathan Thrall. Metropolitan, 323 pp., $28.00 In Search of Modern Palestinian Nationhood by Matti Steinberg. Tel Aviv University/Moshe Dayan Center, 503 pp., ?100.00 (paper) Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman. HarperPerennial, 434 pp., $16.99 (paper) A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine, and the World’s Most Intractable Conflict by Gershon Shafir. University of California Press, 283 pp., $26.95 This June, Israel is marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Six- Day War. Some Israelis, including most members of the present government, are celebrating the country’s swift victory over Egypt, Jordan,…

This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy by Matthew Karp. Harvard University Press, 360 pp., $29.95 The US Civil War was once commonly interpreted as a conflict between a progressive North, industrially strong and committed to a powerful central government, and a backward South that clung to states’ rights and agrarianism in its effort to preserve slavery. In this reading, proposed most influentially by the late Eugene D. Genovese, the South was distanced from modern society and the world scene. Recent historians increasingly have recognized the inadequacy of this explanation. As the producer of America’s leading export, cotton, the South in the first half of the nineteenth century was a major participant in the global economy. Its rate of urbanization relative to population, while not…