Innholdsfortegnelse for July 13, 2017 i The New York Review of Books

MARY BEARD is Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge. Her most recent book is SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. JULIAN BELL is a painter based in Lewes, England. A new rewritten edition of his book What Is Painting? will be published in October. CHRISTOPHER DE BELLAIGUE ’s most recent book is The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle Between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times. ELAINE BLAIR is a regular contributor to The New York Review. PETER BROOKS , Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale, teaches at Princeton. His book Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris was published in April. MATTHEW COBB is Professor of Zoology at the University of Manchester. His most recent book is Life’s Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code.…

What is thought and felt, believed and dreamed, reflected on, the plot worked out in constant depth, what isn’t, for the time being, being written is being worked on—how long will it be, the one long poem? Tacitus’s Annals, its half- Virgilian lines—Kafka’s name on a report, Risk Classification and Accident Prevention in Wartime—expansion of a tendentious language, an ancient clarity overlaid. What is said is, objectively, measured by visual and auditory standards of the street; as of last Wednesday, it’s said, two hundred six thousand, six hundred three dead, estimated eighteen million displaced. How will it end—it won’t. Vast open-air, mud-soaked camps, toxic water—no one can say cluster bombs aren’t real. What of my grandparents’ families in Lebanon, in Syria, what of my grandfather, dead for all but four…

“We have immense opportunities and we can use them,” Iranian President Hassan Rouhani told a group of campaign workers a few days after he was reelected to a second term on May 19. “What is it that we want? We are waiting for a cleavage, an opening, but we need to bring about that opening ourselves, so it is definitive.” It was a call for Iran’s moderates to capitalize on their resounding triumph over conservatives and finally push the country toward a liberal political order. The president received 23.5 million of 41.2 million votes cast in the election, compared with just 15.7 million for the conservative candidate, Ebrahim Raisi; the remainder went to two peripheral candidates after two others had stepped aside. This does not take into account the large…

Modern Gods by Nick Laird. Viking, 308 pp., $27.00 “Moving is easy,” begins Nick Laird’s first novel, Utterly Monkey (2005). “But actually leaving somewhere is difficult.” It’s a lesson that the main character, Danny Williams, soon learns. When the book opens, he seems to have long escaped his background in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, where he grew up Protestant in the fictional town of Ballyglass: famous—at least in Ballyglass—for having the widest main street in all of Ireland. After studying at Cambridge, he’s worked at one of Britain’s leading legal firms for nearly five years, in the process turning himself into “a first-class Londoner.” But then the past reappears, ringing his doorbell in the unannounced shape of his feckless, drug-dealing old schoolfriend Geordie—ordered to leave Northern Ireland by the Protestant…

When the World Stopped to Listen: Van Cliburn’s Cold War Triumph and Its Aftermath by Stuart Isacoff. Knopf, 290 pp., $27.95 Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story— How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War by Nigel Cliff. Harper, 452 pp., $28.99 When Van Cliburn died in 2013, he was by far the most famous concert pianist in American history, although he had effectively retired from performance decades before. His had been a strange and complicated life. He was a brilliant student at Juilliard, from which he graduated in 1954, won a couple of prestigious prizes, and made his debut with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. But his career stalled, and he went home to Kilgore, Texas, to live with his parents. Then, in April 1958,…

An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back by Elisabeth Rosenthal. Penguin, 406 pp., $28.00 Getting Risk Right: Understanding the Science of Elusive Health Risks by Geoffrey C. Kabat. Columbia University Press, 248 pp., $35.00 Not long ago, a relative called us for advice about a hospital bill. A public interest lawyer in New York, he had developed chest pain when exercising and consulted his internist, who ordered a stress test with an echocardiogram. To his relief, no abnormalities were found. Distress came later, when he saw that the hospital had charged some $8,000 for this test. Despite having excellent insurance, he was informed that he was responsible for $2,000 of the total. The bill seemed exorbitant to us, and we suggested that…

Late one night several years ago, I got out of my car on a dark midtown Atlanta street when a man standing fifteen feet away pointed a gun at me and threatened to “blow my head off.” I’d been parked outside my new apartment in a racially mixed but mostly white neighborhood that I didn’t consider a high- crime area. As the man repeated the threat, I suppressed my first instinct to run and fearfully raised my hands in helpless submission. I begged the man not to shoot me, repeating over and over again, “It’s all right, it’s okay.” The man was a uniformed police officer. As a criminal defense attorney, I knew that my survival required careful, strategic thinking. I had to stay calm. I’d just returned home from…

The End of Eddy by Édouard Louis, translated from the French by Michael Lucey. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 192 pp., $23.00 Those of us who move from the provinces pay a toll at the city’s gate, a toll that is doubled in the years that follow as we try to find a balance between what was so briskly discarded and what was so carefully, hesitantly, slyly put in its place. More than thirty years ago, when I was in Egypt, I met a cultivated English couple who invited me to stay in their house in London on my way back to Ireland. They could not have been more charming. The only problem was that they had an Irish maid who, as soon as I arrived as their guest, began to…

A Self-Made Man: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1809–1849 by Sidney Blumenthal. Simon and Schuster, 556 pp., $35.00 Wrestling with His Angel: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1849–1856 by Sidney Blumenthal. Simon and Schuster, 581 pp., $35.00 By the time Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as president in 1861, Africans and their descendants had been enslaved in North America for about 250 years. Slavery had survived wars and revolutions, economic upheavals, and a variety of governments. Fifteen presidents had come and gone, as had more than thirty Congresses, and not one of them had made a serious effort to undermine slavery. Yet within a mere eighteen months of taking the oath of office, Lincoln announced the emancipation of three million slaves in the southern states, sounding what Eric Foner…

1 Lincoln Center 18W140 Butterfield Rd Suite 1500 Oakbrook Terrace, IL 60181-4843; www.greenivybooks.com GREEN IVY PUBLISHING LET’S MAKE OUR WORLD BETTER How Politics and Religion Stand in the Way by Warren William Luce This work provides a reasonable blueprint for a better world. An exposé of political treason and false religious dogma. 9781946043924 • Paperback, $19.02 eBook, $12.99 240 pages • Nonfiction Available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Author’s website: www.damnthepolitics.com. WINTER STREET PRESS silverspartan@gmail.com; www.medicinthegreentime.com HOW STEVIE NEARLY LOST THE WAR AND OTHER POSTWAR STORIES by Marc Levy “Here is a fine collection by one of the Vietnam War’s finest writers. The stories click with a kind of muted rage, a majestic astonishment, the fine appreciation of deep irony, and unmistakable authority. Buy this book.” - Larry Heinemann,…

On June 8, British Prime Minister Theresa May learned one of politics’ cruelest lessons: that it is possible to win an election and still lose. Technically speaking, she was the victor, as her Conservative Party won fifty-six more seats in Parliament than its Labour opponents. But May lost her overall majority in the House of Commons and, given where the two parties had started, to say nothing of her expectations and indeed her motives in calling a contest in the first place, this victory tasted like the most bitter defeat. Nothing about this outcome had been predicted. On April 19, the day after the prime minister dissolved Parliament and triggered an early vote, the international edition of The New York Times captured the instant consensus about the inevitability of a…

THE LANGUAGE OF DIANE ARBUS To the Editors In an otherwise characteristically sensitive piece on Diane Arbus [“The Art of Difference,” NYR, June 8], Hilton Als repeats without qualification and as a truism that Diane Arbus “used the word ‘freaks’ to describe [her] subjects. . . .” While often repeated, and in this case possibly unintentional in the implicit breadth of its meaning, nothing could be further from the truth, and the promulgation of the idea harms the reputations of both the photographer and the writer. Als makes it clear that he objects to the use of the word “freaks,” which he finds disparaging, but he seems to have missed the precision of Arbus’s language. Although Arbus did say that she “adored freaks,” and that they made her feel “a…