Innholdsfortegnelse for August 17, 2017 i The New York Review of Books

Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy by Trita Parsi. Yale University Press, 454 pp., $32.50 North Korea and Nuclear Weapons: Entering the New Era of Deterrence edited by Sung Chull Kim and Michael D. Cohen. Georgetown University Press, 224 pp., $64.95; $32.95 (paper) Over five days in May, Donald Trump’s Iran policy—of monumental importance to the future of the Middle East and to US security—began to come into focus. On May 17, the president quietly agreed to continue to waive sanctions against Iran, a step that was required to keep the Iran nuclear deal in force. Two days later Iran held presidential elections with a landslide result in favor of the moderate incumbent, Hassan Rouhani; and two days after that the United States’ new Middle East…

Wonder Woman a film directed by Patty Jenkins The United Nations has ended a campaign featuring Wonder Woman as an ambassador for women and girls, two months after the announcement was met with protests and a petition complaining that the fictional superhero was an inappropriate choice to represent female empowerment. . . . “A large- breasted white woman of impossible proportions, scantily clad in a shimmery, thigh- baring body suit with an American flag motif and knee- high boots” is not an appropriate spokeswoman for gender equity at the United Nations, the petition said. —The New York Times, December 13, 2016 Perhaps the greatest service that the director Patty Jenkins does her protagonist in Wonder Woman, the Warner Brothers blockbuster released this June, is to give her a new set…

Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America’s Origins to the Twenty- First Century by Geoffrey R. Stone. Liveright, 668 pp., $35.00 In early spring, reports began to appear in the international press that authorities in Chechnya were rounding up and detaining gay men. Tales of torture, starvation, and murder soon emerged after some of the men were released and described their ordeals in captivity. According to one survivor, officials had instructed the families of captives to act preemptively and kill their gay sons, telling parents, “Either you do it or we will.” The Russian- backed government of this predominantly Muslim region declared the crackdown fake news, while Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov issued a flat denial. (Gathering and detaining gay men was impossible, Kadyrov insisted, because there were…

The Memory of Justice a documentary film directed by Marcel Ophuls, restored by the Academy Film Archive in association with Paramount Pictures and the Film Foundation; available on HBO The main Nuremberg war crimes trials began in November 1945 and continued until October 1946. Rebecca West, who reported on the painfully slow proceedings for The New Yorker, described the courtroom as a “citadel of boredom.” But there were moments of drama: Hermann Göring under crossexamination running rings around the chief US prosecutor Robert H. Jackson, for example. Jackson’s opening statement, however, provided the trial’s most famous words: We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to…

Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets by Luke Dittrich. Random House, 440 pp., $28.00; $20.00 (paper) On September 1, 1953, William Scoville, a neurosurgeon at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut, operated on a twentyseven- year- old man named Henry Gustav Molaison, who suffered from severe epilepsy. Scoville removed two pieces of tissue—the left and right sides of the hippocampus—from Molaison’s brain. The hippocampus, located near the center of the brain, forms a part of the limbic system that directs many bodily functions, and Scoville thought that epileptic seizures could be controlled by excising much of it. The result, however, as the journalist Philip Hilts wrote in Memory’s Ghost (1995), was that from H. M.’s moment in surgery onward, every conversation for him was without predecessors, each face…

Derain, Balthus, Giacometti: Une amitié artistique [Derain, Balthus, Giacometti: An Artistic Friendship] an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, June 2–October 29, 2017. Catalog of the exhibition by Jacqueline Munck. Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, 295 pp., €49.90 Some of the darkest, most beautifully saturnine dimensions of the modern imagination are explored in an extraordinary exhibition mounted in Paris this summer. “Derain, Balthus, Giacometti: Une amitié artistique,” at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, plunges visitors into the melancholy of modernism, but a melancholy so vigorous, provocative, and heartfelt that it has its own kind of exhilaration. On the most basic level, this is an exhibition about the profound artistic sympathy that developed in mid- twentieth-…

Criminal Defense in China: The Politics of Lawyers at Work by Sida Liu and Terence C. Halliday. Cambridge University Press, 200 pp., $99.99; $28.99 (paper) China’s Human Rights Lawyers: Advocacy and Resistance by Eva Pils. Routledge, 312 pp., $163.00 To Build a Free China: A Citizen’s Journey by Xu Zhiyong, translated from the Chinese by Joshua Rosenzweig and Yaxue Cao, with an introduction by Andrew Nathan. Lynne Rienner, 297 pp., $68.50 Unwavering Convictions: Gao Zhisheng’s Ten-Year Torture and Faith in China’s Future translated from the Chinese by Stacy Mosher. Carolina Academic, 200 pp., $30.00 (paper) Activist Lawyers in Post-Tiananmen China by Rachel E. Stern. Law & Social Inquiry, Winter 2017 Like an army defeated but undestroyed, China’s decades-long human rights movement keeps reassembling its lines after each disastrous loss, miraculously…

1. New York City is in the throes of a humanitarian emergency, a term defined by the Humanitarian Coalition of large international aid organizations as “an event or series of events that represents a critical threat to the health, safety, security or wellbeing of a community or other large group of people.” New York’s is what aid groups would characterize as a “complex emergency”: man- made and shaped by a combination of forces that have led to a large- scale “displacement of populations” from their homes. What makes the crisis especially startling is that New York has the most progressive housing laws in the country and a mayor who has made tenants’ rights and affordable housing a central focus of his administration. The tide of homelessness is only the most…

This year America celebrates the bicentennial birthday of Henry David Thoreau with many excellent publications about his life, legacy, and love of the natural world. Only his fellow citizens are likely to lend an ear to them. Unlike his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau hardly makes it onto the list of notable American authors outside his home country. His peculiar brand of American nativism has little international appeal, for as Emerson wrote in his funeral eulogy of May 9, 1862: No truer American existed than Thoreau. His preference of his country and condition was genuine, and his aversation from English and European manners and tastes almost reached contempt. These days the question of what it means to be a “true” American resists rational analysis. Whatever one can say about Americans…

America Collects Eighteenth- Century French Painting an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., May 21–August 20, 2017. Catalog of the exhibition by Yuriko Jackall and others. National Gallery of Art/Lund Humphries, 332 pp., $69.99 In the latter part of the 1820s, the novelist James Fenimore Cooper was in Paris, observing French society and meditating on the lessons to be learned from it by the United States. In one surprising segue from his book Gleanings in Europe: France (1837), he recommends the expenditure of thirty or forty million dollars on a navy to secure “our national rights” and, in the same sentence, to appropriate, at once, a million to the formation of a National Gallery, in which copies of the antique, antiques themselves, pictures, bronzes, arabesques, and other…

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay. Harper, 306 pp., $25.99 Roxane Gay is a writer of extreme empathy. Her fiction and essays elicit as much shared understanding as they give. Her new memoir, Hunger, is the story of being a physical woman in a physical world that has been shaped for so long by men. And I suspect that every woman who reads Hunger will recognize herself in it. For men who read the book, it will be more of a travelogue. Vade mecum. The book revisits some of the details of Gay’s life that she has written about elsewhere and fills in others. The daughter of prosperous Haitian immigrants, she had an upbringing that was midwestern, though her boarding school and college were East Coast preppy.…

Protest in Putin’s Russia by Mischa Gabo witsch. Polity, 332 pp., $69.95; $26.95 (paper) Over a few weeks in March, more than 13 million Russians watched an unusual video online. Posted on March 2, the film documented, with stunning drone footage and scathing narration by the anticorruption activist Alexei Navalny, Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev’s collection of marble- floored mansions, sprawling estates, luxurious yachts, and carefully tended vineyards (including one in Tuscany), altogether worth roughly half a billion dollars. It also included clips of the prime minister giving speeches condemning graft by public officials and explaining to a crowd of ordinary Russians in the newly annexed Crimean peninsula— where pensions and public services are far from what the Kremlin had promised—that “there’s no money.” A second Navalny documentary, also released on…

On the Trail: A History of American Hiking by Silas Chamberlin. Yale University Press, 243 pp., $30.00 On Trails: An Exploration by Robert Moor. Simon and Schuster, 340 pp., $25.00; $16.00 (paper) To the uninitiated it can be hard to understand why anyone would go hiking. Today’s fleece- and Gore- Tex– clad masses may take for granted the attraction of spending weekends doing what, for most of human history, qualified as grunt work: trudging through the wilderness, surrounded by dangerous animals, a heavy pack on your back. Earlier advocates had to be more candid. “This is very hard work for a young man to follow daily for any length of time,” wrote John Meade Gould in a popular guide in 1877. “Although it may sound romantic, yet let no party…

To the Editors: I read Martin Filler’s sweeping survey of Louis Kahn’s life and work [“A Mystic Monumentality,” NYR, June 22] with great interest. Louis Kahn has been on my mind lately—not for the striking creations that testify to his decades as “America’s master builder,” so many of which I know and love, but for his brief tenure as a shipwright. In the mid-1960s, conductor Robert Austin Boudreau—Kahn’s friend and mine—commissioned Kahn to design a unique floating concert hall, one that would carry an orchestra up and down America’s waterways in a grand celebration of the Bicentennial. Launched in 1976, the 195-foot Point Counterpoint II has traveled America’s rivers, lakes, and intercoastal waterways; the Caribbean, Baltic, and Irish Seas; and the rivers of northern Europe. Anchoring in large cities and…