Innholdsfortegnelse for October 12, 2017 i The New York Review of Books

ANNE APPLEBAUM is a columnist for The Washington Post and a Professor of Practice at the London School of Economics’ Institute of Global Affairs. Her new book, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, will be published in October. JAMES FENTON is a British poet and literary critic. From 1994 until 1999, he was Oxford Professor of Poetry; in 2015 he was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize. He is the author of School of Genius: A History of the Royal Academy of Arts and, most recently, Yellow Tulips: Poems, 1968–2011. BENJAMIN M. FRIEDMAN is the William Joseph Maier Professor of Political Economy at Harvard and the author of The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. He is currently finishing a book on the historical influence of religious thinking on economic thinking. JOHN…

Cristóbal de Villalpando: Mexican Painter of the Baroque an exhibition at the Palacio de Cultura Citibanamex–Palacio de Iturbide, Mexico City, March 9–June 4, 2017; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, July 25–October 15, 2017. Catalog of the exhibition by Jonathan Brown, Ronda Kasl, Juana Gutiérrez Haces, Clara Bargellini, Pedro Ángeles, and Rogelio Ruiz Gomar. Mexico City: Fomento Cultural Banamex, 173 pp., $25.00 (paper) Jonathan Brown, in an essay adapted for the catalog of the exhibition of the work of Cristóbal de Villalpando at the Metropolitan Museum, warns us against the use of the word “colonial” in connection with Spanish-American painting of the period 1550–1700. Colonial, he says, “carries the burden of second-class status.” It “implies the domination and subordination of a territory and its inhabitants, who are…

Come again, Professor Hardwick said, doing that seesaw dance with her shoulders, as if to say, get a load of him. I’d no idea what she was talking about. She nodded toward the blue- and- magenta paperback on top of my notebook: it was by a distinguished, elderly member of the Columbia faculty. If I was reading that for a class, then I should drop that class right away. Who, she wondered, apart from the professor himself, would make students read him on the Romantics. Not much of interest there, she finished. The exchange happened faster than it has taken me to recall it, from her getting settled in her seat, to me, the apple- polisher, claiming first chair and opening another notebook. She’d laughed at the class for our…

The “Mito Americano” and Italian Literary Culture Under Fascism by Jane Dunnett, with a foreword by Massimo Bacigalupo. Rome: Aracne, 564 pp., €24.00 What was America to Italy and Italy to America during the twenty years of Fascist rule? Arriving in Italy to live in 1981, and learning Italian very largely by reading the works of writers who had come through Fascism, I soon became familiar with the accepted view of literary life in that period. Fascism had been not only repressive but also inward- looking. Foreign and above all American literature had been censored when not banned; anti-Fascist thinkers and activists had found comfort in and taken inspiration from American literature, which had been courageously translated and published in the years immediately before and during the war by a…

Lazy Susan Gallery 191 Henry Street (917) 650- 7287; www.lazysusan.nyc; Gallery hours: Wednesday– Sunday, 12–6 p.m. & by appointment. Pasadena Leaves is a solo exhibition of new photographs by Tom Bovo, portraying autumnal leaves from Pasadena, California. John Davis Gallery 362 ½ Warren Street, Hudson, NY 12534; (518) 828-5907; art@johndavisgallery.com; www.johndavisgallery.com Benjamin Butler, Sculpture, 09.16 - 10.08 "I work with strict systems that establish narrow parameters for making—finite materials are manipulated by highly repetitive gestures. The work develops a quality of unpredictability as gestures accumulate into form. Each piece is a meditation on our relationship to natural objects, as it simultaneously references both human and non-human processes. It is not designed but discovered, or grown, and it holds evidence of unseen forces at work." Alexandre Gallery (212)755-2828; inquiries@alexandregallery.com; www.alexandregallery.com. Tom Uttech: New…

John Ashbery, a long- standing contributor to and friend of The New York Review, died on September 3, aged ninety, at his house in Hudson, New York. He was the author of twentyeight books of poems (not counting Selecteds or Collecteds) as well as one novel, three plays, three volumes of essays and criticism, and three of translations from French. Over the course of his career he received just about every major prize, including the triple crown: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Self- Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975). At the time of his death he was considered, by general acclaim, the greatest living American poet. He was often referred to as a member of the New York School of…

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan. Scribner, 438 pp., $28.00 A third of the way through Jennifer Egan’s new novel, Manhattan Beach, a young woman named Anna Kerrigan enlists Dexter Styles, a charismatic nightclub owner and racketeer, to drive her and her severely disabled sister, Lydia, to the seashore at the edge of Brooklyn. Lydia, who cannot walk or feed herself, and who rarely leaves her family’s cramped apartment, has never seen the ocean, and Anna allows herself to hope that the experience might arrest her sister’s decline and jolt her out of her growing detachment from the loving domestic life around her. Dexter’s palatial house abuts a private beach, and he and Anna carry Lydia, swaddled in an imported blanket from his linen closet and propped up in a specially…

Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum by James Delbourgo. Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press, 504 pp., $35.00 When the first visitors entered the newly opened British Museum in Montagu House in Bloomsbury in January 1759, they walked past a stone from the Appian Way, the skeleton of a unicorn fish, and a buffalo head from Newfoundland. Beneath their feet were pillars from the Giant’s Causeway in County Down. This was the entrance hall. Next came Egyptian mummies, coral, wasps’ nests, and a stuffed flamingo. Upstairs were manuscripts and coins, portraits and busts, artifacts from Mexico and Peru, a model of a Japanese temple, hubble- bubble pipes (hookahs), musical instruments, minerals and fossils, plants and insects, Wampum beads from America, and a “cyclops pig, having…

DEALING WITH THE ENEMY To the Editors: Jessica T. Mathews’s fine essay on North Korea and Iran, “Nuclear Diplomacy: From Iran to North Korea?” [NYR, August 17], contains several excellent points, particularly the special salience of two common words for the leadership of both countries: respect and dignity. The details on the “around- the- clock supervision” of Iran’s nuclear facilities by IAEA inspectors are notably useful at a time when President Trump is casting about for reasons to torpedo the Iran nuclear agreement. “A ‘failure’ like this,” she then writes, “would be an unimaginable success in North Korea.” Yet in 1994 that same IAEA inspection regime began for North Korea, placing all of its plutonium and related facilities under strict controls. Six years into the process, the Clinton administration also…

The Siege of Corinth an opera by Gioachino Rossini, produced by La Fura dels Baus, at the Rossini Opera Festival, Pesaro, Italy, August 10–19, 2017 Two days after the Islamist attack in Barcelona on August 17, a chorus of Greek warriors sang out from a stage in the little town of Pesaro on the Adriatic coast of Italy: “We take up the sword; the Muslims are climbing our ramparts.” They were met by a chorus of Turkish soldiers, at the opening of the next scene, singing of conquest: “The rapid flame, the murderous sword, spread horror everywhere.” The opera was Le siège de Corinthe (The Siege of Corinth), Gioachino Rossini’s 1826 masterpiece about the struggles of a Christian community to resist a Muslim assault—an operatic dramatization of what Samuel Huntington…

Bubbles: Spheres, Volume 1: Microspherology translated from the German by Wieland Hoban. Semiotext(e), 663 pp., $34.95 Globes: Spheres, Volume 2 : Macrospherology translated from the German by Wieland Hoban. Semiotext(e), 1,019 pp., $39.95 Foams: Spheres, Volume 3 : Plural Spherology translated from the German by Wieland Hoban. Semiotext(e), 905 pp., $39.95 Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation translated from the German by Mario Wenning. Columbia University Press, 248 pp., $85.00; $28.00 (paper) Philosophical Temperaments: From Plato to Foucault translated from the German by Thomas Dunlap, with a foreword by Creston Davis. Columbia University Press, 114 pp., $59.50; $19.95 (paper) Critique of Cynical Reason translated from the German by Michael Eldred, with a foreword by Andreas Huyssen. University of Minnesota Press, 558 pp., $30.00 (paper) Stress and Freedom translated from the…

The End of the Asian Century: War, Stagnation, and the Risks to the World’s Most Dynamic Region by Michael R. Auslin. Yale University Press, 279 pp., $30.00 Post- Western World: How Emerging Powers Are Remaking Global Order by Oliver Stuenkel. Polity, 251 pp., $64.95; $22.95 (paper) Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? by Graham Allison. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 364 pp., $28.00 Ten years ago the journalist James Mann published a book called The China Fantasy, in which he criticized American policymakers for using something he called “the Soothing Scenario” to justify the policy of diplomatic and economic engagement with China. According to this view, China’s exposure to the benefits of globalization would lead the country to embrace democratic institutions and support the American- led world order.…

A Grace Paley Reader: Stories, Essays, and Poetry by Grace Paley, edited by Kevin Bowen and Nora Paley, with an introduction by George Saunders. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 371 pp., $27.00 A decade after Grace Paley’s death, a new collection brings together fifteen of her most famous stories, with nineteen essays and thirty- four poems, all of them dealing with her characteristically large subjects: war, men, marriage, children, life and death. The fiction gathered in A Grace Paley Reader is peopled by lovable and profoundly eloquent characters living mostly in the Bronx, where Paley herself grew up. Her parents had come from Russia, and the family spoke Russian, Yiddish, and English. Born in 1922, Paley went to public schools in the Bronx and then briefly attended Hunter College and the…