Innholdsfortegnelse for November 9, 2017 i The New York Review of Books

JOHN BANVILLE ’s new novel, Mrs. Osmond, will be published in November. SUSAN DUNN , the Massachusetts Professor of Humanities at Williams, is the author of Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison and the Decline of Virginia and Jefferson’s Second Revolution. Her new book, A Blueprint for War: FDR’s Hundred Days That Mobilized America, will be published next spring. OMAR G. ENCARNACIÓN directs the Political Studies Program at Bard. His books include Out in the Periphery: Latin America’s Gay Rights Revolution and Democracy without Justice in Spain: The Politics of Forgetting. KAYA GENÇ ’s most recent book is Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey. He lives in Istanbul. MARK LEONARD is Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, which he cofounded in 2007. He is the author…

The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics by Mark Lilla. HarperCollins, 143 pp., $24.99 I owe my marriage to identity politics. In 1960, I was born into a world where openly homosexual Americans were legally banned from federal employment, informally banned from much private employment, terrorized on the streets, persecuted by police, pathologized by psychiatrists, reviled from the pulpit, and made to live a lie. Fifty years later, in 2010, I married a man. In order for me to stop being a criminal, a sinner, and mentally ill—and in order for same-sex marriage even to be conceivable—homosexuality first had to become an identity. If you were asked to name twentiethcentury America’s single most powerful force for social improvement, identity politics would be a good choice. Its success in transforming…

Calder: The Conquest of Time: The Early Years: 1898–1940 by Jed Perl. Knopf, 687 pp., $55.00 Alexander Calder—Sandy to all who knew him—was deceptively easygoing: a bulky, lumbering, slow-spoken figure with big, capable hands and a sleepy smile. Poise, balance, and equilibrium were his priorities, and he could be ruthless in their pursuit. You get some idea of his disruptive potential from the strict rules laid down by Pierre Matisse before he agreed to mount a first show of Calder’s elegant, austere abstractions in his New York gallery: “There won’t be any wall cracking or floor nailing, or ceiling bursting and I have to be sure that my carpet is not going to be eated [sic] up by your wild menagerie.” Sandy was the third Alexander Calder, son and grandson…

I have been reading lately about the rise of humanism in Europe. The old scholars often described themselves as “ravished” by one of the books newly made available to them by the press, perhaps also by translation. Their lives were usually short, never comfortable. I think about what it would have been like to read by the light of an oil lamp, to write with a goose quill. It used to seem to me that an unimaginable self-discipline must account for their meticulous learnedness. I assumed that the rigors and austerities of their early training had made their discomforts too familiar to be noticed. Now increasingly I think they were held to their work by a degree of fascination, of sober delight, that we can no longer imagine. John Milton…

Almost ten months into the Trump administration, how are the Democrats doing as an opposition party? The first instinct of rank-and-file liberals is always to dismiss them as ineffective (just as, not coincidentally, it is the first instinct of conservatives to bemoan Republicans’ congenital lack of spine). And the first instinct of the mainstream press is to feed that narrative with a steady supply of “Democrats in disarray” articles. It’s an old storyline and a mossy one; my friends and I, in e-mails, mockingly use the hashtag #demsindisarray when we note articles that overhype some new Democratic calamity. Yet there is some truth to both claims. “Disarray” isn’t exactly an unfair adjective for a party that controls no branch of the federal government and only sixteen governors’ mansions and thirteen…

The Transferred Life of George Eliot: The Biography of a Novelist by Philip Davis. Oxford University Press, 410 pp., $35.00 A sonnet sequence is traditionally addressed to a lover and recounts a turbulent, romantic love. Mary Anne Evans, writing under the pseudonym George Eliot, is perhaps unique in having dedicated such a sequence to her brother, Isaac Evans. Published in 1869, when the novelist turned fifty, the poems focus on her and Isaac’s early infancy and the exquisite complementarity of older brother and younger sister, he teaching her, she adoring him, he learning from the need to protect her, she afraid of disappointing him, the two laying down together the emotions and values that would structure their lives. The canals, bridges, fields, and wild flowers of their infant wanderings, the…

Toscanini: Musician of Conscience by Harvey Sachs. Liveright, 923 pp., $39.95 Biographers are understandably tempted by the idea of revisiting their subjects. In the years after a life story is completed, doors open and new details, clarifications, and documents become available. Myths are dispelled and mysteries solved—or deepened. As time and reflection leave their marks, we feel there may be something else to say. When Harvey Sachs’s Toscanini was published in 1978, it was greeted as the most serious portrait of the conductor that had yet appeared, a judgment that has largely remained unchallenged. But an enormous amount of material about Toscanini has come to light in the past four decades, including roughly 1,500 personal letters as well as numerous tape recordings of him in private conversation with friends and…

Smile by Roddy Doyle. Viking, 214 pp., $25.00 On St. Patrick’s Day, 1943, Éamon de Valera, Ireland’s prime minister and founding father, gave what his biographer Diarmaid Ferriter has uncontroversially called “the most famous broadcast of any Irish politician of the twentieth century.” “The ideal Ireland,” de Valera began, would be . . . a land whose countryside would be bright with cozy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry. . . and the laughter of happy maidens. . . . The home, in short, of a people living the life that God desires that men should live. . . . It was the idea of such an Ireland—happy, vigorous, spiritual—that . . .made successive generations of patriotic men give their lives to win…

RETURN OF THE FREUD WARS To the Editors: n writing for Robert Silvers over a fiftythree-year span, from 1964 until shortly before his death last spring, I was awestruck by his critical focus on every submitted paragraph. Bob never required agreement with his views, but he demanded close analysis, independent thought, and attentiveness to possible objections. The Review will be hard pressed to match his brilliant and tireless editing. It ought to be easier, though, to emulate his vetting of potential reviewers for gross conflicts of interest. As a model of what can go wrong, one need look no further than Lisa Appignanesi’s trashing of my Freud: The Making of an Illusion [NYR, October 26], a book that painstakingly traces Freud’s path from conventional science to arbitrary claims and the…

Joey Arias at Jackie 60, 1997 The disposition of her arms Is a case of Nothing ventured, nothing Gained. Her violet ear Makes sense if Something wicked is Being said. The angle Of her nose is a challenge, A crime against nature. Her Throat a fine line. Lover Where have you been? Mistakes come back to her Like wrong notes, a clarinet Of echoes. You can take the boy Out of Dubuque . . .Nothing Like bourbon To make her sing A slow tune: downcast Eyes, hands swaying Just so. The catch In her voice like a rusty key Turned. A hundred Nights blurred together Like an ink blot Smeared—her long fall Of hair saying No no no.…

Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald by David S. Brown. Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press, 397 pp., $29.95 Writers in general are not known for their modesty. To a question by a New York Times interviewer in 1972 as to what was his position in the world of letters, Vladimir Nabokov delivered the merry reply, “Jolly good view from up here,” which, while typically smug, at least had the merit of being witty. At the weightier end of the scale there is the ever autobiographical Wallace Stevens and his stately assertion, in “Large Red Man Reading,” that “there were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases,” the deathless phrases made by, as he has it in another poem, “the dauntless master,” who is of course Stevens…

“We Europeans really must take our destiny into our own hands.” With this short sentence, uttered in a sweaty and overcrowded beer tent in Munich in May 2017, German Chancellor Angela Merkel implied that the most successful relationship in modern political history was at an end. In doing so, she also laid claim to leadership of the West. That position used to be occupied by the president of the United States, who sometimes invoked the British prime minister as a junior partner. But as the US loses its bearings under Donald Trump and the UK succumbs to a new provincialism after its Brexit vote, the mantles of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are now being worn by a very different power couple: Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron. They have vowed…

A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America by Sam White. Harvard University Press, 361 pp., $29.95 “We are starved! We are starved!” the sixty skeletal members of the English colony of Jamestown cried out in desperation as two ships arrived with provisions in June 1610. Of the roughly 240 people who were in Jamestown at the start of the winter of 1609–1610, they were the only ones left alive. They suffered from exhaustion, starvation, and malnutrition as well as from a strange sickness that “caused all our skinns to peele off, from head to foote, as if we had beene flayed.” Zooarchaeological evidence shows that during those pitiless months of “starving time” they turned to eating dogs, cats, rats, mice, venomous snakes, and other…