Innholdsfortegnelse for December 7, 2017 i The New York Review of Books

G.W. BOWERSOCK is Professor Emeritus of Ancient History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His most recent book is The Crucible of Islam. DAVID COLE is the National Legal Director of the ACLU and the Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at the Georgetown University Law Center. The paperback edition of his book Engines of Liberty: How Citizen Movements Succeed has just been published. ROBERT COTTRELL is Editor of The Browser. He has served as Moscow bureau chief for both The Economist and the Financial Times. TIMOTHY GARTON ASH is Professor of European Studies and Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford. His latest book is Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected…

The Politics of Opera: A History from Monteverdi to Mozart by Mitchell Cohen. Princeton University Press, 477 pp., $39.95 Machiavelli’s The Prince was presented to the Medici family in 1513 with a dedication that turned out to be much more than a flattering formality since, for the next five centuries, it remained attached to the most influential treatise of modern political theory. Machiavelli began by observing that “those who strive to obtain the good graces of a prince are accustomed to come before him with such things as they hold most precious”—horses, arms, jewels—but he offered instead his thoughts on the conduct of princes. By the end of the sixteenth century poets and musicians would be offering the Medici something new, unprecedented, and precious: opera. Machiavelli, in dedicating The Prince,…

No Room for Small Dreams: Courage, Imagination, and the Making of Modern Israel by Shimon Peres. Custom House, 227 pp., $27.99 Arnaldo Momigliano, the great historian of late antiquity, once said: “When I was young, scholars wrote history and gentlemen wrote biography.” Who, then, wrote, or writes, autobiographies? At best, the spiritually tormented and temperamentally restless, like Augustine and Jean- Jacques Rousseau, or great artists such as Pablo Neruda, Nikos Kazantzakis, and Simone de Beauvoir, or adventurers such as Ármin Vámbéry, the Hungarian savant and founder of modern Turkology. At worst, a host of lesser figures, mediocre literati and self- apologists whose names we can happily forget. Somewhere in between these two poles lie women and men who have led unusually interesting lives, some of them, like Shimon Peres, in…

Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris: The Story of a Friendship, a Novel, and a Terrible Year by Peter Brooks. Basic Books, 241 pp., $32.00 Ford Madox Ford said that one had to read Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education fourteen times in order to fully grasp it; he had memorized whole sections of it. Franz Kafka said it was one of his favorite novels. Not bad for a book that was widely criticized for its heartlessness and cynicism when it was published. People speak glibly about Flaubert’s style. I’ve noticed that the best way to get people to talk about your “style” is to talk about it yourself. That’s what Flaubert did, and Truman Capote as well. Flaubert’s correspondence attested to his hours spent on his couch, his “marinade,” searching for…

Out of China: How the Chinese Ended the Era of Western Domination by Robert Bickers. Harvard University Press, 532 pp., $35.00 1. Just as Donald Trump was being inaugurated last January, the People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, declared: “Westernstyle democracy used to be a recognized power in history to drive social development. But now it has reached its limits.” Two years earlier, China’s education minister, Yuan Guiren, told a conference of academics that they should “by no means allow teaching materials that disseminate Western values in our classrooms.”1 These statements are just two examples of an ever more evident theme of Xi Jinping’s tenure as China’s paramount leader. Behind the strident rhetoric lies a longstanding fear that somehow the “West” will take over and destroy China’s…

Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, September 24, 2017–January 28, 2018. Catalog of the exhibition by Deborah Wye. MoMA, 248 pp., $55.00 Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois by Robert Storr. Monacelli, 828 pp., $150.00 After we’re done shaking our heads at what they had to endure, we project onto our long- lived women artists a mystique that’s as old as history— that of the sorceress or the good witch. These women have a secret. We want them to tell us everything, but maybe they don’t want to. If we can gain access to their magical workshop, squeezing through a narrow corridor to find the door, we might be privy to some important mysteries. The veils will…

Towards the Forest: Knausgård on Munch an exhibition at the Munch Museum, Oslo, May 6–October 8, 2017. Catalog of the exhibition by Karl Ove Knausgård. Munch Museum, 102 pp., Kr 199.00 Så mye lengsel på så liten flate [So Much Longing on Such a Small Surface] by Karl Ove Knausgård. Oslo: Forlaget Oktober, 233 pp., Kr 399.00 Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, June 24–October 9, 2017; the Met Breuer, New York City, November 15, 2017–February 4, 2018; and the Munch Museum, Oslo, May 12–September 9, 2018. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Gary Garrels, Jon- Ove Steihaug, and Sheena Wagstaff, with a preface by Karl Ove Knausgård. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 152 pp., $45.00 In a career…

The Language of Light: A History of Silent Voices by Gerald Shea. Yale University Press, 266 pp., $26.00 Several years ago, I noticed difficulty hearing; testing showed diminished perception of high frequencies, a common consequence of aging. Hearing aids were prescribed, which helped to amplify sounds but weren’t a complete remedy. Background noise in restaurants made it difficult to discern the conversation of dinner partners, and I often missed muttered dialogue in movies. Most vexing was what Oliver Sacks termed “mishearing”1—I thought I heard certain words, but they were distortions of what was actually said, and my response corresponded to the distortions. For example, recently a scientific colleague told me he was going to a conference in Milan. I heard “Iran,” and replied that he was sure to be hassled…

The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen. Riverhead, 515 pp., $28.00 Early in Vladimir Putin’s first presidency I spoke to a Moscow banker, with reason to care on this point, who said he detected no trace of anti- Semitism in Putin personally, but that Putin would encourage popular anti- Semitism in a second if he thought that doing so would serve his interests. So far, Putin has not felt the need to demonize Russia’s Jews. He has instead identified the enemy within as Russia’s homosexuals, whose persecution is one of the main themes of The Future Is History, Masha Gessen’s remarkable group portrait of seven Soviet- born Russians whose changing lives embody the changing fortunes and character of their country as it passed from the end…

The Essential W.S. Merwin edited by Michael Wiegers. Copper Canyon, 338 pp., $18.00 (paper) Garden Time by W.S. Merwin. Copper Canyon, 71 pp., $24.00 The Moon Before Morning by W.S. Merwin. Copper Canyon, 121 pp., $17.00 (paper) Last summer I had one of those happy experiences in the life of a reader: I found the perfect book for my purposes. Those purposes were vague, and I found the book by accident, but it was the book that put everything into focus. I was going to Tuscany for the first time, and I wanted to feel closer to Dante, whose poetry I fell in love with when I was nineteen. Surprisingly, what I got was a book about the French Occitan region, not Tuscany, written by W. S. Merwin, whose poetry…