Innholdsfortegnelse for December 21, 2017 i The New York Review of Books

JULIAN BELL is a painter based in Lewes, England. A new, rewritten edition of his book What Is Painting? was published in October. CHRISTOPHER CARROLL is a former member of The New York Review’s editorial staff. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Lapham’s Quarterly, and Tin House. J.M. COETZEE is Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide. He is the author of sixteen works of fiction, as well as numerous works of criticism and translation. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. His story in this issue is adapted from Moral Tales, a forthcoming collection. TIM FLANNERY is the author of Chasing Kangaroos: A Continent, a Scientist, and a Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Creature and, most recently, Atmosphere of Hope: Searching for…

One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli, and the Great Stink of 1858 by Rosemary Ashton. Yale University Press, 338 pp., $30.00 The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us by Richard O. Prum. Doubleday, 428 pp., $30.00 By 1858 London had grown to be the largest city on earth, yet its nearly two and a half million inhabitants had no effective sewage system. Prior to the 1840s the city’s 200,000 cesspools had provided some degree of sanitation, but they often overflowed, and they needed to be emptied by hand so that their contents could be transported out of the city and sold as fertilizer. It was doubtless a messy process, but the solution implemented by the great sanitary crusader Edwin Chadwick in…

Among the many anomalies of Donald Trump’s presidency has been the near invisibility of institutions that for many years served as a bulwark of Republican policymaking. Though many on the right like to quote Ronald Reagan’s assertion from 1981 that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” his administration in fact began its bold work with a comprehensive playbook—the twenty-volume Mandate for Leadership, published by The Heritage Foundation. It contained a variety of proposals for slashing federal income taxes, boosting defense spending, and rolling back business regulations. It was widely seen as a blueprint for the administration, and Reagan gave a copy to each member of his cabinet. A redacted paperback version even became a best seller. “Of a sudden,” Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan…

Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left by Gareth Dale. Columbia University Press, 381 pp., $40.00; $27.00 (paper) What a splendid era this was going to be, with one remaining superpower spreading capitalism and liberal democracy around the world. Instead, democracy and capitalism seem increasingly incompatible. Global capitalism has escaped the bounds of the postwar mixed economy that had reconciled dynamism with security through the regulation of finance, the empowerment of labor, a welfare state, and elements of public ownership. Wealth has crowded out citizenship, producing greater concentration of both income and influence, as well as loss of faith in democracy. The result is an economy of extreme inequality and instability, organized less for the many than for the few. Not surprisingly, the many have reacted. To the chagrin of…

The Cambridge Companion to Seneca edited by Shadi Bartsch and Alessandro Schiesaro. Cambridge University Press, 361 pp., $99.00; $33.99 (paper) Seneca: The Complete Tragedies, Volume 1 edited by Shadi Bartsch; translated from the Latin by Shadi Bartsch, Susanna Braund, Alex Dressler, and Elaine Fantham. University of Chicago Press, 274 pp., $45.00 Seneca: The Complete Tragedies, Volume 2 edited by Shadi Bartsch; translated from the Latin by Shadi Bartsch, Susanna Braund, and David Konstan. University of Chicago Press, 320 pp., $45.00 Plato, in his Republic, spoke of an ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy; he sought to ban tragic drama—in his eyes the purest, most destructive form that poetry could take—from his ideal state. Four centuries later, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, a Roman philosopher who took Socrates as his model to the…

Before Pictures by Douglas Crimp. Dancing Foxes/University of Chicago Press, 307 pp., $39.00 Douglas Crimp’s Before Pictures is the sort of book that can make its readers feel as if they have made an interesting friend (or at least an acquaintance) without the bother and awkwardness of getting to know an actual person. We hear our new friend’s favorite stories, polished to a high gloss, and gain access to a trove of memories, preoccupations, and regrets. Crimp, whose books include Our Kind of Movie: The Films of Andy Warhol (2012), On the Museum’s Ruins (1993), and Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (2002), tells us about his aesthetic passions, his private life, and his career as an art critic, curator, and significant force in the downtown art…

Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical by Jacqueline Jones. Basic Books, 464 pp., $32.00 With its economic instability, mass immigration, corrupting influence of money on politics, and ever-increasing gap between the rich and everyone else, our current era bears more than a slight resemblance to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dubbed by Mark Twain the Gilded Age. There are also striking differences. Back then, larger-than-life radical organizers—Eugene V. Debs, Emma Goldman, Bill Haywood, and others—traversed the country, calling on the working class to rise up against its oppressors. Today’s critics of the capitalist order such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren seem tame by comparison. In her time, Lucy Parsons was as celebrated a radical orator as Debs and the others. Born…

Dear Norma, I am writing from San Juan, from the one and only hotel here. I visited Mother this afternoon—a half-hour drive along a tortuous road. Her condition is as bad as I had feared, and worse. She cannot walk without her stick, and even then she is very slow. She has not been able to climb the stairs since returning from the hospital. She sleeps on the sofa in the living room. She tried to have her bed shifted downstairs, but the men said it had been built in situ, could not be moved without being taken to pieces first. (Didn’t Penelope have a bed like that—Homer’s Penelope?) Her books and papers are all upstairs—no space for them downstairs. She frets, says she wants to get back to her…

Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 by Mike Wallace. Oxford University Press, 1,182 pp., $45.00 Despite the durable tale of liberation from Victorian repression, American history during the early twentieth century was less a linear drive toward emancipation than a recasting of centrifugal and centripetal forces. The two tendencies coexisted, calling each other into being, sometimes within the same cultural figure. Consider the chorus girl, whose vibrant sexuality was constrained by close-order drill; or the militant imperialist, whose lust for vicarious risk was countered by a dream of regimented order. The interplay between new sources of chaos and new ways to contain it characterized the epoch as a whole. Centrifugal forces arose from exploding markets for labor, goods, and entertainment; from women’s demands for…

In late June, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) released a report on the April 4, 2017, nerve gas attack on the central Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun, a civilian area under rebel control in which there was no fighting at the time. An estimated one hundred people died; another two hundred suffered from acute exposure to the gas. The OPCW’s report persuasively showed that the agent used in the attack was sarin. The investigators, who did not have access to the site, could not determine the method by which it was dispersed, but they concluded that “the exposure was likely initiated from a release in the vicinity of a crater in the road, located close to the silos in the northern part of town,” where eyewitnesses…

Exact Thinking in Demented Times: The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science by Karl Sigmund. Basic Books, 449 pp., $32.00 The “Vienna Circle” was the selfchosen designation for a group of philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians, some three dozen in all, who came together in the mid-1920s with the ambition of purging philosophy of metaphysics and making it into the handmaiden of science. Every other Thursday evening, its members would convene in a dingy street-level lecture room at the University of Vienna to argue about how to do this. They took their inspiration from Albert Einstein, whose theory of relativity seemed to have transformed the conceptual basis of science, and from Bertrand Russell, from whom they absorbed the lesson that the essence of philosophy was logic.…

Thalia: A Texas Trilogy by Larry McMurtry. Liveright, 722 pp., $29.95 Larry McMurtry wrote his first novel, Horseman, Pass By, in 1958, when he was just out of college, and he published it in 1961. His second, Leaving Cheyenne, came out in 1963. He published his third, The Last Picture Show, in 1966, when he was thirty. In the small Ohio town where I grew up, my friends and I started reading his books in the late 1960s—half a century ago. Now these three early novels have been reissued as a single-volume trilogy, Thalia, which is the name of the fictional small town in Texas that figures importantly in all of them. I’m impressed, first, by how consequential the Thalia novels turned out to be. From a personal standpoint, although…

SPY NOVELISTS To the Editors: A small correction to “Back from the Cold” by Christian Caryl [NYR, November 23]. John Bingham was not Sir John Bingham, but John Bingham 7th Baron Clanmorris of Newbrook, Mayo, whose ancestors included the winner of a VC at the Battle of Jutland. He was an MI5 spy but not the head of MI5. If it had been Bingham himself that had said that he had tried his hand at novel-writing it would have been put down as typically English understatement. In fact, he published seventeen thrillers, detective stories, and spy novels, two of which were subsequently filmed. Before joining MI5 he was art editor of the Sunday Dispatch. Le Carre has said that it was the success of Bingham’s novels that encouraged him to…

What You Did Not Tell: A Russian Past and the Journey Home by Mark Mazower. Other Press, 379 pp., $25.95 In the second decade of the twenty-first century, we are not yet done with the ghosts and demons of the twentieth. Even as the great cataclysms of the “terrible century” recede in time, recent years have given rise to a growing body of third-generation literature, written mostly (although not only) by the indirect heirs of World War II and the Holocaust, and often driven by a haunted sense of an enormous but largely unknown past. Mark Mazower’s What You Did Not Tell can be seen as belonging to this genre, but it is an unusual and exceptionally interesting example of it. Like many third-generation memoirs, Mazower’s exploration of the past…

Ill. Gaillot, Self-Portrait, c. 1820 / Feininger, The Signalman, 1910 Shepherd / W & K Galleries 58 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10075; (212) 861-4050; Fax: (212) 772-1314; shepherdny@aol.com; www.shepherdgallery.com. WINTER SELECTION: WORKS ON PAPER FROM THE GALLERY COLLECTION. Also on view: LYONEL FEININGER: WATERCOLORS AND PAINTINGS December 4th through December 22nd, 2017. John Davis Gallery 362 ½ Warren Street, Hudson, NY 12534; (518) 828-5907; art@johndavisgallery.com; www.johndavisgallery.com Pamela Blum Like and Unlike, 11.10 – 12.02 "My works are improbable combinations of familiar components. The works’ titles imply a search, meaning. Their forms refer to animals, plants, tools, grammar and punctuation. Just as energy and entropy are opposites, so are whites and blacks, extremes that transition into each other. Surfaces, marks, and values emerge and submerge. Paper suggests effects of time and…