Innholdsfortegnelse for January 18, 2018 i The New York Review of Books

ANTONY BEEVOR the author of Stalingrad, is a Visiting Professor at the University of Kent. His latest book is Ardennes 1944: The Battle of the Bulge. ANDREW BUTTERFIELD is President of Andrew Butterfield Fine Arts. He is the author of The Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio, among other books. PRUDENCE CROWTHER is on the editorial staff of The New York Review. MARTIN FILLER’s Makers of Modern Architecture, Volume III: From Antoni Gaudí to Maya Lin, a collection of his writing on architecture in these pages, will be published in September. RUTH FRANKLIN’s most recent book is Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, for which she received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography in 2016. SUE HALPERN is a regular contributor to The New York Review and a Scholar-in-Residence…

The cloud-gatherer Zeus issued this message today through his public relations team of rustling oak trees: I came of agelessness just after heaven and earth were formed, when there weren’t many rules yet about behavior, since I’d hardly made any. If someone broke an oath, I threw a thunderbolt—that was one of the few. Nor was there any “workplace culture” on Olympus to speak of. That’s no excuse, I know now. I will leave it for others to judge whether the fact that my father cut off my grandfather’s genitals and flung them into the ocean and ate all my siblings makes any difference. One way or another, clearly I have needed to channel some kind of insecurity, and over the last few weeks I’ve asked Athena to put together…

The Poems of Hesiod: Theogony, Works and Days, and The Shield of Herakles translated from the Greek by Barry B. Powell. University of California Press, 184 pp., $14.95 (paper) There seems to be an insatiable thirst in the contemporary Anglophone world for new translations of archaic Greek hexameter poetry. It is easy to see why the Homer market is booming. The Odyssey—a gripping, deeply human poem about identity, community, loss, cleverness and lies, gender inequality, wealth and poverty, migration, travel, colonization, mass murder, and cultural difference—has never felt more resonant than it does in 2017. The Iliad—a starker poem about human vulnerability, rage, pain, isolation, honor, and the thrilling, horrific effects of male aggression—feels more chillingly important on each rereading. The near- contemporary poems by Hesiod, also the products of…

Keeping On Keeping On by Alan Bennett. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 722 pp., $40.00 Balancing Acts: Behind the Scenes at London’s National Theatre by Nicholas Hytner. Knopf, 312 pp., $28.95 Last summer, I saw a fine production of Alan Bennett’s best- known play, The Madness of George III, at the Shaw Festival in Niagara- on- the- Lake, Ontario. I had read the play before but knew it mostly from Nicholas Hytner’s 1994 film version in which, as Hytner puts it in his engaging and illuminating theatrical memoir Balancing Acts, Nigel Hawthorne’s imperious monarch movingly “descends into babbling incontinence.” But I always had a problem with the play. It openly invokes King Lear, but compared to that terrifying journey into the dark heart of a deranged state, it seemed too soft.…

A CURRENT LISTING Swann Auction Galleries 104 East 25th Street, New York, NY 10010; (212) 254- 4710; swanngalleries.com. Upcoming Auction: “Icons & Images: Photographs & Photobooks,” February 15; Preview: February 10-15. Twenty-five vintage contact prints of iconic works by Lewis W. Hine, including Powerhouse Mechanic, circa 1921, and various Empire State Building views, lead this dynamic sale of vernacular and fine art photographs. Haunting twentieth-century masterpieces include Cowgirl, Wyoming, 1955, by Robert Frank, printed 1980s, as well as works by Sally Mann, Herb Ritts, Cindy Sherman, Robert Silvers, W. Eugene Smith, Bert Stern and Alfred Stieglitz. John Davis Gallery 362 ½ Warren Street, Hudson, NY 12534; (518) 828-5907; art@johndavisgallery.com; www.johndavisgallery.com Martin Dull; Title, 1.06 –1-29 "My goal is simple: to communicate through paint and found objects the many and diverse sensations of…

YELTSIN’S WAR IN CHECHNYA To the Editors: In his review of William Taubman’s biography of Mikhail Gorbachev [“The Man Who Lost an Empire,” NYR, December 21, 2017], Strobe Talbott also comments on two subsequent rulers of Russia: Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin. Yeltsin, like the last leader of the Soviet Union, writes Talbott, “was loath to use force or risk instability as the world’s largest territorial state dismantled itself,” whereas Putin pursued a “scorched- earth strategy in subduing Chechen secessionists.” Yet it was Yeltsin in late 1994 who first chose force to crush Chechnya’s separatist movement, by launching a devastating war that entailed massive indiscriminate bombing of the capital city Grozny and smaller Chechen towns. Many thousands of civilians—Russian and Chechen alike—perished, and tens of thousands became refugees or internally…

Wiener Werkstätte, 1903–1932: The Luxury of Beauty an exhibition at the Neue Galerie, New York City, October 26, 2017–January 29, 2018. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Christian Witt- Dörring and Janis Staggs. Prestel/Neue Galerie, 576 pp., $65.00 1. The imaginative fervor that gripped avant- garde master builders and artisans around 1900 in Vienna, the capital of the vast and culturally diverse Austro- Hungarian Empire, paralleled equally radical innovation in other creative realms, including the music of Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg, the painting of Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka, and the writings of Arthur Schnitzler and Sigmund Freud. Yet the singular contributions to the visual arts that the Viennese made during this epoch have never loomed large enough in general chronicles of modernism. The constant rewriting of art history…

J. PAUL GETTY TRUST OCCASIONAL PAPERS IN CULTURAL HERITAGE POLICY NUMBER 1 2017 MUST CULTURAL HERITAGE ALSO BE A VICTIM OF WAR? The J. Paul Getty Trust, prompted by the destruction of cultural heritage in Syria and Iraq, is enlisting the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect to engage in an educational campaign for the protection of cultural heritage in conflict zones. The campaign will raise awareness of UN Member States regarding the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and its additional protocols, as well as recent resolutions by the UN Security Council. To that end, the Getty has initiated a series of papers on culture at risk. Learn more about this effort at getty.edu/publications/occasional-papers A World of Art, Research,…

The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg. Bloomsbury, 420 pp. $30.00 Daniel Ellsberg in his youth and Daniel Ellsberg in his age are the same man—a born worrier quick to spot trouble, take alarm, and issue warning. He is best known for worrying about the American war in Vietnam, which time in the war zone convinced him was a crime, and for doing what he could to bring it to an end. In that case he copied and illegally released a huge collection of secret documents about the war, first published in June 1971 by The New York Times, which came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. But Vietnam was not the first or the biggest thing that worried Ellsberg after he went to…

This fall, the Nineteenth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) gave proof that during his five years as general secretary Xi Jinping has become the most powerful leader of China since Mao Zedong died in 1976. Most observers, Chinese and foreign, who already knew this could only have been surprised at the manner in which it was displayed in public at the congress: in the choice of the new leadership team and the designation of an official ideology named for Xi. The CCP’s Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) consists of the party’s top leaders, and it currently has seven members. In the past, the PSC has been the location of ferocious struggles for power. Mao forced out two deputies who might have succeeded him: Liu Shaoqi, who was denied medical…

Improvement by Joan Silber. Counterpoint, 227 pp., $26.00 “Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one,” John Berger wrote in his novel G. (1972). In the decades that have followed, that line has become a rallying cry for contemporary novelists, including Michael Ondaatje, Arundhati Roy, and, most famously, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. But it’s worth remembering that, from Mrs. Dalloway to Underworld, the novel has often relied on a plurality of voices—sometimes a chorus, sometimes a cacophony—to evoke the texture of life. A technique that once felt radical has become a new fictional norm. So it bears noticing when a novelist creates a genuinely new way of suggesting the complicated dance of relationships formed and dissolved, of connections made and missed, that sets the…

FRIESEN PRESS 990 Fort Street, Suite 300, Victoria, BC, V8V 3K2, Canada www.Friesenpress.com DIS-EASED by John Ralph Tuccitto Authored by a user experience designer with bipolar disorder, this is “an intriguing volume that combines a personal memoir with a treatise on the use of technology in today’s society.” — Foreword Clarion Reviews 9781525502248 • Paper, $14.99 9781525502231 • Cloth, $24.99 B0742R7KGC • eBook, $4.99 104 pages • Psychology/Self-Help Available on all platforms, Amazon, FriesenPress, Barnes & Noble, chapters. indigo, Amazon Kindle, iBooks, and Google play. OFF TELEGRAPH A Novel of Berkeley in the Sixties by Joseph Rodricks A tale of scientific fraud that twists its way through the cultural and political turbulence of the 1960’s and the wakening rebellion against the scientific worldview. These themes and the novel’s many brilliant characters…