Innholdsfortegnelse for February 8, 2018 i The New York Review of Books

What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton. Simon and Schuster, 494 pp., $30.00 The title of Hillary Clinton’s memoir of her unsuccessful campaign for the presidency, What Happened, has no question mark at the end, although many people around the world might reflexively add one. Clinton’s defeat surprised—stunned—many, including, as is clear from her recollections, Clinton herself. The majority of polls of the likely electorate indicated that she was headed for a nearly certain win, although her prolonged struggle for the Democratic nomination against a wild-haired, septuagenarian socialist from Vermont was a blinking sign of danger ahead. A significant number of voters were in no mood to play it safe, and the safe choice was what Clinton far too confidently offered in both the primaries and the general election. It was…

Lebanon is a tiny country, with a population of around six million; it could fit neatly between Philadelphia and Danbury, Connecticut. It has survived many crises over the past several decades: a brutal civil war from 1975 to 1990 that left 100,000 dead, a string of political assassinations since 2004 whose perpetrators have gone unpunished, and occupations by Israel and Syria. But Lebanon’s resilience is fraying. Its infrastructure is badly damaged and unemployment is high. It is also struggling to accommodate a large refugee population—500,000 Palestinians, many descended from those who fled the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and nearly 1.5 million Syrians, a majority of them Sunni Muslims. Most of the Syrian refugees I met in Lebanon do not want to be there—or in Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, or Egypt. They are…

The Pentagon’s Wars: The Military’s Undeclared War Against America’s Presidents by Mark Perry. Basic Books, 341 pp., $30.00 It was August 2004, and the Iraqi insurgency was raging in Anbar province. Major General James “Mad Dog” Mattis of the Marines, who is now the Trump administration’s defense secretary, called a meeting with a group of religious leaders outside Fallujah. His division was coming under daily fire from both local militants and foreign terrorists associated with al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq, and he hoped to persuade the leaders that it was misguided of them to encourage local young men to pick up rifles and shoot at American forces rather than trying to throw out al-Qaeda, whose bombings and beheadings were transforming their province into a hellscape. “How could you send your worshipers,…

To the Editors: In his review of Rüdiger Safranski’s Goethe: Life as a Work of Art [“Super Goethe,” NYR, December 21, 2017], Ferdinand Mount concludes: When [Goethe] finally made his long-dreamed-of trip to Italy, he remained impervious to the Christian art he saw. He was disappointed even by the classical monuments he saw in Rome, most of them at this date overgrown tumbles of stone. For all his endless fertility, Goethe’s imagination or lack of it has a forbidding quality. He made an exception for Mantegna’s frescoes in the Eremitani Chapel in Padua, which seemed to have a blunt, pure presence. “Presence” is the key word here. He condemned what he saw as the poverty of Christian mythology, always longing for something absent, dwelling, in a way that he regarded…

This essay was delivered in a slightly different form as the Robert B. Silvers Lecture at the New York Public Library on December 18, 2017. 1. Fetus The topic of my talk was determined by today’s date. Thirty-nine years ago my parents took a package of documents to an office in Moscow. This was our application for an exit visa to leave the Soviet Union. More than two years would pass before the visa was granted, but from that day on I have felt a sense of precariousness wherever I have been, along with a sense of opportunity. They are a pair. I have emigrated again as an adult. I was even named a “great immigrant” in 2016, which I took to be an affirmation of my skill, attained through…

Blameless by Claudio Magris, translated from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel. Yale University Press, 349 pp., $26.00 In a museum of war, a fire breaks out— or just possibly is ignited by someone— and kills the museum’s creator. This is not surprising. He sleeps among his exhibits in a wooden coffin, wearing a samurai mask and a Prussian spiked helmet, and he smokes abundantly, flicking the butts out of the coffin as he grows drowsy. Although he appears and reappears throughout Blameless, this figure is not exactly a protagonist. He is certainly heroic, a human bundle of generous actions and outbursts to which most episodes in this novel refer. Claudio Magris doesn’t give him a name. But in an author’s note at the end, he lets it be known…

Solo: Reflections and Meditations on Monk an album by Wadada Leo Smith. TUM Records, $19.98 Some artists start out with a bang, others with barely a whisper. The trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith, one of the most influential figures of the postwar black musical avant-garde, could not have begun his career more quietly. In 1972, Smith, then a thirty-one-year-old musician living in New Haven, released a solo album called Creative Music—I, on which, besides trumpet, he played flugelhorn, wooden flute, harmonica, hand zithers, and an assortment of percussion instruments set up on steel poles: bells, gongs, xylophones, cymbals, whistles, aluminum pot drums, metal plates. And for long periods of time, Smith did not play at all. Instead, he allowed silence to fill the space of his music. Not many…

The Essential Fictions by Isaac Babel, edited and translated from the Russian by Val Vinokur. Northwestern University Press, 404 pp., $21.95 (paper) Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk. London: Pushkin Press, 219 pp., $18.00 (paper) Odessa Stories by Isaac Babel, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk. London: Pushkin Press, 221 pp., $18.00 (paper) On January 17, 1940, Stalin approved the sentences of 346 prominent people, including the dramaturge Vsevolod Meyerhold, the former NKVD (secret police) chief Nikolai Yezhov, and the writer Isaac Babel. All were shot. Babel had been arrested on May 15, 1939, in the middle of the night, and, the story goes, he remarked to an NKVD officer: “So, I guess you don’t get much sleep, do you?” Grim wit was…

Ephemeral Works 2004–2014 by Andy Goldsworthy. Abrams, 367 pp., $85.00 Projects by Andy Goldsworthy. Abrams, 367 pp., $85.00 The British artist Andy Goldsworthy, who first made a name for himself in the early 1980s, has always been most strongly associated with the land art practitioners of his own and the previous generation. Although other figures haunt the outer ring of his inspiration (Brancusi with his smooth forms, Matisse with his flowing cut-out lines), Goldsworthy’s most obvious affinities are with his fellow British earth-inscriber Richard Long and with Americans of the 1960s such as Robert Smithson (whose signature work Spiral Jetty uses more than six thousand tons of black basalt to form a counter clockwise coil that runs from the Rozel Point peninsula into the Great Salt Lake in Utah) or…

Shtisel a television series created by Yehonatan Indursky and Ori Elon As a pitch, it would have sounded unpromising. A TV drama set entirely among the ultra-Orthodox Jews of Jerusalem, the men black-hatted, bearded with side curls, most of the women bewigged, their sleeves long and their skin covered up; the action centered on one family, specifically a widowed father and his unmarried son, sharing a cramped apartment, each sleeping on a narrow single bed; storylines touching on bereavement, the fading health of an elderly mother, power struggles within a religious elementary school, and the search for, if not necessarily love, then a person with whom it might be possible to share a life and make a home. No nudity, no profanity, no touching, and certainly no sex. There cannot…

Laura Owens an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, November 10, 2017–February 4, 2018; the Dallas Museum of Art, March 25–July 29, 2018; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, November 4, 2018–March 25, 2019. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Scott Rothkopf. Whitney Museum of American Art, 663 pp., $45.00 (paper) (distributed by Yale University Press) The Los Angeles artist Laura Owens brings a light touch and a tough mind to a new kind of synthetic painting. Her exuberant, bracing midcareer survey at the Whitney beams a positive, can-do energy. As a stylist and culture critic, Owens is neither a stone-cold killer nor a gleeful nihilist, traits embraced by some of her peers. She’s an art lover, an enthusiast who approaches the problem…