Innholdsfortegnelse for February 22, 2018 i The New York Review of Books

LISA APPIGNANESI is Chair of the Royal Society of Literature and of this year’s Man Booker International Prize. She is the author of Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors and Losing the Dead. Her next book, Everyday Madness, will be published in September. CHRISTOPHER DE BELLAIGUE’s most recent book is The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle Between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times. IAN BOSTRIDGE is an opera singer and a song recitalist. He is the author of Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession. CRAIG BROWN has been a columnist for Private Eye since 1989. His most recent book is Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret. JASON DEPARLE, a reporter for The New York Times, is writing a book about a family…

Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre? an exhibition at the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam, October 20, 2017–March 25, 2018 Life? or Theatre? by Charlotte Salomon. Overlook Duckworth, 815 pp., $150.00 Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre?: A Selection of 450 Gouaches Taschen, 599 pp., $35.00 A woman walks down the red stairs of a tall roofless building. Her dress is almost black. Her hair is pulled back, her arms crossed against the cold, her face melancholy. She walks past denuded trees up a darkened street, curves into another, and another. The wind seems to be propelling her, tugging at her, so that at one point her hair tumbles free, her dress whirls. Lamplight turns pavement and road a stormy sea blue. As she comes closer her path is outlined in blood red,…

One, Two, Three, More by Helen Levitt, with an introduction by Geoff Dyer. PowerHouse, 203 pp., $40.00 The “street” in “street photography” does not refer to a location or a subject; it identifies an idiom. A street photographer walks into situations nobody controls in order to discover what can be made of them as pictures. She commits to contingency as a coauthor, as war photographers do, but her object is art, not news. A street photographer is a central, even if unseen, character in every scene she records. Any human gesture in a street photograph—a swinging arm seen from this angle, a planted foot from that one—results from the posture and movements not of the subject alone but of two people, photographer and photographed. The characteristic gestures in the street…

Cockroaches by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated from the French by Jordan Stump. Archipelago, 165 pp., $16.00 (paper) Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated from the French by Melanie Mauthner. Archipelago, 244 pp., $18.00 (paper) Helena is the most beautiful girl in Rwanda. She has everything: a bevy of admiring suitors, lace garments and high-heeled shoes, skin-lightening creams from Nigeria, and a coveted spot at Notre-Dame-de-Cîteaux, Kigali’s finest lycée. The white teachers adore her, one so distractedly that he pronounces her—in a whisper the other students cannot help but overhear—“a real Tutsi beauty.” While this schoolgirl gossip betrays the fledgling envies of adolescence, in the newly independent republic of the “majority people,” it also augurs Helena’s ruin. After graduation, ascendant Hutu nationalism prevents her from working, marrying, or remaining…

The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983–1992 by Tina Brown. Henry Holt, 436 pp., $32.00 The finest diarists are able to view themselves with the detachment they apply to others. They become, in this sense, their own sharpest biographers, dividing themselves into both observer and observed, audience and performer, hovering eagle-eyed above themselves, ever curious to record, however unfavorably, their own imperfect ways. As Claire Tomalin puts it in her biography of Samuel Pepys: “In writing it down, he detached himself from the self who acted out the scene.” In her diaries of her years at Vanity Fair, Tina Brown is certainly adept at noting, with her unforgiving eye, the flaws in others. Revulsion brings out the best in her. The Hollywood agent Swifty Lazar is “tiny and bald and hairy in…

REMEMBERING PAUL ROBESON To the Editors: Simon Callow’s article on Paul Robeson [NYR, February 8], who was a childhood (and beyond) hero of mine, was a powerful reminder of what a great man Robeson was and how shamefully we all neglected him. It also brought back to me two memories of the only times I saw him in person, each of which may add a little to the list of his deeds. The first, in the mid-1940s, was when he came to my parents’ home (I must have been about ten) in Brookline, Massachusetts, to raise money for American veterans of the Lincoln Brigade, a republican unit in the Spanish civil war. There were perhaps forty people there to hear him. My younger brother and I were at the top…

The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World by Maya Jasanoff. Penguin, 375 pp., $30.00 Joseph Conrad’s heroes were often alone, and close to hostility and danger. Sometimes, when Conrad’s imagination was at its most fertile and his command of English at its most precise, the danger came darkly from within the self. At other times, however, it came from what could not be named. Conrad sought then to evoke rather than delineate, using something close to the language of prayer. While his imagination was content at times with the tiny, vivid, perfectly observed detail, it was also nourished by the need to suggest and symbolize. Like a poet, he often left the space in between strangely, alluringly vacant. His own vague terms—words like “ineffable,” “infinite,” “mysterious,” “unknowable”—were as…

Transported by a sudden gust of windnot felt by anything except itself,a butterfly, a Cabbage White, blows inand dithers through my yard consideringis this the place to rest, or this, or this,and in the process fastens with a threadI cannot see the drowsy flower-headseach to the other and in turn to me,until a second gust of wind arrivesand lifts it through my fence and out of sight.Which leaves the yard exactly as it was,except that now a sense of emptinessinsists a moment of my life has passedwhich otherwise I would not think to miss.…

Walking in Chincoteague among the reedsstitching thin air and sunlight into shadeI thought of Tabitha the seamstress deadand Peter at her bedside calling outGet up!—which led me suddenly to youand winter evenings from the time before,hunched in a cone of yellow light, one handpoising your needle like a trophy savedfrom chaos that might any moment nowdescend again, the other with a threadyou lifted to your pouting lips and kissedto dampen and make sharp enough to piercethe needle’s eye before you pulled it tight,and took a breath, and cut the thread in two.…

WINDY CITY PUBLISHERS 2118 Plum Grove Road, #349, Rolling Meadows, Illinois 60008 www.windycitypublishers.com SERENDIPITY Seemingly Random Events, Insignificant Decisions, and Accidental Discoveries that Altered History by Thomas J. Thorson The world as we know it would be radically different were it not for the role accidents, chance and pure luck have played throughout history, as detailed in this fascinating mix of significant events and pop culture. 9781941478554 • Paper, $16.99; eBook, $5.99 95 pages • History Website: www.serendipity-book.com Available online through Amazon and Barnes and Noble. NEW ACADEMIA PUBLISHING 4401-A Connecticut Ave. NW, #236, Washington, DC 20008 (202) 391-1591 http://www.newacademia.com THE MIND OF THE AFRICAN STRONGMAN Conversations with Dictators, Statesmen, and Father Figures by Herman J. Cohen Former Assistant Secretary of State Herman Cohen reflects on nearly four decades of…

1. I admit that when I began these notes in the autumn of 2014, some six months after the election of Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi the previous May, I wanted to build a case in support of el shaab (the people). By that I mean the unprecedented number of Egyptians who had taken to the streets the summer before, calling for the army to assist in the ouster of then president Mohamed Morsi. The grievances against the Islamist president were many, including violence perpetrated by his Freedom and Justice Party and the most overreaching power grab of any Egyptian president (he granted himself extrajudicial constitutional powers). Amid a rapidly declining economy and a general sense of disarray, popular dissent had escalated. Millions of Egyptians poured into the streets, underhandedly…