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

Jewish Comedy: A Serious History by Jeremy Dauber. Norton, 364 pp., $28.95 Feeling Jewish (A Book for Just About Anyone) by Devorah Baum. Yale University Press, 282 pp., $26.00 Many years ago at a literary conference in Key West that focused on humor, I heard Billy Collins speak. Comedy, he said, is the dog that leaves the room when you call its name. Collins’s wistful, loving resignation over the elusive nature of comedy has distinguished antecedents. The list of those who have called comedy’s name only to watch it prance off in the other direction, wagging its tail, is long and illustrious, reaching back millennia. Cicero warned that one could “discourse more wittily on any other topic than wit itself.” Humor is physical, intellectual, emotional, cultural, ephemeral, essential. Puns and…

And Cain said unto the Lord, My punishment is greater than I can bear. —Genesis 4:13 Mount Qasioun soars above the Damascus plain to a height of four thousand feet, a sheer escarpment that for millennia has borne witness to insurrection, invasion, siege, and annihilation. Mankind’s first, albeit legendary, murder occurred in Qasioun’s Cave of Blood, where Cain crushed his brother Abel’s skull with a stone. For many Jews, Christians, and Muslims, Abel became the original martyr, the prototype for millions who followed him into blameless death. Cafés on the summit used to afford a vista of the sprawling metropolis below, until the government banned visitors lest they act as artillery spotters for the rebels. Damascus divided in 2011 into hostile strongholds of the state and its armed opponents. Six…

Japan’s Security Renaissance: New Policies and Politics for the Twenty-First Century by Andrew L. Oros. Columbia University Press, 272 pp., $90.00; $30.00 (paper) The Pivot: The Future of American Statecraft in Asia by Kurt M. Campbell. Twelve, 399 pp., $30.00 Intimate Rivals: Japanese Domestic Politics and a Rising China by Sheila A. Smith. Columbia University Press, 361 pp., $45.00; $28.00 (paper) In 1990, an interviewer for Playboy asked Donald Trump how he felt about “Japan’s economic pre-eminence.” He responded with a tirade: Japan gets almost seventy percent of its oil from the Persian Gulf, relies on ships led back home by our destroyers, battleships, helicopters, frog men. Then the Japanese sail home, where they give the oil to fuel their factories so that they can knock the hell out of…

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward. Scribner, 289 pp., $26.00 Mr. Eady is a student concern specialist at North Charleston High, in Charleston, South Carolina. South Carolina was one of four states I visited to research—for my play Notes from the Field—what has come to be known, among social scientists, educators, jurists, politicians, and grassroots activists, as “the school-to-prison pipeline.” I met Eady when I took a side trip to Charleston while traveling up and down the “Corridor of Shame,” a stretch of towns along I-95 with about thirty-six substandard schools. Many children in these schools are travelers on the school-to-prison pipeline. During the Obama administration the Justice Department released data revealing the overuse of expulsions and suspensions to discipline kids who live in poverty. Black, brown, Native American, and…

Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years by Nicholas Frankel. Harvard University Press, 374 pp., $29.95 The argument could be made that Oscar Wilde, one of the greatest literary artists of what we persist in calling the fin de siècle—that is, roughly, the period between 1880 and 1900—was at his greatest in two instances of aesthetic theorizing, namely the page-long preface to his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the pamphlet-length essay “The Decay of Lying.” It may seem paradoxical to lay so heavy an emphasis on a couple of snippets from an oeuvre that includes such theatrical masterpieces as The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband, as well as the tormented prison testaments De Profundus and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” but then was not Wilde himself the…

Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton by Rob Iliffe. Oxford University Press, 522 pp., $34.95 Sometime in 1664 the young Isaac Newton abandoned his hitherto dutiful undergraduate note-taking on the standard Cambridge curriculum, dominated, as it had been for centuries, by classical languages and the works of Aristotle. Instead, his notebooks begin to trace his excited response to radical new scientific and philosophical ideas culled from the works of René Descartes and Pierre Gassendi. This risqué engagement with suspect French Catholic thinkers, considered in Restoration Cambridge the last word in avant-garde modernity, was to trigger the emergence of Newton’s own far greater scientific genius. With astonishing rapidity, the earnest and melancholy young loner moved from admiring assimilation to pioneering explorations in philosophy, mathematics, and the physical sciences.…

Network a play directed by Ivo van Hove, adapted by Lee Hall from the screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky, at the National Theatre, London, November 13, 2017–March 24, 2018 Network, one of the big movie hits of 1976, now seems prophetic in both senses of the word. The Old Testament prophet is typically less interested in seeing into the future than in denouncing the iniquities already present in the world. Howard Beale, the deranged TV news anchor created by Paddy Chayefsky, is a comic, deluded, but nonetheless captivating descendant of Jeremiah or Ezekiel. But the film has also come to seem prophetic in the more colloquial sense. Even before the rise of Donald Trump, Aaron Sorkin, the creator of The West Wing, claimed that “no predictor of the future—not even Orwell—has…

Farewell to the Muse: Love, War and the Women of Surrealism by Whitney Chadwick. Thames and Hudson, 256 pp., $35.00 Down Below by Leonora Carrington, with an introduction by Marina Warner. New York Review Books, 69 pp., $14.00 (paper) The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington with an introduction by Kathryn Davis, translated from the French by Kathrine Talbot and from the Spanish by Anthony Kerrigan. Dorothy, 215 pp., $16.00 (paper) One morning in Mexico City in 1991, the English Surrealist artist and writer Leonora Carrington and the art historian Whitney Chadwick set off for the Mercado de Sonora, a traditional market in a rough part of town that is also known as a mercado de brujería, or witches’ market. “It is here that the shamans and the curanderas [folk healers]…

India Modern: The Paintings of M. F. Husain an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, July 14, 2017—March 4, 2018 With his lean stick-like frame and luxurious halo of thick white hair, the Indian artist M. F. Husain was a figure of romance. A consummate showman, he was known to wake at the crack of dawn to paint with his two-foot-long brush, shirtless, always barefoot, in his down-and-out studio—a conspicuous choice—in front of Delhi’s overcrowded Jama Masjid. When a canvas was not available, he would paint on anything at hand: floors, walls, hotel room furniture, automobiles, a horse. By the end of the 1960s, the artist in dervish drag had become Mr. India, a human mascot and a stand-in for the nation. Even Andy Warhol, roughly his contemporary, another…