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

The past, in Poland, is not a foreign country; it is morality drama and passion play, combining high ideology and down-and-dirty politics. One recent manifestation of history’s significance has been the creation of several ambitious and architecturally inventive museums dedicated to central events and themes in the Polish past. Since the beginning of this century, four “houses of history” have opened in Warsaw and Gdańsk, attracting many visitors and contributing to the development of neglected neighborhoods. At the same time, the museums have inspired sharp controversies over such topics as freedom of cultural expression, the relationship of Polish to European identity, and interpretations of Polish-Jewish history. At a time when Poland, with its unexpected hard-right turn and defiance of democratic principles, is once again a matter of European concern, these…

The following letters to relatives and the accompanying headnotes are adapted from Freeman Dyson’s Maker of Patterns: An Autobiography Through Letters, to be published by Liveright on March 27. May 19, 1942 Cambridge, England In my second year as an undergraduate at Cambridge, I registered for national service. I was in the Home Guard, which was supposed to help the army defeat the Germans in case of an invasion. In 1940 the threat of an invasion had been real, but in 1942 the Germans were heavily engaged in Russia, and nobody took the threat of an invasion seriously. It was lucky that we never had to do any real fighting. The Home Guard required me to take part in occasional night exercises. The invasion became more and more unlikely as…

Men and Apparitions by Lynne Tillman. Soft Skull, 397 pp., $16.95 (paper) The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories by Lynne Tillman. Semiotext(e), 295 pp., $17.95 (paper) Lynne Tillman is widely revered by other writers—the galley of her new novel, Men and Apparitions, boasted a page of quotes from literary luminaries branded “TILLMAN SUPERFANS” who shovel on the praise with a backhoe—though not by me. I suspect that revering writers does them no favors, but don’t worry, this isn’t the setup for a hit job. Reading Tillman reminds me of once visiting the home of an acquaintance. Her partner was a brilliant philosopher who’d been left crippled and hunchbacked by a childhood disease. I found myself wondering whether my acquaintance managed to overlook the hunchback or was attracted to it.…

King Zeno by Nathaniel Rich. MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 386 pp., $28.00 New Orleans is a cliche, a loud, brassy, brazen hussy of a cliche, lubricated with booze and animated by jazz. Tits and beads. Corruption and hurricanes. Thanks to the copious, seasonally ubiquitous marketing efforts of Big Beer, that’s all you know and all you need to know. And yet New Orleans keeps tempting writers to discover, in archaeological digs of the heart and the soul, what else is in this unlikely settlement in the swamp at the mouth of the continent’s great river. John Kennedy Toole legendarily wrote his life away creating the city’s great comic novel, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), populating midcentury New Orleans with a gallery of only slightly exaggerated grotesques. (The legend includes his…

Making It by Norman Podhoretz, with an introduction by Terry Teachout. New York Review Books, 254 pp., $17.95 (paper) Norman Podhoretz’s memoir Making It was almost universally disliked when it came out in 1967. It struck a chord of hostility in the mid-twentieth-century literary world that was out of all proportion to the literary sins it may or may not have committed. The reviews were not just negative, but mean. In what may have been the meanest review of all, Wilfred Sheed, a prominent critic and novelist of the time, wrote: In this mixture of complacency and agitation, he has written a book of no literary distinction whatever, pockmarked by cliches and little mock modesties and a woefully pedestrian tone…. Mediocrities from coast to coast will no doubt take Making…

The Landmark Julius Caesar: The Complete Works: Gallic War, Civil War, Alexandrian War, African War, and Spanish War edited and translated from the Latin by Kurt A. Raaflaub. Pantheon, 793 pp., $50.00 When Julius Caesar was thirty-one years old in 69 BCE, so the story goes, and serving as a junior Roman magistrate in Spain, he once stood lamenting before a statue of Alexander the Great because he had achieved so little at an age by which Alexander had already conquered the world. He had good reason for concern. Although his recent election as a quaestor—one of the officials responsible for finances—had given him a lifetime seat in the Senate, Roman politics were more of a funnel than a ladder: twenty quaestors who had been elected at thirty years old…

The Story of the Jews, Vol. 2 : Belonging, 1492–1900 by Simon Schama. Ecco, 790 pp., $39.99 The story of the Jews extends farther back into the past than that of any other faith: perhaps only Hindus and Zoroastrians come close. But having more history does not help in the writing of it. On the contrary: the difficulties have been evident since the appearance of the first standard history of the subject, Heinrich Graetz’s compendious Geschichte der Juden, in the middle of the nineteenth century. What does it mean to write the history of a religious group? Is one charting the vicissitudes of a creed? Or is the real story the fate of a people? There is the risk of seeking—and hence finding—some essential core of Jewishness that may, in…

Knowing the Score: What Sports Can Teach Us About Philosophy (And What Philosophy Can Teach Us About Sports) by David Papineau. Basic Books, 285 pp., $27.00 What We Think About When We Think About Soccer by Simon Critchley. Penguin, 204 pp., $20.00 In the 1960s, when I was studying philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, we had a regular visiting professor from Yale: an energetic little man who was warm to students. There wasn’t a subject in philosophy on which he hadn’t written a tome. He was a metaphysician; Reality—capitalized—was his thing. In 1969, a book came out called Sport: A Philosophical Inquiry. The author was Paul Weiss, our metaphysician from Yale. It was savagely torn apart by the logician and philosopher Joseph Ullian, who called it “tedious, pompous,…

Phantom Thread a film written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson “I find it comforting to think that the dead are watching over the living,” Daniel Day-Lewis happily confides to a new acquaintance several scenes into the writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread. It’s an odd thing to say to a young woman whom he seemingly plans to seduce, particularly since it refers to his mother. Phantom Thread, which stars the always remarkable Day-Lewis as Reynolds Woodcock, a domineering master couturier in mid-1950s London, has been characterized by many reviewers as a love story. It is that, being concerned largely with the complicated relationship between Woodcock and a young woman who serves him as a mannequin, studio assistant, and sometime accomplice. But it is also a faux Hollywood melodrama, a…

The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook by Niall Ferguson. Penguin, 563 pp., $30.00 The Square and the Tower claims to present “a new historical narrative, in which major changes—dating back to the Age of Discovery and the Reformation, if not earlier—can be understood, in essence, as disruptive challenges to established hierarchies by networks.” Social networks “have always been much more important in history than most historians, fixated as they have been on hierarchical organizations such as states, have allowed,” and never more so than in modern times. The first “networked era” followed the introduction of the printing press in Europe in the late fifteenth century. The second such era—our own—dates from the 1970s, and the pace of change has accelerated along with new…

Peter Taylor: Complete Stories, Vol. 1, 1938–1959 by Peter Taylor, edited by Ann Beattie. Library of America, 695 pp., $37.50 Peter Taylor: Complete Stories, Vol. 2, 1960–1992 by Peter Taylor, edited by Ann Beattie. Library of America, 703 pp., $37.50 Let’s imagine a street of big houses in the 1930s—deep lawns, servants in the kitchen, and a clear sense of who belongs and who doesn’t. The paperboy doesn’t. The neighborhood girls may be sweet on Tom Bascomb, but he lives in an apartment building and even at thirteen everybody knows that he doesn’t quite fit in. The elderly Dorset siblings do, simply because they always have. Their ancestors made money in town before moving on to the West, and they belong even though their house lies near ruin and they…

Jasper Johns: Catalogue Raisonné of Painting and Sculpture edited by Roberta Bernstein with Heidi Colsman-Freyberger, Caitlin Sweeney, and Betsy Stepina Zinn. The Wildenstein Plattner Institute/Yale University Press, five volumes, 1,578 pp., $1,500.00 Jasper Johns: Redo an Eye by Roberta Bernstein. The Wildenstein Plattner Institute/Yale University Press, 335 pp., $60.00 Jasper Johns: “Something Resembling Truth” an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, September 23– December 10, 2017; and the Broad, Los Angeles, February 10– May 13, 2018. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Roberta Bernstein. Royal Academy of Arts/The Broad, 262 pp., $65.00 Jasper Johns: Pictures within Pictures, 1980–2015 by Fiona Donovan. Thames and Hudson, 288 pp., $60.00 A good mythology needs a Genesis story. For Jasper Johns, the dawn of creation came in the late fall of 1954,…