Innholdsfortegnelse for April 5, 2018 i The New York Review of Books

Armed in America: A History of Gun Rights from Colonial Militias to Concealed Carry by Patrick J. Charles. Prometheus, 555 pp., $28.00 Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. City Lights, 237 pp., $16.95 (paper) Chosen Country: A Rebellion in the West by James Pogue. Holt, 304 pp., $28.00 (to be published on May 22) “Welcome, Patriots! Gun Show Today,” says a big sign outside the Cow Palace in Daly City, California, just south of San Francisco, where the Republican National Convention nominated Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. Inside, past the National Rifle Association table at the door, a vast room, longer than a football field, is completely filled with rows of tables and display cases. They show every conceivable kind of rifle and pistol,…

It is a commonplace of American civics to view each of the three branches of our government as a check on the other two. Many Americans therefore look to the judiciary to rein in executive action when it exceeds lawful bounds. In recent months, a number of lower courts have held various actions of the current administration unlawful; but for the most part the Supreme Court has yet to weigh in. The judicial history of the past two centuries suggests that when the Court does respond, it may very well duck the substantive issues and defer to executive authority. The Constitution does not distinguish between the courts’ powers visà-vis the executive and vis-à-vis the legislature. But a close reading of the Federalist Papers suggests that some of the Founders—especially Alexander…

Cuba on the Verge: Twelve Writers on Continuity and Change in Havana and Across the Country edited by Leila Guerriero. Ecco, 285 pages, $26.99 1. It was late afternoon on March 22, 2016, when the sun came out in Havana. This was back when it was hard not to feel, in Cuba as in the United States, that history was progressing in a hopeful direction. It was the last day of Barack Obama’s historic visit to Havana. He had come to further the remarkable thaw in US–Cuba relations that he and Raúl Castro had announced more than a year before. That morning, Obama proclaimed to his Cuban hosts that he was in Havana “to bury the last remnant of the cold war in the Americas.” And then the outgoing US…

UNFORCED ERRORS To the Editors: The article by Paul Reitter, “The Business of Learning” [NYR, February 22], contained an egregious error. It reads that “hundreds of admissions offers [were] rescinded by UC Irvine on shaky grounds.” As of August 2 Howard Gillman, chancellor of UC Irvine, announced that the decision to withdraw admissions was “unacceptable” and stepped in, stating that “effective immediately, all students who received provisional acceptances into UCI will be fully admitted, except those whose transcripts clearly indicate that they did not meet our academic standards.” Thank you to the Editors for correcting this mistake. Dorothy J. Solinger Professor of Political Science Emerita University of California, Irvine Irvine, California Paul Reitter replies: It would have been easy, alas, to make the list of administrative missteps in my essay longer…

Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts by Daniel Siemens. Yale University Press, 459 pp., $32.50 The torchlight parade of some ten to fifteen thousand brown-shirted stormtroopers through the streets of Berlin on the night of Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor of Germany in January 1933 is certainly one of the best-known images of the Nazi era. It is no surprise, then, that it was invoked last August by a few hundred American white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, at the moment they openly admitted their identification with National Socialism by chanting “Blood and Soil” and “Jews will not replace us” and carrying the swastika flag alongside the Confederate flag. But who exactly were the stormtroopers, members of Hitler’s SA (Sturmabteilungen, or Storm Sections), whom the Americans were trying to emulate?…

The Darkening Web: The War for Cyberspace by Alexander Klimburg. Penguin, 420 pp., $30.00 The big Silicon Valley technology companies have long been viewed by much of the American public as astonishingly successful capitalist enterprises operated by maverick geniuses. The largest among them—Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Google (the so-called Big Five)—were founded by youthful and charismatic male visionaries with signature casual wardrobes: the open-necked blue shirt, the black polo-neck, the marled gray T-shirt and hoodie. These founders have won immense public trust in their emergent technologies, from home computing to social media to the new frontier, artificial intelligence. Their companies have seemed to grow organically within the flourishing ecology of the open Internet. Within the US government, the same Silicon Valley companies have been considered an essential national security…

In early December, three weeks after the military coup that unseated Zimbabwe’s ninety-three-year-old president, Robert Mugabe, I traveled to Harare, the country’s threadbare capital. A large white canvas tent had been set up on fairgrounds near the city center. Loyalists from the ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), had gathered from across the country to attend a national assembly. The assembly had been scheduled months earlier to endorse Mugabe as the party’s candidate in the 2018 presidential election and to rubber-stamp his selection of his fifty-two-year-old wife, Grace, as vice-president and likely successor. But the tumultuous events of the preceding weeks—including the mysterious poisoning of Mugabe’s rival Emmerson Mnangagwa and his subsequent clandestine flight across the border; a standoff at the airport between soldiers disguised as baggage…

The Naughty Nineties: The Triumph of the American Libido by David Friend. Twelve, 631 pp., $32.00 The summer of 1998, Philip Roth began his novel The Human Stain, “was the summer when a president’s penis was on everyone’s mind”; 1998 was also the year when Pfizer signed up Bob Dole, who had run for president against Bill Clinton two years earlier, to promote its new drug, Viagra. The barriers to talking explicitly and publicly about sex had been falling for several years. In the early 1990s, the rap group 2 Live Crew had been acquitted of obscenity charges for performing their album As Nasty as They Wanna Be. The Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati and its director won a similar victory when they were tried for exhibiting photographs from Robert…

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry. Viking, 259 pp., $26.00 How did it come about that an Irishman, Sebastian Barry, has written one of the most illuminating and moving recent novels about America—and nineteenth-century America at that? And what odds would you have given that it would be published in the United States within weeks of that other superb novel set in the same period: George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo? (Please don’t tell me that the novel is dead.) Days Without End is Barry’s eighth novel, a number that includes an early, ambitious, and pretentious Joycean effort called The Engine of Owl-Light, which is unavailable and which you can safely ignore. Every one of his other novels is luminous. Not one of them sounds like anyone else. In Britain,…

Mozart in Vienna: The Final Decade by Simon P. Keefe. Cambridge University Press, 689 pp., $44.99 In 1778, when Mozart was twenty-two, he went to Paris for six months, accompanied by his mother, leaving his father and sister in Salzburg. It turned into a difficult time for him: his mother became ill and died, which he hesitated to reveal to his father, staging the news gradually in a letter that described her illness as dire even after she was dead. Most on Mozart’s mind, however—judging from his correspondence—were his efforts to make an impression on the French musical public. In a letter to his father, Mozart vented his fury at being asked to play the piano for the Duchesse de Chabot in a cold room without a fireplace, where the…

“Politics is the art of identifying and neutralizing the enemy.” —Ivan Ilyin, 1948 The Russian looked Satan in the eye, put God on the psychoanalyst’s couch, and understood that his nation could redeem the world. An agonized God told the Russian a story of failure. In the beginning, there was the Word, purity and perfection, and the Word was God. But then God made a youthful mistake. He created the world to complete Himself, but instead soiled Himself, and hid in shame. God’s, not Adam’s, was the original sin, the release of the imperfect. Once people were in the world, they apprehended facts and experienced feelings that could not be reassembled to what had been God’s mind. Every individual thought or passion deepened the hold of Satan on the world.…

The Experiments a three-part documentary film series directed by Bosse Lindquist Dr. Paolo Macchiarini relaxes into a barber’s chair, leaning back to have his hair washed. “I am working for the university, and we are trying to create new organs,” he tells the barber, pausing to add an explanation: “Frankenstein.” Although Macchiarini, a transplant surgeon born in Switzerland to Italian parents, is fending off charges of research misconduct at his university, he appears untroubled, even carefree, in this scene from Bosse Lindquist’s documentary The Experiments.1 Knowing what lies ahead for him—dismissal, disgrace, manslaughter charges—it’s hard not to think of the beginning of Brian De Palma’s film The Untouchables, in which Robert De Niro, playing Al Capone, entertains questions from reporters as he gets a shave. Macchiarini is just as charming. As…

Peter Hujar: Speed of Life an exhibition at the Fundación MAPFRE, Barcelona, January 27–April 30, 2017; Fotomuseum The Hague, June 17–October 15, 2017; the Morgan Library and Museum, New York City, January 26–May 20, 2018; and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, July 11–October 7, 2018. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Joel Smith. Fundación MAPFRE/Aperture, 246 pp., $50.00 This is what the great photographer Brassaï, who spent a lifetime recording the merry-go-round of twentieth-century Paris, had to say about his work: “I hunt for what is permanent.” Peter Hujar, who photographed New York and died in the city in 1987, could have said the same thing. Hujar’s achievement, the subject of a compact, engrossing retrospective now at the Morgan Library and Museum, has a nerve-wracking power. Here…