Innholdsfortegnelse for May 10, 2018 i The New York Review of Books

GINI ALHADEFF’s books include The Sun at Midday and Diary of a Djinn. CHRISTOPHER BENFEY is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke and the author of Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay: Reflections on Art, Family, and Survival, among other books. DANIEL COHN-BENDIT was one of the leaders of the student protests of 1968 in France, and later in Germany. Between 2002 and 2014, he was copresident of the Green Group in the European Parliament. CLAUS LEGGEWIE is a political scientist and codirector of the Centre for Global Cooperation Research in Duisburg. He was, until last year, director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in Essen. His most recent book, published in Germany, is Europe First! A Declaration of Independence. DAVID COLE is the National Legal…

On War and Writing by Samuel Hynes. University of Chicago Press, 215 pp., $22.50 War has played a part in literature second only to that of love, as the great lexicographer Eric Partridge noted, because these two experiences have “most captured the world’s imagination.” His observation is quoted by Samuel Hynes in On War and Writing, a diverse collection of essays and reviews, in which he himself adds: “We can never entirely imagine what it’s like to actually fight a war—all war is unimaginable.” This assertion seems open to challenge. Though it is often suggested that, on the basis of internal evidence in the plays, Shakespeare must at some time have been a soldier, this is unproven. Superb war histories—for instance, those of John Keegan—have been written by people who…

Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Uncompleted Writings by Herman Melville, edited by Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, Robert A. Sandberg, and G. Thomas Tanselle, with a historical note by Hershel Parker. Northwestern University Press/Newberry Library, 998 pp., $115.00; $45.00 (paper) When Herman Melville died at seventy-two, in September 1891, he had been out of public view for so long that The New York Times identified him as Henry Melville. An obituary writer expressed surprise that the author best known for Typee—his first novel, set in the South Seas, notorious for its Gauguin-like sexual exploits with native women—had not died much earlier. Melville had outlived his two sons: one killed himself with a gunshot to the head, the other survived shipwreck and other mishaps to die, a feckless wanderer, of tuberculosis. Melville…

Claus Leggewie: On March 15, 1968, Pierre Viansson-Ponté, the editor-in-chief of Le Monde, concluded that France was bored—as a diagnosis this may have been true, but as a prediction it was totally amiss. Daniel Cohn-Bendit: Viansson-Ponté was baffled by the fact that revolts were occurring everywhere—in Germany, in the United States—but not so much in France. There were some demonstrations against the Vietnam War here, too, but somehow everyone thought this would come to nothing. In fact, though, an enormous strike had already taken place at Paris Nanterre University just a few months earlier, with students demanding administrative reforms. I was a sociology major at Nanterre at the time, and in November 1967 my gut had told me that this could very well turn into something huge. (I have always…

Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, March 2–June 10, 2018. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Barbara Haskell. Whitney Museum of American Art, 271 pp., $65.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) Grant Wood became famous pretty much overnight in October 1930, when American Gothic was included (a last-minute choice after being initially rejected) in the annual exhibition of the Art Institute of Chicago. The Chicago Evening Post slapped a photo of it on the front page of its art section under the headline: “American Normalcy Displayed in Annual Show; Iowa Farm Folks Hit Highest Spot”; the image was picked up by newspapers across the country, all quick to underscore the painting’s corn belt authenticity. Wood—whose most notable…

Alberto Savinio an exhibition at the Center for Italian Modern Art, New York City, October 6, 2017–June 23, 2018 Alberto Savinio, the hidden spring of metaphysical modernism, lives on in his Self-Portrait as an Owl (1936). His face, with its marked eyebrows, dark eyes, thin lips, and air of melancholic diffidence, sketched in swirling feathers, resembles that of his brother, Giorgio de Chirico, who did a pencil drawing of the two siblings—or Dioscuri, as they liked to call themselves, after the mythical twins Castor and Pollux—at the start of their working life in Paris, one as a musician, the other as an artist. In Self-Portrait, Savinio wears a dark suit, and his shapely hand, the thumb hooked over a waistcoat button, takes up one fifth of the image. The scarf…

Some time ago, Drue Heinz said to me about dying, “It’s rather disconcerting to realize that you can’t take even a book with you.” We were in a very brown and velvety study done up by her favorite decorator, Renzo Mongiardino, in her house in New York, on Sutton Place. Renoirs here, a Modigliani there, and a great deal of trompe l’oeil in between. On March 30, after false alarms, when her doctors had written her off but she bounced back, this weird and wonderful woman finally passed away, peacefully enough, they say, after a few weeks of decline, of talking to the radio, asking for her ski boots, and seeing a man in a cloak. She died at Hawthornden, the lovely castle nestled in a glen in Scotland that…

Siamo in Guerra: Per una nuova politica [We Are at War: For a New Politics] by Gianroberto Casaleggio and Beppe Grillo. Milan: Chiarelettere, 188 pp., €13.60 (paper) Comico e Politico: Beppe Grillo e la crisi della democrazia [The Comic and the Politician: Beppe Grillo and the Crisis of Democracy] by Oliviero Ponte di Pino. Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 248 pp., €15.00 Politica a 5 stelle: Idee, Storia e Strategie del Movimento di Grillo [Five-Star Politics: Ideas, History and Strategies of the Grillo Movement] by Roberto Biorcio and Paolo Natale. Milan: Feltrinelli, 155 pp., €14.00 (paper) Supernova: Com’è stato ucciso il MoVimento 5 Stelle [Supernova: How the Five Star Movement Was Killed] by Marco Canestrari and Nicola Biondo. StreetLib, 283 pp., €14.99 (ebook) The immediate future of Italian politics is now in the hands of a…

Lyman Allyn Art Museum 625 Williams Street, New London, CT 06320; (860) 443-2545; www.lymanallyn.org. Spirited: Prohibition in America (on view April 4–May 25, 2018), a new traveling exhibition from NEH on the Road, brings visitors back to the period of flappers and suffragists, bootleggers and temperance lobbyists, and real-life legends, such as Al Capone and Carry Nation! Visitors will learn about the complex issues that led America to adopt Prohibition through the 18th Amendment in 1919 until its repeal through the 21st Amendment in 1933. Gallery I M A 123 S. Jackson St., Seattle, WA 98104; (206) 625-0055; info@galleryima.com. www.galleryima.com. In Jacqueline Barnett: Conversation (March 3–31), her first solo exhibition since a 2016 Museum of Northwest Art retrospective, New York-born painter Jacqueline Barnett brings a dozen new large abstract canvases and six…

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner. Scribner, 338 pp., $27.00 The mammoth and cruel American prison system poses a special challenge for writers. More than two million people are incarcerated in the United States. Millions more enter and exit the prison system on a regular basis. What actually happens there? The conventional means of conveying information go dark. Journalists are rarely allowed access. Prisoners can’t use the Internet; their mail is often censored or lost. Writing classes in prison are common, but the works produced there rarely reach readers. Visitors—lawyers and family—usually only make it to a meeting room. New York is home to the world’s largest penal colony, Rikers Island, where ten thousand people are held on any given day in large, airless dormitories, often simply because they couldn’t…

New Collected Poems by Marianne Moore, edited by Heather Cass White. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 453 pp., $30.00 Heather Cass White’s New Collected Poems of Marianne Moore is no small event in American poetry: it is the first edition of Moore’s work that actually is what it says it is. Moore expelled poems from her history, and substantially and continually revised many of those she permitted to remain. She prefaced her Complete Poems (1967)—which she herself edited, and which contains 102 poems, less than half of her actual collected poems—with the defiant epigram “Omissions are not accidents.” White’s book, gathering together the traduced and abandoned, should complicate the image of Moore in her later years—the quirky spinster in a tricorn hat who wrote album notes for Cassius Clay, appeared in…

After six years in which he never traveled outside his country, never met with a foreign head of state, and maintained relations ranging from frosty to terrible with South Korea, China, and the United States, Kim Jong-un opened up to all three of those countries over three stunning weeks in March. He established a direct line of communication with the South for the first time in eleven years, scheduled an April meeting with South Korean president Moon Jae-in, invited President Trump to a summit meeting currently planned for May, and then traveled secretly to China for meetings with Chinese president Xi Jinping. In all likelihood, Kim has emerged from his seclusion because of the rapid advance of North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. In 2017 twenty missile tests followed one…

In 2023, Xi Jinping will conclude his second term as China’s president. Ever since Deng Xiaoping revised the country’s constitution more than thirty-five years ago, two consecutive terms have been the most that a president can legally serve. But it has become increasingly clear that Xi has no plans to retire. In March, the National People’s Congress—a rubber-stamp body with no real legislative power—approved a constitutional amendment that abolished term limits for the presidency, effectively clearing the way for Xi to hold the position indefinitely. It was a step that caused despair among Chinese liberals and alarm among commentators outside China. The Washington Post published two pieces on consecutive days speculating that Xi was setting himself up to be China’s first “leader for life” since Mao Zedong died in 1976.…

Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography by Julia Van Haaften. Norton, 634 pp., $45.00 Paris Portraits: 1925–1930 by Berenice Abbott, edited by Ron Kurtz and Hank O’Neal. Steidl/Commerce Graphics, 368 pp., $70.00 The Unknown Berenice Abbott edited by Ron Kurtz and Hank O’Neal. Steidl/Commerce Graphics, five volumes, 1,231 pp., $350.00 The celebrated photographer Berenice Abbott, who began her career as Man Ray’s darkroom assistant in Paris from 1923 to 1926 and shot her first portraits on his studio balcony, does not appear in his four-hundred-page autobiography, Self-Portrait (1963). This omission was “rather dirty,” Abbott felt, even “bitchy,” and seemed to show that Man Ray was still miffed at her early success, as Julia Van Haaften recounts in her comprehensive new biography, Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography. Abbott and Man Ray had been…

Minoru Yamasaki: Humanist Architecture for a Modernist World by Dale Allen Gyure. Yale University Press, 283 pp., $65.00 1. Now that I’m about to turn seventy I finally feel able to reveal a shameful secret: I was a teenage Yamasaki addict. I have no good excuse for why I got hooked, but Minoru Yamasaki was the first contemporary architect who entranced me. I had already begun my architectural self-education with the early writings of Ada Louise Huxtable in The New York Times, where in 1962 she praised the plans for Yamasaki’s Robertson Hall of 1961–1965 (home of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs) for the way in which “Greco-Roman and Far Eastern influences blend in a series of slender classic columns of Oriental lightness, in a…

Klimt and Schiele: Drawn an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, February 25–May 28, 2018 Klimt and Schiele: Drawings by Katie Hanson. MFA Publications, 150 pp., $49.95 As you enter “Klimt and Schiele: Drawn,” at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, you are faced with a choice. Begin on the left, with Gustav Klimt’s Seated Woman in a Pleated Dress, and you will find yourself following Klimt down one wall of the single, large room; pick the right, with Egon Schiele’s The Artist’s Mother, Sleeping, and you are in his more colorful and astringent territory. Not until you have completed the whole circuit does it become clear that these two paths are also mirror images, each organized around the same rubrics: “Inner Life Made Visible,” “The Stuff…

Danh Vo: Take My Breath Away an exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, February 9–May 9, 2018; and the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, August 30–December 2, 2018. Catalog of the exhibition by Katherine Brinson. Guggenheim Museum, 284 pp., $65.00 The art of Danh Vo is popular and politically engaged, though it’s the opposite of agitprop. Vo is too canny and too much of an aesthete for that. He’s like Prospero and Ariel both, light on his feet, and his art manifests images and pulls in references from disparate places; it feels in transit, as if it just alighted here. The work can be profane, caustic, irreverent, or elegiac, often in combination. It can be beautiful or visually negligible. Occasionally it can be dull. Vo is…