Innholdsfortegnelse for May 24, 2018 i The New York Review of Books

The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World’s Rarest Species by Carlos Magdalena. Doubleday, 261 pp., $26.95 Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm by Isabella Tree. London: Picador, 335 pp., £20.00 During the excavation of Herod’s palace at Masada between 1963 and 1965, a pottery jar was unearthed that contained a great many seeds of the Judean date palm, which had been extinct for some eight hundred years. The jar had been buried sometime between 155 BC and 64 AD. In 2005, after spending forty years in the archaeological collections at Bar-Ilan University, three of the seeds were planted at Ketura in southern Israel. Eight weeks later, one sprouted, becoming the oldest seed to have germinated with human assistance and the only living example of this…

The air strike carried out against Syria on April 13 by the Unites States, Britain, and France—“Operation Desert Stormy” in Bill Maher’s memorable phrase—was carefully pegged to the alleged responsibility of the Assad regime for the chemical attack in Douma on April 7, which killed more than forty people and violated the Chemical Weapons Convention. The strike was explicitly presented as a matter of deterrence, not regime change, and the targets—the Barzah Research and Development Center in the Damascus suburbs and the Him Shinshar chemical weapons complex near Homs—bore this out. No presidential palaces were struck, although the countries responsible for the strike were clearly willing to hit Damascus itself. The regime has kept its nerve throughout the civil war, even when the opposition wiped out almost the entire Syrian…

Sex and Secularism by Joan Wallach Scott. Princeton University Press, 235 pp., $27.95 Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics by R. Marie Griffith. Basic, 395 pp., $32.00 If ever a couple of books were locked in an epistemic cage match it would be the two under review here, written by warring brands of historians on the subject of sex, religion, and secularism. I am, by default, in the secularite corner: I come from such religiously indifferent people they couldn’t even bother to be atheists. My sister and I were the only ones of our friends who didn’t go to Sunday school—when I once asked why, my father said that he and my mother couldn’t agree on whether to send us to a conservative or a…

Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto by Mark Polizzotti. MIT Press, 182 pp., $22.95 In 2016 the Man Booker International Prize was awarded for the first time to a single novel, The Vegetarian, which was translated from the Korean. The award was shared by its author, Han Kang, and its translator, Deborah Smith. Kang and Smith are friendly collaborators, and Smith has translated Kang’s subsequent work. But the translation aroused controversy late last year when Korean readers accused Smith of not knowing the language well enough and translating irresponsibly, producing an English version that is not really a “translation” at all. Smith’s English version was considered by some to be a betrayal of the original, despite the fact that the author seems to have been perfectly happy with it,…

Babylon Berlin a television series created by Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries, and Hendrik Handloegten, based on the novels by Volker Kutscher, available on Netflix Babylon Berlin: Book 1 of the Gereon Rath Mystery Series by Volker Kutscher, translated from the German by Niall Sellar. Picador, 423 pp., $17.00 (paper) Somewhere between decadent dance halls, S&M trysts, mob slayings, opium dens, corruption, torture, pornography, and bloody May Day riots, the TV series Babylon Berlin twirls away from Weimar Germany to give a nod to 1930s Hollywood comedies. The hero of the show, a detective named Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch), has rescued his irrepressible sidekick, Charlotte Ritter (Liv Lisa Fries), a would-be investigator, from a scrape with the local police. Outside the station Gereon hails a taxi, but the driver ignores…

Chantal Akerman a series of forty-five films at the Cinémathèque Française, Paris, January 31–March 2, 2018 In 1990 the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman set out on a trip across the former Soviet Union to do research for a movie about the poet Anna Akhmatova. She said “it was almost like home, or close enough.” Akerman’s Polish-Jewish parents had both immigrated to Brussels from Eastern Europe some fifty years before. Her mother survived Auschwitz, where her own parents were killed. In her 2013 memoir Ma mère rit, Akerman remembered that in her old age her mother would sometimes announce out of the blue, “without anyone having asked,” that she no longer remembered much Polish. Wherever Akerman went during that first trip, she found “the same food on the table that my…

Hasidism: A New History by David Biale, David Assaf, Benjamin Brown, Uriel Gellman, Samuel C. Heilman, Moshe Rosman, Gadi Sagiv, and Marcin Wodziński, with an afterword by Arthur Green. Princeton University Press, 875 pp., $45.00 In 1945 Shlomo Halberstam reached New York. He was a broken man, his faith shattered and his will to live shaken. He and his son Naftali were the sole survivors of their family: Bluma, Shlomo’s young wife, and two of their children had been murdered by the Nazis. Shlomo had been born in 1907 and raised in the town of Bobov in Galicia, where his father, Rabbi Ben Zion Halberstam, was the rebbe (leader) of a thriving Hasidic community. In September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, Ben Zion, his sons, and his sons-in-law managed to…

The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad. Basic Books, 710 pp., $40.00 The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War by Benn Steil. Simon and Schuster, 608 pp., $35.00 Two American academics have written big, serious, and thoroughly intelligent studies of the cold war. In The Cold War: A World History Odd Arne Westad, a professor of US–Asia relations at Harvard, covers the entire period that is conventionally held to have started in about 1947 and ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. He questions whether those dates really fit the history (he sees the conflict taking shape, or at least germinating, as far back as the 1890s). Most perceptively, he examines all the related conflicts in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and doesn’t…

Thailand: Shifting Ground Between the US and a Rising China by Benjamin Zawacki. Zed, 370 pp., $95.00; $26.95 (paper) The idea of one country “losing” another implies ownership. It belongs to the vocabularies of the cold war and the Great Game. In Thailand: Shifting Ground Between the US and a Rising China, Benjamin Zawacki argues that since around 2000 the US has “lost” Thailand to China through negligence and bad diplomacy. He assumes that although economic relations among countries are now multilateral, in politics “the world is again more bipolar than multipolar,” with the US on one side and China on the other. “‘Spheres of influence’ à la the Cold War,” he writes, “remain the order of the day.” He wants the US to win Thailand back. Zawacki’s book has…

When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting That Changed History by Matthew Restall. Ecco, 526 pp., $35.00 On the road to Toboso, where he is hoping to meet Dulcinea, Don Quixote talks to Sancho Panza about the nature of fame. He mentions four characters from classical literature who achieved it by acts of unlikely valor, Julius Caesar among them. Then he adds a more modern figure: “the gallant Cortés.” Appearing in Don Quixote alongside Julius Caesar is no mean achievement for a member of the minor aristocracy who enriched himself as a bureaucrat on the furthest shores of the Spanish empire. The reference in Don Quixote de La Mancha is not the only one Cervantes makes to Hernán Cortés. In “The Novel of the Glass Lawyer,” one…

Grant by Ron Chernow. Penguin, 1,074 pp., $40.00 The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant: The Complete Annotated Edition edited by John F. Marszalek, with David S. Nolen and Louie P. Gallo. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 784 pp., $39.95 For a century and a half Ulysses S. Grant has been a baffling and inspiring presence in the American literary and historical imaginations. Born in 1822 and raised by a pious Methodist mother, as a young man he was quiet, given to depressions, and lacking much ambition. Only his love of horses seemed to animate him and give him a reason to excel in his education at West Point, which his scheming father desired for him more than he did. In his thirties, he was a complete failure, at times a…

Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical by Kevin Winkler. Oxford University Press, 350 pp., $29.95 All That Jazz: The Life and Times of the Musical “Chicago” by Ethan Mordden. Oxford University Press, 260 pp., $29.95 When people think of the work of Bob Fosse, Broadway’s foremost choreographer-director in the 1960s and 1970s, what they are likely to see in their minds is a group of dancers, in bowler hats and white gloves, standing in a stiff configuration and bobbing up and down in a cool sort of way. The dancers may rotate their wrists or splay their fingers, but they don’t stick out too many parts of themselves at one time, and they generally don’t travel around the stage much. They are often dressed in some…