Innholdsfortegnelse for June 7, 2018 i The New York Review of Books

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at Baruch and the author of numerous books, including A History of Modern Iran and The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern US-Iranian Relations. GINI ALHADEFF’s books include The Sun at Midday and Diary of a Djinn. ALEC ASH is a writer and editor based in Beijing. He is the author of Wish Lanterns, about China’s youth. MICHAEL CASPER is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of California, Los Angeles. LOUISA CHIANG’s essays have been published in Taiwan and China. She was the China officer at the National Endowment for Democracy and received the Taipei Council for Cultural Affairs Literary Fiction Translation Prize in 2003. PERRY LINK is Chancelorial Chair for Teaching Across Disciplines at the University…

Barthes: A Biography by Tiphaine Samoyault, translated from the French by Andrew Brown. Polity, 586 pp., $39.95 The Friendship of Roland Barthes by Philippe Sollers, translated from the French by Andrew Brown. Polity, 166 pp., $64.95; $19.95 (paper) Album: Unpublished Correspondence and Texts by Roland Barthes, translated from the French by Jody Gladding. Columbia University Press, 357 pp., $35.00 In 1978, Roland Barthes embarked on a series of lectures entitled “Preparation of the Novel” at the Collège de France. The novel? Which novel? The one that Barthes had long planned to write, of course. But he didn’t know quite how to begin, and he kept getting distracted. As Laurent Binet writes in his recent novel, The Seventh Function of Language, “All year, he has talked to his students about Japanese…

At the end of the eighteenth century, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck noted that life on earth had evolved over long periods of time into a striking variety of organisms. He sought to explain how they had become more and more complex. Living organisms not only evolved, Lamarck argued; they did so very slowly, “little by little and successively.” In Lamarckian theory, animals became more diverse as each creature strove toward its own “perfection,” hence the enormous variety of living things on earth. Man is the most complex life form, therefore the most perfect, and is even now evolving. In Lamarck’s view, the evolution of life depends on variation and the accumulation of small, gradual changes. These are also at the center of Darwin’s theory of evolution, yet Darwin wrote…

Little Reunions by Eileen Chang, translated from the Chinese by Jane Weizhen Pan and Martin Merz. New York Review Books, 332 pp., $16.95 Forever Young a film directed by Li Fangfang In 2012, as he ascended to the top of the Chinese Communist Party and its government, Xi Jinping began giving speeches about a “Chinese Dream”: China was to become wealthy, powerful, beautiful, and unified. Of these four goals, wealth and power were especially important because, in an official narrative that had been repeated for decades in schools and the media, China for too long had been bullied by Western powers. The sense of national humiliation that has seeped into popular consciousness in China has, for many, led to a deep ambivalence toward the West: Chinese admire its wealth, modernity,…

SHE WRITES PRESS 1563 Solano Ave. #546 Berkeley, CA 94707 (866) 770-3022; www.shewritespress.com UNDER THE BIRCH TREE A Memoir of Discovering Connections and Finding Home by Nancy Chadwick An exploration of what it means to belong, Under the Birch Tree is a success story of discovering connections and finding home. 9781631523571 • Paper, $16.95 248 pages • Memoir This book is due out June 19 but is available for preorder on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and IndieBound. Connect and follow me on: nancychadwickauthor.com CREATESPACE (386) 323-5774; pickwick88@yahoo.com WATERSHED The Bi-Polar Trials Of Liam Gulliver by William Annett A comic send-up of the Pacific coastal water export industry, told by a manic-depressive snowbird coursing from manic Florida to depressive Vancouver. And occasionally vice-versa. 9781985619715 • Paper & eBook, $14.95 349 pages…

SWEDISH APOLOGIES To the Editors: In the April 5 issue of The New York Review, you published an article entitled “Knifed with a Smile.” I would like to make a few comments regarding that text: 1. The text states that none of the whistleblowers recall receiving an apology from Karolinska Institutet (KI). That could very well be the case; however, it is an irrefutable fact that on December 20, 2016, KI published a public apology in one of the most widely distributed and read Op-Ed pages of all the Swedish dailies, Dagens Nyheter: “That the whistleblowers who raised the alarm about Paolo Macchiarini’s activities were not listened to is unacceptable, and here, in this article, KI publicly apologizes to the whistleblowers.” (Text in Swedish: “Att de visselblåsare som larmade om…

William Eggleston: Los Alamos an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, February 14–May 28, 2018 Election Eve by William Eggleston, with a preface by Lloyd Fonvielle. Steidl, 184 pp., $85.00 Portraits by William Eggleston, edited by Phillip Prodger, with an appreciation by Sofia Coppola. Yale University Press, 184 pp., $50.00 The Democratic Forest by William Eggleston, edited by Mark Holborn and William Eggleston III, and with an introduction by Eudora Welty. Steidl, ten volumes, 1,328 pp., $600.00 William Eggleston has imagined that he shoots photographs from the vantage point of an insect, a baby, or a rifle—anything to avoid feeling as if he were doing it with his own eyes or, God forbid, taking a picture that looks like one he might have already taken: Humans…

I Had Nowhere to Go by Jonas Mekas. Spector, 469 pp., $25.00 (paper) A Dance with Fred Astaire by Jonas Mekas. Anthology Editions, 451 pp., $55.00 I Had Nowhere to Go by Douglas Gordon. Kerber, 320 pp., $49.95 The Adolfas Diaries Book 1: September 1941–December 1946 by Adolfas Mekas. Hallelujah, 138 pp., $22.00 (paper) The Adolfas Diaries Book 2: February 1947–October 1949 by Adolfas Mekas. Hallelujah, 102 pp., $22.00 (paper) In October 1949, Jonas Mekas, a twenty-six-year-old Lithuanian writer, arrived in New York City on a United Nations ship carrying European refugees from World War II. He and his younger brother, Adolfas, who traveled with him, had been planning to go on to Chicago, but settled instead in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, among other Lithuanian immigrants. A few months after they arrived,…

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates. One World, 367 pp., $28.00 Not long ago in the locker room of my Harlem gym, I was the eavesdropping old head who thought Black Panther was another documentary about the militants of the Black Panther Party from the Sixties. I caught on from what the young white guy and the young black guy were talking about that Kendrick Lamar had written some of the film’s soundtrack. I almost said, “Lamar is woke,” but the memory of the first time I heard my father say a thing was “fly” rose up and shut my mouth. In the current political backlash—the only notion the current administration has is to undo whatever President Obama did, to wipe him out—black America…

How to Read a Protest The Art of Organizing and Resistance L.A. Kauff man NOVEMBER 2018 “This is an incredible tool for understanding collective action: who is involved, how it unfolds, and what makes it successful, with special emphasis on the often overlooked role of women in making movements.” —Marina Sitrin, co-author of They Can’t Represent Us! Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy Uberland How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work Alex Rosenblat OCTOBER 2018 Uber has become a juggernaut of the sharing economy, promising drivers the opportunity to be entrepreneurs but treating them like consumers. Alex Rosenblat shares her award-winning research on how Uber uses algorithms and rhetoric to blur the line between workers and consumer and exemplifies the ways in which technology is now rewriting the rules…

Beckett’s Political Imagination by Emilie Morin. Cambridge University Press, 266 pp., $39.99 In April 1962, Samuel Beckett sent a clipping from the French press to his lover Barbara Bray: a report of the arrest in Paris of a member of the Organisation armée secrète. The OAS was a far-right terror gang whose members were drawn largely from within the French military. It had carried out bombings, assassinations, and bank robberies with the aim of overthrowing the government of Charles de Gaulle and stopping the concession of independence to Algeria. Among its targets had been Beckett’s publisher and friend Jérôme Lindon, whose apartment and office were both bombed by the OAS. The press clipping detailed the capture of an army lieutenant who would be charged with leading an OAS attack on…

Studs Terkel, who died in 2008, is best remembered, if at all, by Americans at large for his popular and prize-winning books of oral history—nine of them, from Division Street (1967) to Hope Dies Last (2003). But we Chicagoans remember him more vividly for his large presence in our city over the last half of the twentieth century. He was as much identified with Chicago as Herb Caen was with San Francisco, or Jimmy Breslin with New York, or H.L. Mencken with Baltimore. He was born in New York in 1912, but he came to Chicago at age eight and never left. He went to university and law school here, acted in local theater, ran a pioneering television show, championed local candidates and causes, and, most importantly, did a five-day…

The Quest for Queen Mary by James Pope-Hennessy, edited by Hugo Vickers. London: Zuleika, 335 pp., $40.00 Queen Mary, otherwise known as Mary of Teck (1867–1953), was the paternal grandmother of Queen Elizabeth II. It is surprising how many Britons of the present day are ignorant of this fact. She was born in England but typically for a British royal of her period was predominantly German by blood. George III, the Hanoverian king of Great Britain, was one of her great-grandfathers, so she was considered “royal,” but her father’s father, Alexander, Duke of Württemberg, had married beneath his station, as a consequence of which his children were forbidden to inherit his titles and royal status. Thus Mary, in her maidenhood, was considered too royal to marry into the British aristocracy…

Lyman Allyn Art Museum 625 Williams Street, New London, CT 06320; (860) 443-2545; www.lymanallyn.org. Noh Theatre in the Woodblock Prints of Tsukioka Kōgyo (June 16–October 14, 2018) explores the art of woodblock prints and the history, stories, and costumes of Japanese Noh Theater at the turn of the 20th century. Kōgyo specialized in depictions of Noh Theater, a classical art form that had primarily been enjoyed by social elites until the modernization of Japan in the Meiji era. Over 50 Japanese color woodblock prints and several masks will be featured. Alexandre Gallery (212) 755-2828; inquiries@alexandregallery.com; www.alexandregallery.com. Neil Welliver: Paintings and Prints. On view through June 29th. In the 1960s and 70s Neil Welliver (1929–2005) led a movement to redefine representational painting in a post-abstract expressionist, post-minimal world. This exhibition surveys Welliver’s work…

Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday. Simon and Schuster, 275 pp., $26.00 Early in Asymmetry, Lisa Halliday’s astounding first novel, Alice, a young assistant editor at a large publishing house, comes across a stray paper in the apartment of the much older writer she is sleeping with. On it are a few typed lines, including this: “An artist, I think, is nothing but a powerful memory that can move itself through certain experiences sideways …” The quote bears no attribution, but it comes from the nineteenth-century novelist Stephen Crane. It will resurface, as so many other details in Alice’s story, in Asymmetry’s second section, a seemingly disconnected tale told from the point of view of an Iraqi-American economist detained at Heathrow Airport. It is also an apt précis for what Halliday sets…

Outliers and American Vanguard Art an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., January 28–May 13, 2018; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, June 24–September 30, 2018; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, November 18, 2018–March 18, 2019. Catalog of the exhibition by Lynne Cooke and others. National Gallery of Art/University of Chicago Press, 396 pp., $65.00; $39.95 (paper) Vestiges and Verse: Notes from the Newfangled Epic an exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum, New York City, January 21–May 27, 2018. Catalog of the exhibition by Valérie Rousseau and others. American Folk Art Museum, 154 pp., $38.00 In recent decades, a tale unfolding within the larger story of contemporary art has been our gradually learning more about, and our trying to place, outsider artists. Problems…