Innholdsfortegnelse for June 28, 2018 i The New York Review of Books

GEREMIE R. BARMÉ was the Founding Director of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University and is the Editor of China Heritage. His books include The Forbidden City (Wonders of the World) and An Artistic Exile: A Life of Feng Zikai (1897–1975). DAVID A. BELL is Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Era of North Atlantic Revolutions at Princeton. His recent books include Shadows of Revolution: Reflections on France, Past and Present and, with Anthony Grafton, The West: A New History. G.W. BOWERSOCK is Professor Emeritus of Ancient History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His most recent book is The Crucible of Islam. ROBERT DARNTON’s A Literary Tour de France: The World of Books on the Eve of the French…

The Odyssey A New Translation by Peter Green Homer “Green brings to the poem the rhetorical directness and historical expertise which worked so well in his translation of The Iliad. Speeches in his version are vigorous and direct. “—London Review of Books Flawless Understanding Faults in Wine Jamie Goode Flawless is the first book of its kind dedicated to exploring the main causes of faults in wine. Jamie Goode brings his authoritative voice to the table once again to demystify the science behind what causes a good bottle to go bad. Brian O’Doherty Collected Essays Brian O’Doherty; edited by Liam Kelly, with an introduction by Anne-Marie Bonnet Adventurous, original, and essentially O’Doherty. This collection brings together much of this acclaimed artist and critic’s most influential writing, including essays on major…

Gershom Scholem: Master of the Kabbalah by David Biale. Yale University Press, 232 pp., $25.00 Gershom Scholem: From Berlin to Jerusalem and Back by Noam Zadoff, translated from the German by Jeffrey Green. Brandeis University Press, 320 pp., $95.00; $40.00 (paper) Greetings from Angelus: Poems by Gershom Scholem, translated from the German by Richard Sieburth, with an introduction and annotations by Steven M. Wasserstrom. Archipelago, 150 pp., $16.00 (paper) The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem edited by Marie Luise Knott and translated from the German by Anthony David. University of Chicago Press, 352 pp., $45.00 Werner Scholem: A German Life by Mirjam Zadoff, translated from the German by Dona Geyer. University of Pennsylvania Press, 372 pp., $49.95 Gershom Scholem was one of the great scholars of the twentieth…

WHOSE COUNTRY? To the Editors: Robert Kaiser, in his review of Max Boot’s The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam [NYR, June 7], states that “South Vietnam never was a real nation. Vietnamese in every region seemed to understand that they lived in one country.” Ken Burns’s popular documentary on the Vietnam War makes the same statement, even more bluntly. It is absolutely and obviously false. The separate southern Nguyen regime began in 1558 when the Nguyen Prince went south with his entourage and established himself in his capital at Hue. That separation was formalized in 1611 when the Nguyen dynasty stopped paying taxes to the northern Trinh “Lords” who pretended to represent the dysfunctional Le regime. For nearly two hundred years the two regimes,…

I came to the Met to see Therese—Therese Blanchard, Balthus’s model and muse. The museum owns two of the eleven paintings Balthus made of the girl between 1936 and 1939, when she turned fourteen, including Thérèse Dreaming, the object of recent #MeToorelated controversy and an online petition, signed by thousands, requesting that the painting either be removed from view or displayed differently. The Met has so far declined to do so. To my surprise, it is the smaller of the two canvases, titled simply Thérèse, that I find the more immediately arresting. The girl is pushed to the extreme foreground of the composition and cropped rather dramatically at the legs and feet, as though Balthus was zooming in on her with a lens. The effect is jarring and claustrophobic and…

Now that nothing has been done Before, you can speak of the stigma style and ovary Fourth whorl of the flower You can run your tongue Along the lips of the sleeping No one has touched Your hair, described the fall of it Now you can smoke Indoors, around your daughters Windows open to spring Nights that flare up in winter Words like transparent Shells attached to the elms maples and ash I hear the people Because tonight is recycling Picking through glass As I write you, slow pour of metal Into the mold, my speech direct Because recycled The prohibition against Feeling broken like bread Above the sill, an inferior mirage Above their heads, minute gaps Impulses pass through, blue sparks rise in the dark Fourth wall of the…

…actual tottering that takes place late in the season, the recently capsized trees, lindens arranged so they protect the settlements the cities, the oaks slowly giving in to paralysis the uncultivated elms never touched in certain places the cumbersome loosely arranged willows down by the pond illusions sputtering, it’s time for the weather report that haunts us like a death certificate, the icteritious following like tiny rabbits blowing everything on lunch, a tidiness in the faltering clouds we’ve seen before, longing calling a substitute to take over the last bit of wallowing we’ll recall on closed up nights when the stars like spittle stuck to your shirt beckon in what looks like a new way, speaking in a new way of dust and alarms playing tunes you remember from childhood.…

Crusade and Jihad: The Thousand-Year War between the Muslim World and the Global North by William R. Polk. Yale University Press, 632 pp., $37.50 A comment by a young Muslim man who had studied at an American university sets the tone for the impressively far-ranging Crusade and Jihad. “The bottom line,” he tells William Polk, is that no Muslim ever tried to enslave or slaughter your people. You might think of the attack on the World Trade Center, 9/11, as a counterattack. It was terrible and most of us are ashamed of it, but just remember—it killed about 25 hundred people whereas imperialists killed at least 25 million of our relatives and tried to destroy our way of life and our religion. Do you care about that? Polk, a distinguished…

Superbugs: An Arms Race Against Bacteria by William Hall, Anthony McDonnell, and Jim O’Neill. Harvard University Press, 246 pp., $29.95 I never knew my aunt, Pessimindle. As a teenager in the early 1900s, she developed appendicitis and rapidly succumbed to the infection. At the time, there were no antibiotics. When I was growing up, my father contrasted the loss of his sister with the advent of penicillin that saved many of his fellow soldiers in the waning days of World War II. I was taught that medicine could create miracles, which should never be taken for granted. Penicillin was serendipitously discovered when the researcher Alexander Fleming went on vacation in the summer of 1928. He returned to his laboratory at St. Mary’s Hospital, London, to find that a petri dish…

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez. Riverhead, 212 pp., $25.00 These are dark days for aging male seducers, particularly those plying their trade as writing professors. Imagine yourself as a committed shagger of students—it’s your lifeblood! it keeps you vital!—graying out of the charisma you once possessed. Your theories about the erotics of the classroom sounded more convincing back in the 1980s. Once it was easy to attract young acolytes who followed you around, hanging on your every literary reference. These days they find you a little gross, recoil from your kisses—charges are likely to be brought. Even calling them “dear” creates complaints. When you manage to wrangle one into the sack, she’s not exactly aswoon with desire. You catch a glimpse of your flaccid torso in a full-length hotel room…

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen. Random House, 462 pp., $30.00 Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News by Kevin Young. Graywolf, 560 pp., $30.00 Post-Truth by Lee McIntyre. MIT Press, 216 pp., $15.95 (paper) Fake news, alternative facts, and post-truth belong to a political climate change—that is, an overheating of the environment in which politics takes place. To understand it requires something more than fact-checking and the exposure of bunk, and to reduce it to the election of Donald Trump is to underestimate the extent of the change. Trump embodies tendencies that go far back into the past and that have seeped into politics from American popular culture. Think P.T. Barnum. The most ambitious of several attempts to put…

STEPHEN BRUMWELL, Turncoat: Benedict Arnold and the Crisis of American Liberty “In a time when charges of treason and disloyalty intrude into our daily politics, Turncoat is essential reading.”—R. R. B. Bernstein, City College of New York ■ “The most balanced and insightful assessment of Benedict Arnold to date.”—Edward G. Lengel, author of General George Washington CASSIANO DAL POZZO AND PIETRO OLINA, Pasta for Nightingales: A 17th-Century Handbook of Bird-Care and Folklore, translated from the Italian by C.J.P. Clayton, foreword by Helen Macdonald ■ “A charming 17th-century Italian treatise now presented in English.…Beautiful and precise watercolors.…Text and drawing together take us to the dawn of ornithology.”—Simon Barnes, Wall Street Journal ■ A co-publication with Royal Collection Trust PATRICK CHAMOISEAU, Migrant Brothers: A Poet’s Declaration of Human Dignity, translated by Matthew…

Baroque Antiquity: Archaeological Imagination in Early Modern Europe by Victor Plahte Tschudi. Cambridge University Press, 300 pp., $99.99 For several decades in the early seventeenth century, German-speaking visitors to Rome could tour the city with a strapping Swiss Guard named Hans Rudolf Heinrich Hoch, who liked to use the Italian version of his name, Giovanni Alto—Tall John. Towering over the average Roman in his billowing guardsman’s uniform, complete with cape, ruff, pantaloons, rosette-studded codpiece, and extravagantly plumed top hat, Giovanni Alto cut a dashing figure as he shepherded his charges through the Eternal City, bringing the ruins back to life with his exuberant descriptions while gently extolling the virtues of the Roman Catholic faith. As a final flourish, he would invite his most illustrious clients to sign his guest book;…

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45 by Milton Mayer, with a new afterword by Richard J. Evans. University of Chicago Press, 378 pp., $20.00 (paper) Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the Twentieth Century by Konrad H. Jarausch. Princeton University Press, 446 pp., $35.00 Liberal democracy has enjoyed much better days. Vladimir Putin has entrenched authoritarian rule and is firmly in charge of a resurgent Russia. In global influence, China may have surpassed the United States, and Chinese president Xi Jinping is now empowered to remain in office indefinitely. In light of recent turns toward authoritarianism in Turkey, Poland, Hungary, and the Philippines, there is widespread talk of a “democratic recession.” In the United States, President Donald Trump may not be sufficiently committed to constitutional principles of democratic…

THE GROLIER CLUB Distributed by Oak Knoll 310 Delaware Street, New Castle, Delaware 19720 (302) 328-7232 A CONVERSATION LARGER THAN THE UNIVERSE Readings in Science Fiction and the Fantastic 1762-2017 by Henry Wessells “…essential reading.” — Publishers Weekly Essays charting the emergence of science fiction from the Gothic and its history up to our dystopian present, and including notable works by Mary Shelley, H. G. Wells, Katharine Burdekin, Philip K. Dick, Joanna Russ, and others. 9781605830742 • Paper, $35 288 pages, 100 illus. • Science Fiction http://endlessbookshelf.net/Conversation2018.html DONLAZARO TRANSLATIONS donlazaro@mail.com A NEWER TESTAMENT Misanthropology Unleashed by Reneau H. Reneau “…satirical essays—some similar in style to Spike Milligan, others as if written by the bastard offspring of William Burroughs and Stephen Fry.” — Ian, Goodreads “…the pages drip with sarcasm and…

A Genealogy of Terror in Eighteenth-Century France by Ronald Schechter. University of Chicago Press, 289 pp., $45.00 It is clearly impossible to identify a birthdate for terrorism. There are vociferous disagreements about its definition, and even more vociferous arguments about which actions actually count as terrorism. As the old saying goes, your evil terrorist is my heroic freedom fighter. Were the bomb-throwing anarchists of late-nineteenth-century Europe terrorists? What about Guy Fawkes, the radical Catholic who tried to blow up the English Parliament in 1605? What about the Crusaders? The Maccabees? It all depends on whom you ask. We can, however, date the birth of the word “terrorism” with surprising precision: August 28, 1794, in a speech by the French politician Jean-Lambert Tallien. Five weeks earlier, Tallien had helped to end…

In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front by Judi Rever. Random House Canada, 277 pp., $32.00 The UN’s definition of genocide is not restricted to attempts to eradicate a particular ethnic group. It includes “killings… with the intent to destroy, in whole, or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” (my emphasis). Part One of this article explored the evidence presented in Judi Rever’s In Praise of Blood that before, during, and after the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) killed tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent Hutus. The claim that these killings constituted a “parallel genocide” has long been dismissed by many academics and journalists, including myself, as overstatement, and even as Hutu propaganda. But Rever makes a plausible…