Innholdsfortegnelse for August 16, 2018 i The New York Review of Books

CHRISTOPHER BENFEY is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke. He is the author of Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay: Reflections on Art, Family, and Survival. IAN BOSTRIDGE is an opera singer and a song recitalist. He is the author of Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession and Witchcraft and Its Transformations, c. 1650–1750. JASON DEPARLE is a reporter for The New York Times. His book on global immigration will be published next year. ARIEL DORFMAN, an emeritus professor of literature at Duke University, is the author of numerous books, including the play Death and the Maiden, the book of essays Homeland Security Ate My Speech, and the novel Darwin’s Ghosts. He served as a cultural adviser to President Salvador Allende’s Chief of Staff in 1973. DEBORAH EISENBERG’s…

Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu by Anshel Pfeffer. Basic Books, 423 pp., $32.00 Perhaps it’s now impossible to read any political biography without thinking of Donald Trump. The forty-fifth president of the United States looms so large in the global imagination that the impulse to measure all other politicians against him has become almost involuntary. But in the case of Benjamin Netanyahu, the grounds for comparison are stronger than most. Anshel Pfeffer, a prolific correspondent for both Ha’aretz and The Economist, has written a detailed, revealing, and shrewd biography of Netanyahu that is packed with fascinating insights, yet the word many readers might find themselves mentally scribbling in the margins repeatedly is “Trump.” Pfeffer describes a man raised in elite institutions but nevertheless consumed by hatred…

There are two possibilities: either President Trump was as ignorant after his June 12 meeting with Kim Jong-un about what North Korea has in mind when it pledges “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” as he was in March when he brushed aside warnings from his aides and rushed to accept Kim’s invitation to meet. This would mean that in the intervening three months he learned nothing about the past quarter-century of failed efforts to stop North Korea’s nuclear program and genuinely believes he accomplished something in Singapore. Or the president knows that he got nothing. In that case, when he bragged on his way home that “this should have been done years ago” and later tweeted “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea,” he was simply…

Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum. Doubleday, 461 pp., $35.00 On December 14, 1932, Joseph Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov, the former as head of the Communist Party, the latter as premier of the Soviet government, signed a decree titled “On the Procurement of Grain in Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and the Western Region.” The country was in the midst of a food crisis that had already caused widespread hunger, but the decree was not concerned with the famine. Its purpose was to mobilize party cadres to continue extracting grain from the countryside so that, among other things, it could be sold abroad to pay for Soviet industrialization. Procurement quotas were not being fulfilled, and the collectivization of agriculture was in trouble, as were the reputation of Stalin…

MORE CAKE? To the Editors: Given David Cole’s long-standing involvement in the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, it is odd and a little disturbing that he avoids even mentioning core issues of the case in his recent piece, “This Takes the Cake” [NYR, July 19]. Cole never once mentions the issue of compelled speech. As Cole describes it, the case hinged on whether Masterpiece Cakeshop’s proprietor, Jack Phillips, had a right to refuse to sell a product (a cake) to a same-sex couple, and whether Phillips and his defenders could legitimately find a “right to discriminate” in the First Amendment. In Cole’s reading of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s “general rule,” the provision of equal access to goods and services plainly required Phillips to sell the wedding cake…

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan. Penguin, 465 pp., $28.00 Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change by Tao Lin. Vintage, 308 pp., $16.00 (paper) In 1938 Albert Hofmann, a chemist at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, created a series of new compounds from lysergic acid. One of them, later marketed as Hydergine, showed great potential for the treatment of cerebral arteriosclerosis. Another salt, the diethylamide (LSD), he put to one side, but he had “a peculiar presentiment,” as he put it in his memoir LSD: My Problem Child (1980), “that this substance could possess properties other than those established in the first investigations.” In 1943 he prepared a fresh batch of LSD. In the…

American Witness: The Art and Life of Robert Frank by R. J. Smith. Da Capo, 327 pp., $35.00 Robert Frank: Film Works edited by Laura Israel. Steidl, one book, two booklets, and eight DVDs, $175.00 The Lines of My Hand by Robert Frank. Steidl, 102 pp., $35.00 (paper) “If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here,” James Agee remarked at the start of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), his landmark collaborative study, with the photographer Walker Evans, of three tenant families in Depression-era Alabama. “It would be photographs,” Agee insisted; “the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and excrement.” Agee couldn’t relinquish words so…

My baby’s headstone stands taller than everyone else’s. I mean this literally—it is a great, solid slab of Hornton stone that dwarfs the surrounding memorials in the graveyard in an almost embarrassing way, given his tiny dates: June 19th–20th, 1996. There is a practical reason for this mismatch. When my partner and I bought the plot, we learned that each eight-by-two-and-a-half-foot patch of earth could accommodate two and a half people. Better leave room to write in ourselves, we thought. Why waste the space? And I was rather comforted by the notion that I knew where I was headed in the end. But my partner and I are no longer together, and now when I think of the headstone I imagine my parents’ names inscribed below my son’s, and their…

The Tyrant-Slayers of Ancient Athens: A Tale of Two Statues by Vincent Azoulay, translated from the French by Janet Lloyd, with a foreword by Paul Cartledge. Oxford University Press, 276 pp., $35.00 The Transformation of Athens: Painted Pottery and the Creation of Classical Greece by Robin Osborne. Princeton University Press, 285 pp., $49.95 In 514 BC the city of Athens, then under the control of the tyrant Hippias, witnessed a daring assassination, the first known political murder in European history. A pair of male lovers, the older named Aristogiton and the younger Harmodius, plotted to kill Hippias at the Panathenaic procession, a public ritual instituted by Peisistratus, Hippias’s father and the city’s previous ruler. But when Harmodius and Aristogiton saw their target in conversation with someone who knew about their…

Those blessed momentsthat pretendThey’ll stay with us forever—Soon gone,without a fare-thee-well.What’s the rush?I heard myself say. You have the rightto remain silent,The night told meas I sat in bedHatching planson how to hold the nextCaptive in my head. I recall a window thrown openone summer dayOn a grand view of the bayand a cloud in all that blueAs pale as the horseDeath likes to ride. Always happy to shoot the breeze,that lone cloudWas telling meas it drifted out to sea,Toward someship on the horizon, That had alreadyset sailAnd was about to vanishout of sight,On the way to some portand countryWithout name. A ghost ship,Most surely,but mine all the same.…

Kudos by Rachel Cusk. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 232 pp., $26.00 In introductory studio art classes students are often assigned a negative-space drawing—that is, they are asked to draw everything surrounding a figure, filling up the page, until the blank shape of the figure emerges. This has been Rachel Cusk’s technique in her last trio of novels—a trio referred to appropriately as the Outline trilogy—and it is a little puzzling that more people haven’t thought to write novels in this manner before. Perhaps we go to fiction for the solitary inner life of one character and her actions against the confining tenets and structures of her society (though Cusk’s trilogy manages this as well) rather than for everything surrounding her—in this case, linked and paraphrased soliloquies of secondary, even tertiary,…

Terry Winters: Facts and Fictions an exhibition at the Drawing Center, New York City, April 6–August 12, 2018. Catalog of the exhibition with contributions by Claire Gilman, Peter Cole, and Rachel Kushner. The Drawing Center, 153 pp., $20.00 (paper) There’s a Nichols and May routine from the early 1960s about a high-strung worrier of a mother who’s going to the hospital for some tests. Her grown son asks her over the phone what the doctors intend to do. She tells him, “Well, they’ll X-ray my nerves.” That bit came to mind walking through the exhibition “Terry Winters: Facts and Fictions” at the Drawing Center. In drawing, one feels the nervous system at work. It is where the connections between the hand and the brain, between thought and action, and between…

SEPTEMBER 10-17, 2018 2018 FESTIVAL DAY AUTHORS AND PARTICIPANTS Melissa Albert Alexander Chee Dhonielle Clayton Jennifer Egan Eve L. Ewing Nuruddin Farah Liana Finck Linda Greenhouse Pete Hamill Terrance Hayes A.M. Homes Michael Imperioli Justina Ireland N.K. Jemisin Maureen Johnson Tayari Jones Donika Kelly Nicole Krauss Hari Kunzru Michael Kupperman Laura Lippman Malinda Lo Terry McMillan Ibtihaj Muhammad Neel Mukherjee Audrey Niffenegger Gregory Pardlo Ed Piskor April Ryan David Small Amber Tamblyn Dubravka Ugresic Luis Alberto Urrea Jen Wang Renee Watson Simon Winchester Jenny Xie Dave Zirin and many others! BOOKEND EVENTS SEPTEMBER 10-17 CITYWIDE A week-long literary adventure through all five Boroughs! BKBF curated Bookend events take place throughout the city -- literary trivia, booksto-movies screenings, performances, discussion and more in unique locations that include clubs, ferries, cemeteries, bookstores…

CHICAGO REVIEW PRESS orders@ipgbook.com; 1-800-888-4741 BALLOTS AND BULLETS Black Power Politics and Urban Guerrilla Warfare in 1968 Cleveland by James Robenalt “Ballots and Bullets portrays a discrete but instructive chapter of American history. The lessons therein are relevant today.” —Jeh Charles Johnson, former secretary of homeland security 9780897337038 • Cloth, $27.99 384 Pages • History • Available at IndieBound, Books-A-Million, and www.chicagoreviewpress.com. GISELA ZEBROSKI SELFIE SIDEWAYS A Memoir by Gisela Zebroski Selfie Sideways concludes the trilogy dramatizing the fate of Gisela’s Baltic German family. As an immigrant to America in 1950s, she begins a journey to find the life she sought. When motherhood was denied to her, she forged her own way to love and spiritual enlightenment. 9781978241480 • Paper & eBook, $19.95472 pages • Memoir Available at Amazon TED…

Moon Jae-in eui Unmyeong [The Destiny of Moon Jae-in] by Moon Jae-in. Seoul: Bookpal, 488 pp., W 15,000 In Singapore on June 12, as Donald Trump vigorously shook hands with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, the man behind this improbable meeting leaned forward in his chair and smiled. South Korean president Moon Jae-in, just thirteen months into his five-year term, had helped arrange the first-ever summit between an American president and the leader of North Korea. Yet Moon was careful to keep a respectful distance. He watched on a television monitor in the Blue House, the presidential compound in Seoul. It was, however symbolic, a goal he had pursued over two decades in politics, and it brought him a step closer to healing familial and national wounds. Moon is a child…