Innholdsfortegnelse for October 11, 2018 i The New York Review of Books

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH teaches philosophy at NYU. His new book, The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity, is based on his 2016 BBC Reith Lectures. MARTIN FILLER’s Makers of Modern Architecture, Volume III: From Antoni Gaudí to Maya Lin, a collection of his writing on architecture in these pages, is out in September. MARK FORD’s fourth collection of poetry, Enter, Fleeing, was published earlier this year. GAVIN FRANCIS is a physician and writer in Edinburgh. He has won several awards for his books, which include Empire Antarctica, Adventures in Human Being, and most recently Shapeshifters: A Journey Around the Changing Human Body. JIAN GHOMESHI is a broadcaster, musician, producer, and bestselling author. He was the host and co-creator of the cultural affairs program Q on CBC Radio and TV from 2007…

The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It by Warren Farrell and John Gray. BenBella, 493 pp., $25.95 Healing from Hate: How Young Men Get Into—and Out of—Violent Extremism by Michael Kimmel. University of California Press, 263 pp., $29.95 White American Youth: My Descent into America’s Most Violent Hate Movement—and How I Got Out by Christian Picciolini. Hachette, 275 pp., $15.99 (paper) This March, in a four-part series on Fox News called “Men in America,” Tucker Carlson sat in front of the American flag and listed a set of downward trends for men in school, work, and emotional well-being. Compared to girls, Carlson told viewers, boys far more often fail in school, are diagnosed with ADHD (and take medication for it, which carries…

“but you would see faces that were worth a second look” —Gottfried Benn It was another world, the world of turned collars and polished shoes,Hairbrushes once a week laid face-down in what I thought was a specificBut was only a weak solution of shampoo in lukewarm water,Jerseys were roughed up with a kind of knuckleduster of Sellotape,Suitcases wore characterful labels and tags on their heavy, leather effect cardboard Who can imagine such a world not of cares, but of care,Once we set ourselves to become unpressed, casualized, short-run, drip-dry,Encased in thinking synthetics or flash suits, the human fiddler-crab and his deviceEmerging together from nail-bars and tanning studios and whitening salonsLike so many gigolos, soccer managers, politicians, or molls, Wearing our fewer, simpler, less restrictive garments more shabbily or dressily,Having our…

i.m. Baris Yazgi Reports said you were foundClutching the caseContaining your instrument as wellAs music of your own composition. You knew what it was to placeFaith in a hollow wooden vessel,Carried on waves, lilting in harmonic motion,Scales like water running through your fingers. I think of Arion of Lesbos, and his harp,Saved by a dolphin in the legend;Of accidentals, flat and sharp, Of pitch, and yaw. I think of the deep sound,Of the bow rolling across arpeggios,No bridge but the violin’s bridge.…

Proust’s Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siècle Paris by Caroline Weber. Knopf, 715 pp., $35.00 In June 1885 Henry James received a letter from John Singer Sargent in Paris asking him to see two friends of his who were coming to London. One was Dr. Samuel Pozzi, whom Sargent had painted in a red dressing gown in 1881, “a very brilliant creature”; the other, Sargent wrote, was “the unique extra-human Montesquiou of whom you may have heard [Paul] Bourget speak with bitterness…. (Take warning and do not bring them together.)” There was a third man in the group: Prince Edmond de Polignac, a composer. James devoted July 2 and 3 to entertaining these three gentlemen. “Montesquiou is curious, but slight,” James wrote to a friend. On…

It’s a bullish time for executive power. President Donald Trump’s conception of it is so expansive that he has asserted that he can pardon himself. The Supreme Court has reinforced that conception by upholding Trump’s blatantly anti-Muslim executive order restricting immigration. And Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s probable confirmation will produce a decisively right leaning court likely to be deferential to a Republican president like Trump. Trump’s belief that presidential authority is practically monarchical, his belligerent posturing toward countries such as Iran and North Korea, and his cavalier disregard for legal procedure have made many observers wonder if he will try to start a catastrophic war, and what safeguards exist to constrain him if he does. In November 1973 Congress passed the War Powers Act, over President Richard Nixon’s veto. The Vietnam…

Drafts, Fragments, and Poems: The Complete Poetry by Joan Murray, edited by Farnoosh Fathi, with a preface by John Ashbery. New York Review Books, 257 pp., $16.00 (paper) The only poem by Joan Murray (1917–1942) published during her short life appeared in the April 1941 issue of Decision: A Review of Free Culture, an impressive monthly periodical founded that year by Klaus Mann, son of Thomas Mann. Contributors to Decision, which folded after only twelve issues, included Jean Cocteau, Virginia Woolf, Marianne Moore, W. Somerset Maugham, William Carlos Williams, E. M. Forster, and Thomas Mann, as well as another recent immigrant to America, W. H. Auden, who helped out with the editing too. Auden (who was, incidentally, Klaus’s brother-in-law, having married Erika Mann in 1935 to facilitate her escape from…

Salman’s Legacy: The Dilemmas of a New Era in Saudi Arabia edited by Madawi Al-Rasheed. Oxford University Press, 367 pp., $49.95 Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman’s Awakening by Manal al-Sharif. Simon and Schuster, 295 pp., $16.00 (paper) In June the circus came to town. Nothing remarkable, you might think, except that the town was Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, where until two years ago all forms of entertainment were banned. The previous week, the head of the General Entertainment Authority—sometimes called the Ministry of Fun—had been fired because a female performer in another circus had worn a tight-fitting, flesh-colored outfit that had sparked protests on Twitter (75 percent of Saudis use social media, about the same as Americans). The mutaween—the religious police—had carefully vetted the circus I attended,…

Studies of Laughter in Interaction edited by Phillip Glenn and Elizabeth Holt. Bloomsbury, 295 pp., £110.00; £28.99 (paper) The physician must have at his command a certain ready wit, as dourness is repulsive both to the healthy and the sick. —Hippocrates Medicine is a serious business; when clinical conversations are scrutinized doctors can be seen to laugh less often than patients. But they do laugh—linguistic analysis suggests that physician laughter performs important interpersonal and therapeutic work. When patients laugh, it’s to make a show of alignment or affiliation with the doctor, signal a problem, or demonstrate superiority to their complaint. Anatole Broyard, in a 1990 essay written while he was being treated for prostate cancer (“Good Books about Being Sick”), wrote of one cheerful doctor: Bernie Siegel, a doctor who…

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. Penguin, 289 pp., $26.00 Like her first novel, Eileen (2015), narrated in a memorably dyspeptic first-person female voice, Ottessa Moshfegh’s second novel reads like an uncensored, unapologetic, despairingly funny confession. Its unnamed narrator is a twenty-four-year-old woman who looks “like a model” and defines herself as a “somnophile”: “Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.” In June 2000 she is living in an apartment on East 84th Street, on a trust fund established for her by her recently deceased parents; a Columbia University graduate, she has recently quit a coveted job at a Chelsea art gallery to retreat…

Pretty Gentlemen: Macaroni Men and the Eighteenth-Century Fashion World by Peter McNeil. Yale University Press, 255 pp., $45.00 When Yankee Doodle stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni, he was not thinking of pasta. And the author of the ditty, probably a British professional soldier mocking the New England militiamen with whom he fought during the French and Indian War in the late 1750s or early 1760s, was not indulging in mere amiable ribbing of the colonials. Macaroni was an extravagant and self-conscious fashion in male display and an arena in which anxieties about British masculinity were being played out. Over the next decade, back home in England, the image of the macaroni militia officer would become a staple of the booming market in satiric prints. As…

NUCLEAR DISAGREEMENTS To the Editors: Jessica T. Mathews’s “Singapore Sham” [NYR, August 16] correctly notes North Korea’s failure to halt plutonium production as part of the 1994 Agreed Framework, but fails to mention US violations. The Clinton administration failed to get licensing approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for building two light-water reactors to compensate for North Korea’s loss of nuclear power; the Bush administration failed to supply North Korea with 500,000 tons of heavy fuel on an annual basis. Also, Mathews may believe that the joint US–South Korean military exercises were “defensive,” but the intelligence community had evidence that Pyongyang did not share that view. President Trump’s description of the exercises as “provocative” was much closer to the truth. Communist military doctrine, moreover, assesses large-scale military exercises as possible…