Innholdsfortegnelse for October 25, 2018 i The New York Review of Books

CHRISTOPHER R. BROWNING is Frank Porter Graham Professor of History Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author, most recently, of Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp. DREW GILPIN FAUST is President Emerita and Lincoln Professor of History at Harvard. She is the author of This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, among other books. IAN FRAZIER is the author of eleven books, including Great Plains, Family, On the Rez, and Hogs Wild: Selected Reporting Pieces. JAMES GLEICK’s most recent book is Time Travel: A History. VONA GROARKE’s latest book is her Selected Poems. She teaches at the University of Manchester and is a 2018–2019 Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. ADAM HOCHSCHILD’s books include King Leopold’s Ghost, To…

Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin, translated from the German and with an afterword by Michael Hofmann. New York Review Books, 458 pp., $18.95 (paper) 1. Berlin Alexanderplatz was published in Germany in 1929. It was a novel bearing the name of a giant train station, and its immediate notoriety was due to its aura of metropolitan switchback and speed. No one, it seemed, had reproduced the wild cancan of a city with such meticulously wild techniques. In the nickelodeon theaters, audiences went to watch a quick-change succession of shorts—and now here, so argued its admirers, was the nickelodeon’s novelistic equivalent. Its author, Alfred Döblin, the son of a Jewish tailor from Stettin who practiced as a doctor, was a star of the Expressionist movement. His schtick was garish prose, tonal…

A View of the Empire at Sunset by Caryl Phillips. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 324 pp., $27.00 Few books have been as poorly served by their authors as the novels of Jean Rhys. The drinking (two bottles of wine a day, so drunk that she got violent, so drunk that she got stuck in the toilet), the poverty and the helplessness, the tangled affairs and the excruciating loneliness—the story of her life nearly eclipsed her talent. “Jean Rhys was not a modern woman,” wrote her biographer, Carole Angier. “From beginning to end, dependence was her way of life.” Born Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams in 1890 on the Caribbean island of Dominica, she moved in her teens to England, where she worked as a chorus girl, nanny, and prostitute. Men supported…

The article by Jian Ghomeshi, “Reflec tions from a Hashtag” [NYR, October 11], has prompted considerable criticism from readers. We recognize the validity of this criticism. While Mr. Ghomeshi has a right to express his opinions, we acknowledge our failures in the presentation and editing of his story. A more inclusive editorial discussion should have taken place about whether to publish the article, and the article should have made clear the serious nature and number of allegations against Mr. Ghomeshi. A summary of those allegations has been added in an editorial note to the online version of the article at nybooks.com. Below is a representative sample of the letters we have received. —The Editorial Staff To the Editors: It took me exactly twelve minutes to read the Jian Ghomeshi article…

Song in a Weary Throat: Memoir of an American Pilgrimage by Pauli Murray, with an introduction by Patricia Bell-Scott. Liveright, 587 pp., $22.95 (paper) Pauli Murray’s autobiography, Song in a Weary Throat, first appeared in 1987, two years after her death. A young law professor, Pat Williams—today better known as the distinguished legal scholar, Nation columnist, and Mac-Arthur “genius award” winner Patricia Williams—reviewed it respectfully for The New York Times. Yet she found Murray’s hopefulness in the face of her narrative of racism and injustice “to contain a certain pathos.” “The militance of my generational perspective,” Williams wrote, ran “counter to the persistent gentlewomanliness” of Murray’s tone and message. Murray’s day seemed to have passed. In The Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley appeared awestruck, yet puzzled by the story of a…

A Life of My Own by Claire Tomalin. Penguin, 334 pp., $27.00 Asked in 2011 if there might be a memoir in her future, Claire Tomalin, the author of sterling biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Samuel Pepys, and Charles Dickens, among others, demurred. She had lived for too long through her subjects. She retained little sense of herself. “I know it sounds pathetic,” she told her interviewer, “but I don’t know who I am.” It stood to reason. The biographer has devoted years to thinking with someone else’s mind. While she has lived any number of lives she has traveled each time as a stowaway. Better than most, she knows that we are strangers to ourselves, omniscient only when it comes to others. Seven years later Tomalin has reconsidered.…

They told us a story about the devil,mala cosa, small in stature with a beardwhose face they could never see clearlywho traveled from house to housewith a flaming piece of wood, who stolewhomever he wanted and, with a flint,gave them three incisions one palmo wideand two long in the sides, then pulledout their entrails, cut off a piece to throwinto the fire, made three cutsin the arm, the second in the sangraduraobverse to the elbow, dislocated it beforesetting everything back in place, handstouching the wounds and saying they were healedSometimes he would appear at their dances,in costume, dressed as a woman or a man,and whenever he wanted to he picked upthe buhío house, lifted it into the air,then dropped it with a crashThe food they offered himhe never ate, and…

Sometimes the van was the color of the field.I was small then, barely eleven and every daythat summer taller, more sure of itself than I.The silver grass of the lawn, uncut, used to waitfor the moon to pass, sitting out by the wallto tilt up its face as if laughing, to shake out its long hair.No one could say I lacked imagination: the ferns wereall the time wagging spindly, elderly fingers at me. Once, a man caught my eye in the village:his were not the color of the van or the field.He said nothing to me and I hoarded it, that nothing,hoard it still, nights the wind blows from the eastwith its city talk aglitter like fine rain in headlights. Sometimes I want to tell it this way but the…

A Terrible Country by Keith Gessen. Viking, 338 pp., $26.00 According to the familiar adage, there are only two stories: a man goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town. It’s a catchy premise that falls apart when measured against one’s experience of literature. Yet I found myself recalling it after reading Keith Gessen’s excellent new novel, A Terrible Country. What if those two plots were in fact successive chapters in a single story? A man (or woman) goes on a journey and becomes the stranger in town. Isn’t that what happens in the novel of immigration? A Terrible Country gives us this narrative arc—and plenty more—to consider. It inspires us to reflect on the indelible stamp that each historical era leaves on its survivors; the harrowing or…

The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison “Promiscuous” Women by Scott Wasserman Stern. Beacon, 356 pp., $28.95 There are currently at least 2.3 million people detained and confined in the United States and its territories. Many thousands are held without having committed a crime, including nearly 11,000 children locked away for “technical violations” or “status offenses” such as running away or skipping school. And since at least 1978, the number of women and girls removed from society and locked up for extended periods of time has been growing at more than double the rate of men and boys. According to The Trials of Nina Mc-Call: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison “Promiscuous” Women, a new book by the law student…

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester. Harper, 395 pp., $29.99 Scientists and engineers recognize an elusive but profound difference between precision and accuracy. The two qualities often go hand in hand, of course, but precision involves an ideal of meticulousness and consistency, while accuracy implies real-world truth. When a sharpshooter fires at a target, if the bullets strike close together—clustered, rather than spread out—that is precise shooting. But the shots are only accurate if they hit the bull’s eye. A clock is precise when it marks the seconds exactly and unvaryingly but may still be inaccurate if it shows the wrong time. Perversely, we sometimes value precision at the expense of accuracy. Simon Winchester, whose The Perfectionists ventures a history of this abstract concept,…

TWELVE WINTERS PRESS P.O. Box 414, Sherman, IL 62684-0414 xii. winters@gmail.com; www.twelvewinters.com MRS. SAVILLE by Ted Morrissey On the bicentennial of the publication of Frankenstein, Margaret Saville is finally given voice. “A fantastically chilling psychodrama intelligently woven into literary history.”—Kirkus Reviews 9780998705798 • Paper, $14.00 248 Pages • Literary Fiction Available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powell’s, Waterstones, and Foyles Author’s website: www.tedmorrissey.com. HATHAWAY BARRY (415) 663-1229 BOY A Woman Listening to Men and Boys by Hathaway Barry A collection of vulnerable interviews of men (age 9-94 years), by a woman, about what it means to be male in today’s world. “…as astonishing as it is moving.”—Kirkus Review 9780692592540 • Paper, $19.95 356 Pages • Nonfiction/Gender Studies Available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble Author’s website: www.listeningtomen.com. BOSKY FLAME PRESS www.boskyflamepress.com…