Innholdsfortegnelse for November 8 - 2018 i The New York Review of Books

DAVID BROMWICH is Sterling Professor of English at Yale. His recent books include The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke and Moral Imagination, a collection of essays. ROBYN CRESWELL is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale. His book City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut will be published this fall. SUSAN DUNN, the Massachusetts Professor of Humanities at Williams, is the author of 1940: FDR, Willkie, Lindbergh, Hitler—the Election Amid the Storm. Her latest book is A Blueprint for War: FDR and the Hundred Days that Mobilized America. MARK FORD’s fourth collection of poetry, Enter, Fleeing, was published earlier this year. ANNETTE GORDON-REED is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School and Professor of History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard. She…

Immortal soul, I did not believe in you. Against the age’s preference, I wanted for your markings and historythe markings and history of, say, a small zebra— slightly implausible, far from unique, one visible pelt meant to disappear into the crowded many, one dark stripe alive among the crowded many. You seemed to want to go on separately.You seemed to want elsewhere, and more. I wanted less. One moment to pausewhile setting kibble out in a dish for the calico catwho might or might notbe inside the box when it finally opens. One goldfinch holding the whole Mesozoic discovery, hunting for seeds and hungry, escaping, a few moments longer, the cat also hungry. This dilemma cannot be solved, and will be. My immortal soul, perhaps you went into an Archelon…

Nancy Pelosi believes she has one more great task left in her long career—saving American democracy. If, as expected, the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives on November 6, Pelosi may become the first Speaker to regain the position in more than six decades (the legendary Sam Rayburn did it in 1955). And at what a moment: Pelosi and the House Democrats believe—and a huge number of voters agree—that they are all that stands between the future of the republic and the broad-based assault on democratic values led by Donald Trump, one of the few people in Washington who’s demonized even more than Pelosi is. Despite her promises to embrace a positive agenda from day one of the new Congress, Pelosi (who has said she might have retired…

The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox by Vanda Krefft. Harper, 927 pp., $40.00 20th Century Fox21st Century FoxFox Entertainment GroupFox News ChannelFox Broadcasting CompanyFox MovietoneFox MusicFoxtel … Yes, but who or what was Fox? We know a lot about such giants of the early film business as Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, Adolph Zukor, Cecil B. DeMille, D.W. Griffith, Mack Sennett. But William Fox? Yet William Fox, according to Vanda Krefft in an enormous recent biography called The Man Who Made the Movies, was … the man who made the movies. And if her hyperbole is counterproductive, as hyperbole tends to be, she does make a strong case for Fox’s crucial contribution to how the movies as we know them happened,…

Reversing Roe a documentary film directed and produced by Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg It is impossible to understand American politics of the past half-century without taking abortion into account. The Brett Kavanaugh charade most recently, the machinations of the Republican Party more generally, and the infectious fundamentalism creeping into everyday life: all begin with abortion. Other issues may have been as divisive—civil rights comes to mind—but none has been as definitional. These days, the litmus test for Republicans running for political office or nominated to the judiciary is opposition to abortion. On the Democratic side, it is almost equally crucial to be prochoice. Yet as the Netflix documentary Reversing Roe ably shows, this was not always the case. Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision establishing a woman’s constitutional right…

Nothing to write home about.No home to write home to.Oh boohoo! I’ve never heardAnything so disgustingly absurd.The snow is falling crazily outside the window. Now it’s spring.Still cold but the little birds this morning began to sing.But the fucking pigeons are a constant curse.Disgusting and absurd moans of human sexual intercourseOn the ledge outside my study window. I’m leaping without wings, Though I wouldn’t mind having wings, To you.I’m leaping out my window to you.Right through the screen of my computer into Women don’t like us any moreAnd hold meeting after meeting over what to do.Surf’s up! They ride the big wave.They’re not why the planet may be doomed. Picture a scene right out of Disney Classics of giant saguaro cactuses, Enormous nude green hairless tubes with armsThat look like…

Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward. Simon and Schuster, 420 pp., $30.00 The New York Times columnist Russell Baker once described the lot of the Washington reporter as the weary life of an ink-stained wretch condemned to “wear out his hams sitting in marble corridors waiting for important people to lie to him.” Bob Woodward doesn’t have to wait in marble corridors. Ever since he and his Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein wrote the best book yet published on the fall of a president—The Final Days, in which a drunken and half-mad Nixon destroys himself, raging like a tinhorn Lear—Woodward has been a singular force in American journalism. His clout isn’t precisely the equivalent of subpoena power, and it doesn’t exactly constitute a protection racket, but it…

Lyman Allyn Art Museum, 625 Williams Street, New London, CT 06320; (860) 443-2545; www.lymanallyn.org. American Visionary: John F. Kennedy’s Life and Times (November 2– February 24) features 77 photographs that celebrate the scope of John F. Kennedy’s dynamic life and career. Kennedy’s presidency coincided with the golden age of American photojournalism, and he was photographed more than any other president. American Visionary includes iconic photographs as well as rarely seen images, covering Kennedy’s first run for Congress, his 1953 marriage to Jacqueline Bouvier, the process of running for President in 1960, and life in the White House, to his 1963 assassination in Dallas. John Davis Gallery, 362 1/2 Warren Street Hudson, NY 12534. (518) 828-5907; art@johndavisgallery.com; Thurs-Mondays, 11–5PM. Pamela Cardwell, Painting, November 10–December 2nd. "I build my oil paintings with…

1 Giuseppe Penone: The Inner Life of Forms is a new examination of the artist’s more-than-forty-year career, revealing what constitutes sculpture through the interplay between the human body, nature, and art. Four new essays by Tim Ingold, Rémi Labrusse, Emily Braun, and Salvatore Settis and a conversation between the artist and the book’s editor, Carlos Basualdo, appear in one volume, while twelve insightful texts by Daniela Lancioni, each an independent booklet, investigate the main typologies that constitute the work’s organizing principles. 13 paperbacks in box, 490 pages, $200. Limited edition with etching: edition of 50, $5000 USD; edition of 200, $2500 USD Related Events: Penone and Basualdo will discuss the monograph at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Friday, November 9, at 6pm; and at the Greene Space, New York,…

These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore. Norton, 932 pp., $39.95 Jill Lepore has achieved singular prominence as an American historian. The David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard, she has written eleven books over the last twenty years, among them a Bancroft Prize winner and finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Since 2005, she has regularly contributed essays and reviews to The New Yorker, where she is a staff writer. More successfully than any other American historian of her generation, she has gained a wide general readership without compromising her academic standing. Lepore’s work for The New Yorker has allowed her to develop an engaging narrative style that relies heavily on exact detail and clever metaphors. Her talents…

ABBOTT’S ABSENCE To the Editors: In her review of Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography [NYR, May 10], Regina Marler claims that Abbott does not appear in Man Ray’s autobiography, Self-Portrait (1963), and that the omission was, according to Abbott, “rather dirty,” even “bitchy.” But on page 92, she does appear, and in a very positive light. He describes meeting a young sculptor in a New York café who agreed to model for him at a time when he was just beginning his interest in portrait photography. She also offered to teach him to dance: And she did, very easily. There was nothing to it. I had a sense of rhythm, she said—that was all one needed. I was elated—all the arts that had seemed beyond me were now within…