Innholdsfortegnelse for December 20, 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. T. H. BREEN ’s new book, Revolution: A History of American Independence, will be published next September. PETER BROWN is the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton. His books include Augustine of Hippo: A Biography and, most recently, Treasure in Heaven: The Holy Poor in Early Christianity. ANNE CARSON is a poet who was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek, sometimes at NYU. Her most recent collection of prose and poetry is Float. ANNE DIEBEL works as a private investigator in New York. She was formerly the Robert L. Belknap Faculty Fellow at Columbia. TIM FLANNERY ’s next…

Almost Nothing: The 20th-Century Art and Life of Józef Czapski by Eric Karpeles. New York Review Books, 492 pp., $19.95 (paper) Inhuman Land: Searching for the Truth in Soviet Russia, 1941–1942 by Józef Czapski, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and with an introduction by Timothy Snyder. New York Review Books, 447 pp., $19.95 Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp by Józef Czapski, translated from the French and with an introduction by Eric Karpeles. New York Review Books, 90 pp., $15.95 (paper) Eric Karpeles, a painter and an impassioned reader of Proust—he is the author of Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to In Search of Lost Time (2008)—had never even heard of Józef Czapski until a friend sent him a slim volume in French,…

The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing by Merve Emre. Doubleday, 307 pp., $27.95 “Personality is never general; it is always particular,” wrote Gordon Allport, a Harvard psychologist, in 1938. While “personality” once meant merely personhood, since the late eighteenth century it has referred to the qualities that make a person distinctive. Within the field of psychology, the term was initially used of abnormal clinical phenomena, such as the “alternating” and “double” personality William James discussed in The Principles of Psychology or the “dissociation of personality” that Morton Prince examined in his 1906 book of that name. But in the 1920s and 1930s, in part through Allport’s work, personality— including the “normal” kind—became a central concern of psychological research, with journals, textbooks, courses,…

Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard by Cynthia L. Haven. Michigan State University Press, 317 pp., $29.95 (paper) Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture by René Girard, with Pierpaolo Antonella and João Cesar de Castro Rocha. Bloomsbury, 202 pp., $20.95 (paper) Deceit, Desire, and the Novel by René Girard, translated from the French by Yvonne Freccero. Johns Hopkins University Press (1965) Violence and the Sacred by René Girard, translated from the French by Patrick Gregory. Johns Hopkins University Press (1977) Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World by René Girard, translated from the French by Stephen Bonn and Michael Metteer. Stanford University Press (1987) A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare by René Girard. Oxford University Press (1991) Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît…

Van Gogh and Japan by Louis van Tilborgh, Nienke Bakker, Cornelia Homburg, Tsukasa Kōdera, and Chris Uhlenbeck, with a contribution by Claire Guitton. Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum/Sapporo: Hokkaidō Shimbun Press/Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 200 pp., $45.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) Japan’s Love for Impressionism: From Monet to Renoir edited by the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany. Prestel, 255 pp., $60.00 When Vincent van Gogh made his momentous decision to leave Paris behind and move to Arles in February 1888, he was determined, at age thirty-four, to remake his art, his personal relationships, and himself, body and soul. Central to this midlife dream of self-transformation was the artist’s surprising conviction that Provence was just like—or as he expressed it, was “the equivalent of”—Japan. As he neared his…

THAT OUR AFFECTIONS CARRY THEMSELVES BEYOND US It couldn’t be more obvious: I need better banter. Breezier things to say between the things I say, or beneath them, the carrier wave or groundswell that tells you when to laugh or leave. Be forewarned, I was a profoundly lonely child. That’s the context of every joke, like the one about how I became a student of irony at the very moment my mother was washing my mouth out with soap for flipping my brother the bird, and I, mouth filled with that sensation that was not a flavor—soap was different then, and never named after food—was thinking, Shouldn’t she be washing my hand? This is a good place to laugh. Take your time. Not long after that she left. I didn’t…

1937Beckett gotstabbed bypliant spearof a stranger,one Paris night.Just missedthe lungs. He,lean warrior,spent twoweeks in hospital,descended upon byall the Joyces(James, Nora, Lucia)and some Becketts(mother, brother)and Suzanne,the girlfriend nobodyknew about yet(not even Sam),whom he would marryfifty years hencewith a flicker of shynessstill in his eyes—no,I made that up. Butwhat he does say,of the twoancient (Endgame) enemies:“that’s Suzanne and me!”Now don’t you wonderwhat remarks passedfrom Suzanne to Luciaor mother to Clovleaning over the bedin that battle-bright room?Well, it isn’t bright(battle) andno one isalive who remembers.Everything I can tell youabout that room orthose lavish soulsis just my ownfear of death blowing around on the floorboards.Blowing sand around.You know,in the old days,I, a poet,would lean backin my saddle,recite a poemof sublime sense,fill you with ferocity,then togetherwe’d ride offover the black sand,past moonlit ruins,to our destination,with…

Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce by Colm Tóibín. Scribner, 253 pp., $26.00 More than twenty years ago, writing about Roy Foster’s Modern Ireland, Colm Tóibín recalled what it was like to study history in Ireland in the 1970s—to be on the cusp of the revisionist wave, questioning all the old narratives. “Imagine if Irish history were pure fiction,” he wrote, “how free and happy we could be! It seemed at that time a most subversive idea, a new way of killing your father, starting from scratch, creating a new self.” The burden of having relatives has been a constant theme of Tóibín’s stories, essays, and reviews: “A Priest in the Family,” “How to Be a Wife,” “The Brother Problem,” “The Importance of Aunts,”…

The Eerdmans Encyclopedia of Early Christian Art and Archaeology edited by Paul Corby Finney. Eerdmans, three volumes, 1,532 pp., $495.00 Hagia Sophia and the Byzantine Aesthetic Experience by Nadine Schibille. Ashgate, 282 pp., $130.00 The two massive volumes of The Eerdmans Encyclopedia of Early Christian Art and Archaeology, each over seven hundred pages long, offer a comprehensive survey of the visual and material aspects of Christianity in its first centuries—roughly from 200 to 600. These dates do not include the earliest Christian communities, for it is only around the year 200 that recognizably Christian objects first appeared. By 312, with the conversion of Constantine, we are already dealing with a fully visible religion, in the grip of the problems raised by its own success. Only a generation or so ago,…

Listening to Bach: The Mass in B Minor and the Christmas Oratorio by Daniel R. Melamed. Oxford University Press, 149 pp., $29.95 Around 1730 Johann Sebastian Bach began to recycle his earlier works in a major way. He was in his mid-forties at the time, and he had composed hundreds of masterful keyboard, instrumental, and vocal pieces, including at least three annual cycles of approximately sixty cantatas each for worship services in Leipzig, where he was serving as St. Thomas Cantor and town music director. Bach was at the peak of his creative powers. Yet for some reason, instead of sitting down and writing original music, he turned increasingly to old compositions, pulling them off the shelf and using their contents as the basis for new works. The roots of…

RAF: The Birth of the World’s First Air Force by Richard Overy. Norton, 150 pp., $22.95 Aerial Warfare: The Battle for the Skies by Frank Ledwidge. Oxford University Press, 184 pp., $18.95 A whole great city is ablaze. After two nights of intensive bombing with high explosives and incendiaries, several square miles burn for hours at hundreds of degrees Centigrade, an inferno consuming every living creature. At least 40,000 civilians—mostly women or girls, more than 10,000 of them children—die awful deaths. This year marks the centenary of the founding of the Royal Air Force, commemorated by a flyby over Buckingham Palace of aircraft from Spitfires to F-35 Lightnings. The RAF was the first independent air force created by any country—the United States Air Force didn’t become a separate service until…

THE NUCLEAR OPTION To the Editors: In your article “A Very Grim Forecast” [NYR, November 22] about global warming you state that vast quantities of renewable technology have been deployed in China and India. However, you fail to mention that the “vast fleet” of new Chinese electric buses will be powered by electricity generated by nuclear power plants. Fact check: China is now in the process of building nineteen new commercial nuclear power plants, which will exceed the United States’ nuclear electric-generating capacity when completed. Both India and Russia are in the process of building five each. China’s main goals are to achieve energy independence along with reducing the terrible atmospheric pollution that the country now suffers. Unfortunately, despite nuclear power’s excellent safety record, security, and climatic benefits, here in…

Last February the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held its convention in Washington, D.C. This annual gathering is a kind of right-wing Davos where insiders and wannabes come to see what’s new. The opening speaker, not so new, was Vice President Mike Pence. The next speaker, very new, was a stylish Frenchwoman still in her twenties named Marion Maréchal-Le Pen. Marion, as she is widely called in France, is a granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the far-right National Front party, and a niece of Marine Le Pen, its current president. The French first encountered Marion as a child, beaming in her grandfather’s arms in his campaign posters (see illustration on page 46), and she has never disappeared from the public scene. In 2012, at the age of…

René Girard (1923–2015) was one of the last of that race of Titans who dominated the human sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with their grand, synthetic theories about history, society, psychology, and aesthetics. That race has since given way to a more cautious breed of “re searchers” who prefer to look at things up close, to see their fine grain rather than their larger patterns. Yet the times certainly seem to attest to the enduring relevance of Girard’s thought to our social and political realities. Not only are his ideas about mimetic desire and human violence as far-reaching as Marx’s theories of political economy or Freud’s claims about the Oedipus complex, but the explosion of social media, the resurgence of populism, and the increasing virulence of reciprocal violence…

Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson by Gordon S. Wood. Penguin, 502 pp., $35.00; $18.00 (paper) In the contest with Thomas Jefferson for popularity, John Adams had no chance. The fault was almost entirely his own. Even friends found Adams’s irascibility, vanity, and pomposity embarrassing. Enemies had far worse things to say about the second president. During the run-up to the bitterly fought election of 1800, one of Adams’s detractors wondered whether future historians would “ask why the United States degrades themselves to the choice of a wretch whose soul came blasted from the hand of nature, of a wretch that has neither the science of a magistrate, the politeness of a courtier, nor the courage of a man.” Adams admitted that his problems in communicating with the public…

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Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film by Alan K. Rode. University Press of Kentucky, 681 pp., $50.00 We’ll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie by Noah Isenberg. Norton, 334 pp., $27.95; $17.95 (paper) We used to think we knew what a film director was. First, it was someone who hardly existed; then, a mighty egotist; later a professional in charge of a factory product. Next, he or she was raised to the status of auteur, artist, or genius. And now …well, directors have to be all things. So it’s valuable to note the insouciant flexibility of Michael Curtiz, the Captain Renault (that’s Claude Rains in Casablanca) of movie directors. Six writers were paid for script work on Casablanca, and in total they received…