Innholdsfortegnelse for January 17, 2019 i The New York Review of Books

DAVID A. BELL teaches history at Princeton and is currently the John and Constance Birkelund Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center. His recent books include Shadows of Revolution: Reflections on France, Past and Present and, with Anthony Grafton, The West: A New History. JULIAN BELL is a painter based in Lewes, England. He is the author of What Is Painting? MARIANNE BORUCH is the author of The Little Death of Self: Nine Essays Toward Poetry. Her latest book of poems is Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing; her tenth collection, The Anti-Grief, will be published later this year. 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…

George Balanchine could never quite let go of Prodigal Son. He made the ballet in 1929 in Paris several years after emigrating from Soviet Russia; he last worked on it in New York, a few years before his death. Along the way, it died many deaths in his mind. He told Lincoln Kirstein in 1933 that it was already outmoded and that the final scene with the son “on his knees” crawling toward his father was an “old trick” and would have to be rethought (it never was). In 1950 he revived the ballet for Jerome Robbins largely intact, and a decade later he staged it again with Edward Villella in the lead role, although Villella admitted that Balanchine’s heart didn’t seem in it. When Villella later wanted to perform…

Perlmutter Gallery 60 Garner Road, Averill Park, NY 12018, I-90 exit #8; (518) 674-8711; Website: perlmuttergallery.com; Email: info@perlmuttergallery.com. “Homage to John Singer Sargent” by Jenness Cortez is an acrylic on panel, 24 by 18 inches. It honors “The Daughters of Edward D. Boit” and Paul Manship’s bronze “Atlanta.” In her work Jenness Cortez plays author, architect, visual journalist, art historian, curator and pundit to help open our eyes to what we might otherwise have taken for granted. While challenging the viewers’ intellectual curiosity and celebrating the sheer pleasure of beautiful painting, Cortez underscores a classic paradox of realism: the painting as a “window” into an imagined space, and as a physical object; both a meta-physical presence and a material entity. Open by appointment only. Alexandre Gallery 724 Fifth Avenue, 4th Floor, New…

This essay is adapted from a new afterword to the paperback edition of The Line Becomes a River by Francisco Cantú, to be published by Riverhead in February. In the summer of 2018, as the press began to cover stories of family separation following the implementation of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, Americans were forced to grapple with the human cost of border enforcement at a national level. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the greatest outcry came in response to photographs that distilled the policy’s cruelty into images of children crying at the feet of armed border guards and sleeping on bare floors inside cages—soon after their viral circulation, the president was forced to issue an executive order reversing the practice of separating families. That reversal, we have learned in recent…

Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart. Random House, 338 pp., $28.00 The rambunctious satires of Gary Shteyngart have previously had one foot rooting around the real-life New York City, the other foot dug into the rubble and riches of post-Soviet republics or the oddly similar rubble and riches of an imaginary dystopian New York. In The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, his first novel, he describes Vladimir Girshkin on his twenty-fifth birthday as divided almost evenly between there and here: “He had lived in Russia for twelve years, and then there were the thirteen years spent here. That was his life—it added up.” Over the course of the novel, Vladimir seeks love and success in both worlds, from the smooth, pious liberality of his girlfriend’s Upper East Side parents to the cheerful greed…

Diaries, 1779–1821 Diaries, 1821–1848 by John Quincy Adams, edited by David Waldstreicher. Library of America, 2 volumes, 1,488 pp., $75.00 When Henry Adams defined politics as “the systematic organization of hatreds,” he knew what he was talking about. Politics ran in the family. His great-grandfather John Adams, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the second president of the United States, hated the French Revolution and considered the third president, Thomas Jefferson, the next thing to an anarchist. Henry’s father, Charles Francis Adams, served as Abraham Lincoln’s ambassador to Britain when sectional hatred in the United States burst out into civil war. But it was Henry’s grandfather John Quincy Adams, born in 1767, who held more high federal offices not only than anyone in the family but more than…

NOT TO WORRY To the Editors: Stephen Greenblatt [“Damn It All,” NYR, December 20, 2018] contrasts to ill effect Catholic punishment in the afterlife with that of what he alleges is the rabbinic version. According to him, “For the ancient rabbis” the opposite of heaven “was not a place of torture; it was more like a state of depression.” How benign. The truth is something else, however. The Babylonian Talmud has the destroyer of the Jerusalem Temple, Roman general Titus, burned to ashes, reconstituted, and burned again, forever. The ancient rabbis place Jesus in a cauldron boiling with hot excrement for eternity (BT Gittin 57a). Not a place of torture? Michael Hoffman Coeur d’Alene, Idaho Stephen Greenblatt replies: In their complex, rich textual tradition, the Jews, like the Christians and the…

Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life by Diarmaid MacCulloch. Viking, 728 pp., $40.00 “Thomas Cromwell …Thomas Cromwell? I thought his name was Oliver!” This was the initial reaction of a young Harvard graduate in 1897 to the topic assigned to him for his B. Litt. thesis by Oxford’s Regius Professor of Modern History, Frederick York Powell.1 Over a century later, the relative fame of the two Cromwells has, at least temporarily, been reversed. The brilliance of Hilary Mantel’s novels Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012), with a third, The Mirror and the Light, promised for next year, and the dazzling success of their adaptations to stage and television have made the name of Henry VIII’s minister better known than that of the Lord Protector. After recovering from his…

Those Poor Clares must wonder why the racket louder than usual, three-euros-a-poptourists queuing up outside,weekends the convent on pause. It’s the noise in their heads, the old nunmight say with what’s leftin her head, the girlhood part: war, a low-flying plane, the loud hoarse agony of cows shattered from above into petal byred petal, garish sprays in grassnorth of these olive groves. (Museum of Silence as secret orscent, day of misjudgment,Italy, the baffling website, our stop-start train to Fara Sabina.) Quiet is what’s after, the old nuntells the young nun who hasan edge, that eye thing, she has a look. This too I invent: Is it vanity or justan old woman in wonder, going onso vividly the long ago boy in that cockpit can’t even have a thought, he’s so…

Hey, Marfa by Jeffrey Yang, with paintings and drawings by Rackstraw Downes. Graywolf, 151 pp., $20.00 (paper) Baby, I Don’t Care by Chelsey Minnis. Wave, 249 pp., $18.00 (paper) Is free verse dead? It has been obvious for some time that the unrhymed, unmetered, anecdotal, or monological personal utterance, distinguished by something known as “voice” (as in “finding your voice”) has gone stale; that some esteemed lyric poets, like Terrance Hayes or Natasha Trethewey, have turned back to time-honored forms (from sonnets to villanelles to blues stanzas), where rules were made to be bent; while a great many others have gravitated toward something loosely known as “the poetic project” or “project book,” in which a governing principle (a subject, a trope) commands an array of forms, from prose poems to…

Armenia! an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, September 22, 2018–January 13, 2019 Armenia: Art, Religion, and Trade in the Middle Ages Catalog of the exhibition edited by Helen C. Evans. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 351 pp., $65.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) Over the past two decades, Helen Evans, as curator of Byzantine art, has organized a series of stunning exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They have revealed rich worlds unlike our own, yet bound to us by a family resemblance, as a result of a common origin in the Mediterranean societies of Late Antiquity. In these exhibitions Evans has presented the great alternative to the Catholic West: the Christian Orthodox world of Byzantium, the Balkans, and Russia. She has also reinterpreted the…

GREENLEAF BOOK GROUP PO Box 91869, Austin, TX 78709 (512) 891-6100; www.greenleafbookgroup.com THE RELUCTANT HEALER by Andrew Himmel An attorney torn between evidence of his spiritual healing ability and his skepticism of alternative views. “The author’s sharply etched characters and smart, observant prose shrewdly capture the ways people think and talk about religious and philosophical issues.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) 9781626345300 • Paper, $16.95 9781626345317 • eBook, $7.99 312 Pages • Fiction • Available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble Author’s information: www.facebook.com/andrew.himmel; @andrewhimmel; www.kirkusreviews.com. KÖEHLERBOOKS 210 60th St., Virginia Beach, VA 23451; (800) 435-4811 www.koehlerbooks.com; info@koehlerbooks.com NEVER AGAIN by Harvey A. Schwartz A Holocaust in the United States? In Never Again, civil rights attorney Harvey Schwartz presents “a methodical, convincing story of political upheaval” (Kirkus Reviews) leading to just this…