Innholdsfortegnelse for February 7, 2019 i The New York Review of Books

DAVID COLE is the National Legal Director of the ACLU and the Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at the Georgetown University Law Center. His most recent book is Engines of Liberty: How Citizen Movements Succeed. CARL ELLIOTT is a Professor at the University of Minnesota and the recipient of a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award. He is working on a book about whistleblowers and unethical medical research. HOWARD W. FRENCH is a Professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and was for many years a New York Times correspondent. His latest book is Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power. CHARLES GLASS is a former ABC News Chief…

Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration and Rivalry an exhibition at the Louvre, Paris, February 20–May 22, 2017; the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, June 17–September 17, 2017; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., October 22, 2017–January 21, 2018. Catalog of the exhibition by Adriaan E. Waiboer with Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., Blaise Ducos, and others. Yale University Press in association with the National Gallery of Ireland, the National Gallery of Art, and the Louvre, 304 pp., $60.00; $35.00 (paper) On a May morning in 1921 Marcel Proust ventured from his bed, where he spent most of his time, to see an exhibition of Dutch painters at the Jeu de Paume. Organized to demonstrate the modern sensibilities of certain old masters, it had been lavishly praised, including…

A collection of notable art and exhibitions from around the world. If you would like to know more about the listing, please contact gallery@nybooks.com or (212) 293-1630. Marlborough Graphics, 40 West 57th Street, 2nd floor, New York 10019; (212) 541-4900; graphics@marlboroughgallery.com Monday-Saturday 10-6 Shepherd/W&K Galleries, 58 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10075; (212) 861-4050; ShepherdNY@aol.com; www.Shepherdgallery.com MASTER DRAWINGS NEW YORK 2019 January 25th through February 16th Artists include: Cézanne Kubin Feininger Matisse Grosz Music Kirchner Rohlfs Klimt Schiele Kokoschka de Staël The exhibition can also be viewed on our website: www.shepherdgallery.com. Alexandre Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10019 (212) 755-2828; inquiries@alexandregallery.com; www.alexandregallery.com Lois Dodd: Flashings Extended through February 9 Catalogue available with essay by Faye Hirsch, author of the recent Lund Humphries monograph on the…

undone. As here these words cannot be taken back into the windless wideunsaid. No. These changes to the living skin of silence, there where your dis-appearance into nonlife, into no-longer-ever-again-in-life—no—no longer increation, no, no more of your kind—changes silence to what can I call it—ex- tinction—expiration—this new forever—the small boy on the boat in the dark says—says Iwas holding you when we got on the boat in the deep night—says I can still feelyou now I feel you—others are pressed against me but this weight in the dark it isyou—I feel for your legs your feet—are you you or are these the pressings of others—others are not me—once in a while a flashlight but so brief we cannotbe seen. Then it occurs. It cannot be. And never again arrives—is it…

ARGUING AFFIRMATIVE ACTION To the Editors: A rule against racial discrimination might prevent such discrimination from recurring, but it will not eradicate and may even perpetuate the effects of the discrimination that had already occurred, sometimes over generations, or as in the case of blacks, for centuries. Writing in the December 6, 2018, issue of The New York Review, Noah Feldman defends race-based affirmative action as a means of avoiding or lessening the effects of a history of racial discrimination, but he takes a far too narrow, mostly individualistic conception of what those effects might be. Acknowledging the nation’s long history of racial discrimination, Feldman urges university admissions officers to focus on the “ongoing effects on current applicants” of such historical practices. He charges admissions officers with the near-impossible task…

Empire in Retreat: The Past, Present, and Future of the United States by Victor Bulmer-Thomas. Yale University Press, 459 pp., $32.50 Republic in Peril: American Empire and the Liberal Tradition by David C. Hendrickson. Oxford University Press, 287 pp., $34.95 It is hard to give up something you claim you never had. That is the difficulty Americans face with respect to their country’s empire. Since the era of Theodore Roosevelt, politicians, journalists, and even some historians have deployed euphemisms—“expansionism,” “the large policy,” “internationalism,” “global leadership”—to disguise America’s imperial ambitions. According to the exceptionalist creed embraced by both political parties and most of the press, imperialism was a European venture that involved seizing territories, extracting their resources, and dominating their (invariably dark-skinned) populations. Americans, we have been told, do things differently:…

Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography by Robert Irwin. Princeton University Press, 243 pp., $29.95 Since the nineteenth century, when the Muqaddima (Prolegomena)—Ibn Khaldun’s immense introduction to world history—appeared in French and English translations, the fourteenth-century Arab historian has been widely admired in the West for his perspicacious theorizing about history, politics, economics, society, and religion. The most celebrated of Ibn Khaldun’s ideas, one that appealed especially to Western readers, was based on the practical knowledge of North African politics he had acquired while working for a variety of rulers. “Leadership,” he wrote, “exists through superiority, and superiority only through “‘asabiyya”—an Arabic word meaning “group-feeling,” “social solidarity,” or “clannism” that appears more than five hundred times in his text. The origins of ‘asabiyya lie in desert conditions, where the solidarity of…

The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela edited by Sahm Venter, with a foreword by Zamaswazi Dlamini-Mandela. Liveright, 620 pp., $35.00 In a speech he gave after his release from prison in 1990, Nelson Mandela described the triumph of the South African anti-apartheid struggle he had done so much to lead. “We won peace standing on our feet, not kneeling on our knees,” he proclaimed with evident pride. Mandela had joined the African National Congress in 1943, and when it was outlawed by the South African government in 1960 (weeks after the Sharpeville Massacre killed some seventy protesters near Johannesburg), he cofounded its armed militant wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). (MK began a campaign of bombings against power facilities and government posts that, prior to Mandela’s imprisonment, avoided human targets.) In…

The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World by Sarah Weinman. Ecco, 306 pp., $27.99 Rust & Stardust by T. Greenwood. St. Martin’s, 356 pp., $26.99 “Would you be interested in publishing a timebomb that I have just finished putting together?” Vladimir Nabokov asked James Laughlin, the publisher of New Directions, in February 1954. He had finally completed Lolita, after five years of fitful writing amid other pesky obligations. (“I am sick of teaching, I am sick of teaching, I am sick of teaching,” he’d complained to Edmund Wilson a few months earlier.) Laughlin wasn’t interested. Neither was anyone at Viking or Farrar, Straus. Editors at Simon and Schuster called the manuscript “sheer pornography.” Katharine White, Nabokov’s editor at The New Yorker, said…