Innholdsfortegnelse for February 21, 2019 i The New York Review of Books

The New York Review of Books|February 21, 2019

CONTRIBUTORS

CHRISTOPHER BEHA is the Executive Editor of Harper’s. His new novel, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, will be published next year. RICHARD BERNSTEIN was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and the Beijing Bureau Chief for Time. His latest book is China 1945: Mao’s Revolution and America’s Fateful Choice. ELAINE BLAIR is a regular contributor to The New York Review. 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. MERVE EMRE is Associate Professor of English Literature at Oxford and a Fellow of Worcester College. Her latest book is The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing. CAROLINE…

2 min

The New York Review of Books|February 21, 2019

The Dems Take Charge

I doubt that it was even noticed much beyond Washington, but a meeting on January 10 between Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and members of the House of Representatives gave a pretty good sense of how the next two years are likely to proceed, and how different they will be from the two years just past. Mnuchin was summoned to explain the administration’s actions regarding Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch who is a former associate of Paul Manafort and whom the FBI tried (apparently without success) to turn into an informant about ties between the Kremlin and the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. Last spring, the Treasury Department added three Deripaska-owned companies to its list of sanctioned foreign entities as punishment for Moscow’s interference in the 2016 election. In December the…

16 min

The New York Review of Books|February 21, 2019

‘Our Bodies Were Born into Hard Labor’

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh. Scribner, 290 pp., $26.00 As told in her ambitious and moving new memoir, Heartland, Sarah Smarsh’s life was ripped right out of a Bruce Springsteen song. “Spare Parts,” for one: “Bobby said he’d pull out Bobby stayed in/Janey had a baby it wasn’t any sin.” That’s pretty much the tale the author tells of her own conception, except that her father was Nick and her mother was seventeen-year-old Jeannie. On Halloween night, 1979, Nick and Jeannie are having sex in his parents’ basement when Jeannie says, “Don’t come in me!” Nick pays no attention. Like most Springsteen songs, the story ends in melancholy, or what Thomas Hardy, in Tess of the d’Urbervilles,…

14 min

The New York Review of Books|February 21, 2019

The Great Assimilationists

Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History by Yunte Huang. Liveright, 388 pp., $28.95 The Lives of Chang and Eng: Siam’s Twins in Nineteenth-Century America by Joseph Andrew Orser. University of North Carolina Press, 259 pp., $27.95 (paper) A “monster” debuts in a tent show and becomes an overnight sensation. Gawkers jostle for a viewing, journalists angle for takes; in the crowd, expressions of reverent fascination vie with cynical dismissals and racist prurience. The monster says little, but the multiplying chatter tells its own story about the country where, certainly not for the last time, a sui generis American star has been born. Chang and Eng, eighteen-year-old boys fresh from the Kingdom of Siam, faced their first audience in the ruins of Boston’s Exchange Coffee House…

17 min

The New York Review of Books|February 21, 2019

Cambodia: A Country for Rent

Not that it should have been a surprise, but China was the only major country that declined to join the international criticism of Cambodia’s prime minister, Hun Sen, as he ensured that he would run effectively unopposed in the parliamentary elections on July 29, 2018, turning them into a sham and largely dismantling what remained of Cambodia’s democratic structures. Among Hun Sen’s actions was the arrest and imprisonment on transparently ridiculous charges of Kem Sokha, the leader of the Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP), the only opposition party capable of challenging his rule. That occurred just after midnight on September 3, 2017, when some one hundred armed police descended on Kem’s Phnom Penh home and hauled him off to a rural prison near the Vietnamese border, where he remained for…

15 min

The New York Review of Books|February 21, 2019

The Star of the Silken Screen

Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, November 12, 2018–March 31, 2019; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, May 18–September 2, 2019; and the Art Institute of Chicago, October 20, 2019–January 26, 2020. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Donna De Salvo. Whitney Museum of American Art, 400 pp., $70.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) In the 1970s, impecunious and unknown, the only way I could get into the legendary Studio 54 was under the sponsorship, so to speak, of someone older and more established. The velvet rope parted only one time; it wasn’t the night Bianca Jagger rode across the dance floor on a white horse, but it was close. There was a balcony…

22 min

The New York Review of Books|February 21, 2019

Fool Britannia

Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain by Fintan O’Toole. London: Head of Zeus, 217 pp., £11.99 (paper) From the ill-conceived Brexit referendum onward, Britain’s governing class has embarrassed itself. The Remain campaign was complacent, the Leave campaign brazenly mendacious, and as soon as the result was known, most of the loudest advocates for severing ties with the European Union ran away like naughty schoolboys whose cricket ball had smashed a greenhouse window. Negotiations have revealed the pitiful intellectual limitations of a succession of blustering cabinet ministers, the leader of Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition doesn’t appear to want to oppose, and the prime minister has engineered her own humiliation by starting the countdown to Brexit without a plan that could command wide support, resulting in the heaviest parliamentary…

14 min

The New York Review of Books|February 21, 2019

The Fake Threat of Jewish Communism

A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism by Paul Hanebrink. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 353 pp., $29.95 One of the great merits of Paul Hanebrink’s A Specter Haunting Europe is its demonstration of how Europe’s most pervasive and powerful twentieth-century manifestation of anti-Semitic thought—the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism—emerged before the rise of National Socialism and has continued to have a curious life long after the Holocaust and the defeat of Nazi Germany. Hanebrink’s approach is not to repeat what he considers an error of the interwar era—the futile attempt to refute a myth on the basis of historical facts and statistical data. A small kernel of truth underpinned the stereotype of the Jewish Bolshevik: a number of well-known early Bolshevik leaders (Bela Kun, Leon Trotsky, Karl Radek, and others) were…

13 min

The New York Review of Books|February 21, 2019

SEARCH FOR THE NEW LAND

The future is not a gender, doesn’t even have a body.And then there’s white womenmaking T-shirts and selling them for eighty dollars or whatever.Whatever they do.The sun doesn’t hate anyone and neither do I.All I listen to is Lee Morgan’s trumpetfor long stretches of afternoons and nights in the desert.I decide on the delusion where I live,genderless and out of sight. This is how I chooseto spend what I have. I’m an American,so I hear only what I want to.This is our right—to protect ourselves in times of extreme stress.In times of great fear,we do what we have to do to survive.Our task is to make it out alive.This one instruction for having a body,the punishment for it.I see the way birds look at me—Endangered. The future is only earnedor…

4 min

The New York Review of Books|February 21, 2019

Timeless Quickies

The Collected Stories of Diane Williams with an introduction by Ben Marcus. Soho Press, 764 pp., $28.00 More than any other writer today, Diane Williams understands the essentially tragicomic nature of the penis, human or otherwise. The penises in her very short stories never do what they are supposed to be doing, which is, in a word, fucking; or, rather, fucking well, fucking artistically. “His penis was sticking itself in between her breasts, as if a button were being pushed,” Williams observes in “A Contribution to the Theory of Sex,” the one-page story of a man or boy named Danny Ketchem and a female called—improbably—Nancy Drew. Like most of Williams’s stories, there’s only the suggestion of a plot, and the characters are barely sketched. “It is immaterial who she is,”…

19 min

The New York Review of Books|February 21, 2019

The Myth of Progress

Seven Types of Atheism by John Gray. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 170 pp., $25.00 Over the past two decades, at the end of a long career as an academic political philosopher, John Gray has written a series of short, studiously unacademic books with suggestive titles like Straw Dogs, The Silence of Animals, and The Soul of the Marionette. These books tend toward the aphoristic and are more apt to quote Jorge Luis Borges or Wallace Stevens than Friedrich Hayek or John Maynard Keynes. Though they vary in emphasis and point of attack, all advance the same essential argument—that our ostensibly secular post-Enlightenment age has failed to face up to the full implications of its materialist worldview, that we remain haunted by the ghosts of Western Christianity, chief among them the…

15 min

The New York Review of Books|February 21, 2019

LETTERS

FARMWORKER ANXIETIES To the Editors: Michael Greenberg’s essay “In the Valley of Fear” [NYR, December 6, 2018] captures the overwhelming sense of anxiety among many farm laborer families in California. Daily life among family members, whether traveling to work or to school, shopping, or just visiting friends, places them at risk of sudden arrest and possible deportation at the hands of federal ICE agents. In relating Rufina Garcia’s story and visiting her late parents’ shrine, Greenberg correctly focuses on the indigenous immigrants’ plight: agriculture’s reliance on low-wage immigrant labor vs. a society that has become increasingly antagonistic to the millions of hard-working families who lack authorization for US employment. At the same time, Greenberg inaccurately portrays recent trends in California agricultural production, and in the state’s farm labor market. While…

8 min

The New York Review of Books|February 21, 2019

Men’s Lib

On Henry Miller: Or, How to Be an Anarchist by John Burnside. Princeton University Press, 175 pp., $22.95 Pity John Burnside. It’s not the best time to publish an appreciation and defense of Henry Miller, whose Tropics trilogy, written in the 1930s, was banned for decades in the US for obscenity, and then indicted by feminist critic Kate Millet in her book Sexual Politics (1970) as a paramount example of chauvinist attitudes toward women. Burnside, a poet, points out that Miller is a romantic who devoted over a thousand pages (the Rosy Crucifixion cycle) to chronicling his narrator’s relationship with the great love of his life (based on Miller’s second wife, June). More specifically, Miller was one of the early-twentieth-century writers—with Lawrence and Joyce—who brought the explicitly carnal, so-called lower…

19 min

The New York Review of Books|February 21, 2019

Yemen Under Siege

Yemen and the World: Beyond Insecurity by Laurent Bonnefoy, translated from the French by Cynthia Schoch. Oxford University Press, 234 pp., $49.95 Yemen in Crisis: Autocracy, Neo-Liberalism and the Disintegration of a State by Helen Lackner. London: Saqi, 330 pp., $35.00 Tribes and Politics in Yemen: A History of the Houthi Conflict by Marieke Brandt. Oxford University Press, 466 pp., $45.00 In about 570 AD, in the dry hills of what is now northern Yemen, the great dam of Marib collapsed. It had been one of the engineering marvels of the ancient world, with a mud- and-brick retaining wall fifty feet high and 2,100 feet long—twice as long as the Hoover Dam. It fed a complex irrigation network that made the desert bloom and sustained the kingdom of the Sabaeans,…

19 min

The New York Review of Books|February 21, 2019

On the Trail of the Climate

Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale by Deborah R. Coen. University of Chicago Press, 425 pp., $40.00 Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life: A Tar Sands Tale by Matt Hern and Am Johal with Joe Sacco. MIT Press, 216 pp., $19.95 (paper) At the opening of the United Nations climate change conference in Poland in December, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres made a short speech with a long history. The twenty warmest years on record, he said, have occurred in the past twenty-two years, with the past four years the four warmest; the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the highest it has been in three million years; greenhouse gas emissions, after leveling off for the past three years, are once again on the…

12 min

The New York Review of Books|February 21, 2019

OLMEC

The bone-crushing painof turning into a jaguar:palpable in the shaman’scleft head carved in basalt or jade; in his downturnedsquared-off open mouth;lips stretched and dilatedin birthing, in a scream. Try to imagine yourselfcrossing from one worldof pain into another, the quietneeded to summon the fury needed to catapult you over.For the umpteenth time,until entranced, I trace overa talismanic cascade of spirals copied from an old book.Images smuggled outfrom the border, TV loops,stream into my closed eyes. In no other world but thiswe watch as mother is againand again torn from child,no glyph known for repair.…

1 min

The New York Review of Books|February 21, 2019

Why Is Medicine So Expensive?

Medical Monopoly: Intellectual Property Rights and the Origins of the Modern Pharmaceutical Industry by Joseph M. Gabriel. University of Chicago Press, 334 pp., $35.00 Generic: The Unbranding of Modern Medicine by Jeremy A. Greene. Johns Hopkins University Press, 354 pp., $29.95 Getting to the Root of High Prescription Drug Prices: Drivers and Potential Solutions a report by Henry Waxman and others, July 10, 2017. Available online at www.commonwealthfund.org The prominence of high drug prices among current American grievances derives from three recent episodes. In 2014 Gilead Sciences brought out Sovaldi, a drug that cures hepatitis C within twelve weeks but costs $1,000 a pill, making the price of a full course of treatment $84,000. In 2015 Turing Pharmaceuticals, a new company headed by Martin Shkreli, a hedgefund manager, acquired Daraprim,…

21 min