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

JEROME GROOPMAN is the Recanati Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Chief of Experimental Medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the coauthor, with Pamela Hartzband, of Your Medical Mind: How to Decide What Is Right for You. MICHAEL HOFMANN is a poet and translator from the German. His latest translation is of Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin, and his new book of poems, One Lark, One Horse, will be published in the US in July. He teaches at the University of Florida. ISABEL V. HULL recently retired as the John Stambaugh Professor of History at Cornell. Her books include The Entourage of Kaiser Wilhelm II, 1888–1918 and, most recently, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International…

John Dunkley: Neither Day nor Night an exhibition at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, May 26, 2017–January 14, 2018; the National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, April 29–July 29, 2018; and the American Folk Art Museum, New York City, October 30, 2018–February 24, 2019. Catalog of the exhibition by Diana Nawi with David Boxer, Olive Senior, and Nicole Smythe-Johnson. Pérez Art Museum Miami/DelMonico, 224 pp., $45.00 In recent years art gallery and even museum shows have come to sport titles in addition to the name of the artist on view. Many of them are forgettable—they are flourishes, really—but the subtitle of the John Dunkley exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum, “Neither Day nor Night,” precisely captures one of the most distinctive aspects of his paintings. Dunkley, who died in 1947…

Victorian Radicals: From the Pre-Raphaelites to the Arts and Crafts Movement an exhibition at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, October 11, 2018–January 6, 2019; the Vero Beach Museum of Art, February 9–May 5, 2019; the Seattle Art Museum, June 13–September 8, 2019; the San Antonio Museum of Art, October 11, 2019–January 5, 2020; the Yale Center for British Art, February 13–May 10, 2020; the Nevada Museum of Art, June 20–September 13, 2020; and the Frick Pittsburgh, October 29, 2020–January 24, 2021. Catalog of the exhibition by Martin Ellis, Victoria Osborne, and Tim Barringer. American Federation of Arts/DelMonico, 280 pp., $65.00 Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art edited by Susan Owens and Nicholas Tromans. Yale University Press, 192 pp., $40.00 It’s common for restive artists to conclude that the current generation…

Marlborough Graphics 40 West 57th Street, New York 10019; (212) 541-4900 graphics@marlboroughgallery.com Monday-Saturday 10AM–6PM R. B. Kitaj Ezra Pound II, 1971 5 color screenprint, photo screenprint 38 ½ x 29 ½” Edition of 70 Other prints by R. B. Kitaj available Alexandre Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10019 (212) 755-2828; inquiries@alexandregallery.com; www.alexandregallery.com Emily Nelligan: A Memorial Exhibition On view through April 13, 2019 Varujan Boghosian: A Selection On view through April 13, 2019 Wildlife Art, westendantiques.com; michaelbankswildlifeart.com Contact: mike@westendantiques.com. Hush 20" x 16" Shepherd / W&K Galleries, 58 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10075 (212) 861-4050; ShepherdNY@aol.com; www.Shepherdgallery.com THE SYMBOLIST VISION March 5 – April 20, 2019 Artists include: Alastair Burne-Jones Fabry Fidus Fuchs Khnopff Klinger Minne Moreau Rops Solomon Zichy and others Swann Auction…

LEO DAMROSCH, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age “Damrosch [provides] crisp, colorful portraits of its members, illuminated by quotes from their lively, sometimes contentious interactions with each other…. This effervescent history shines a light on the extraordinary origins of a club which still exists to this day.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review ■ “Late 18th century Britain comes brilliantly alive in a vibrant intellectual history.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review SUSAN CRAWFORD, Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution and Why America Might Miss It “A timely and urgent look at how America is sacrificing its digital future, productivity, connectivity, social mobility, entrepreneurial growth, education, and every other public good, thanks to rapacious telcos, scumbag lobbyists, and negligent, cash hungry politicians…. You should be reading this.”—Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing CHRISTOPHE GUI…

My body has gone.It doesn’t need me anymore. It reminds me of myself,saying prayers, sharing old stories.We are deep in something, with this sharing. The wave approaches,turns, swells. It might cleanse the choiceswe are trying to make right. I’m reconceiving everything I knew:the history of upper New York State, arsenal town, mill, factory, dock.It reminds me of my body, gone but real. We are deep in something.We all have it so hard right now. Let me welcome youto the republic of smiles. Let me be your founding motherwith your fever on my shoulder: —What do you feel like eating, dear?—Nothing really, I just ate. I’m not offended.It’s a relief to me too. How do you reconceive a history?Can kindness buy peace? Does the moon still talk to me?Only every night.…

The following conversation between Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the Nobel Prize–winning Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka took place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in November 2018. —The Editors Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Wole, what’s your view of Donald Trump’s impact on Africa, and how is he perceived in Africa? Wole Soyinka: Well, that is one hell of a question to begin with. Let me put it quite bluntly. He is considered a loose cannon that is discharging long-hidden attitudes, racial attitudes, xenophobic attitudes. Gates: Was there a cause and effect relation between the fact that a black man occupied the White House for eight years and then his opposite was elected? Soyinka: Trump came in on a platform of political, racial, and ideological hatred for Obama. He was not even subtle about…

JAMES LOVEJOY https://www.jameslovejoywriter.com/ JOSEPH CHAPMAN My Molly Life by James Lovejoy “Joseph Chapman will enchant readers of British historical fiction and romance in the traditions of E.M. Forster and Sarah Waters.”—Andrew Peters Out in Print 9781790658022 • Paper, $16.99, eBook, $4.99 361 Pages • Historical Fiction Available at Amazon Author’s website: https://www.jameslovejoywriter.com/. HONG & MOORE ENGLAND’S MARVELOUS GOTHIC CATHEDRALS AND CHURCHES by Richard Moore and Sawon Hong This guidebook provides profiles of thirteen important English churches, including their historical setting, architectural highlights and practical information. Many color photos and images. 9780578430041 • Paper, $25.00, eBook, $9.99 200 Pages • Historical Architecture Available at Amazon, Apple, Barnes and Noble, and Waterstones. TETRACULES PRESS http://www.tetraculespress.com/; (315) 729-4910 EISENSTEIN’S MONSTER by A.V. Bach “Bach weaves a stunning debut out of disparate parts, melding…

Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli. Knopf, 383 pp., $27.95 Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions by Valeria Luiselli. Coffee House, 119 pp., $12.95 (paper) The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney. Coffee House, 195 pp., $16.95 (paper) Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney. Coffee House, 146 pp., $15.95 (paper) Sidewalks by Valeria Luiselli, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney, with an introduction by Cees Nooteboom. Coffee House, 110 pp., $15.95 (paper) Although Valeria Luiselli lives in New York City, she isn’t herself American—not by birth (she was born in Mexico), nor by upbringing (her father was a diplomat, her international childhood nomadic), nor, to a significant degree, in…

In 2010 The Athens Review of Books (ARB), the Greek counterpart of The New York Review of Books, published a letter from a reader that mentioned the political past of Nikolaos Kotzias as a leading member of the Communist Party of Greece and characterized him as a fanatic Stalinist (“gauleiter of Stalinism”) at that time. Mr. Kotzias (who in the 1970s and 1980s wrote books praising the totalitarian Erich Honecker regime in East Germany and Wojciech Jaruzelski’s dictatorship in Poland, and went on to serve as foreign minister of Greece from 2015 to 2018) then sued the ARB for defamation, demanding €250,000 in compensation. Court rulings in 2015 and 2017 considered the characterization “gauleiter of Stalinism” to be defamatory, ignoring the fact that it is a political value judgment about…

THE MIND–BODY PROBLEM To the Editors: I was quite horrified by Elaine Blair’s review of On Henry Miller: Or, How to Be an Anarchist by John Burnside [NYR, February 21]. It seems to get Henry Miller entirely wrong—as it if were just an update of the late Kate Millett’s misinterpretation of Miller in Sexual Politics. Of course she makes no reference to The Colossus of Maroussi, one of Miller’s best books. Nor to To Paint Is to Love Again. She seems to have an animus against Miller, the sexist, completely forgetting that he liberated the language for many generations of writers—Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, myself—and that he was a disappointed romantic who adored and was terrified of women, that he was “always looking for the secret of life,”…

1. When we were stopped in Lviv, we needed airand pulled the window down a bit.A blade of bitter cold slid in; with ita voice, an old man’s voice: “The children here …”He paused to catch his breath a moment, “They…”But we were off. For hours then all we sawwere fields and fields of luminescent snow.And we heard nothing further till the day. 2.From Ústí up to Dresden, in the night,what seemed like crowds moved up and down the train,their shuffling syncopated with the dinthe wheels made on the rails. From left to rightthe carriages tilted into every slopealong the Elbe’s twisting corridor.Once someone tried the handle of our door,thought better of it and we went back to sleep. 3.Toward evening, the train came to a sudden stopoutside a village…

The Trial of the Kaiser by William A. Schabas. Oxford University Press, 410 pp., $34.95 Kaiser Wilhelm II was an emblem of his era. Modern in his appreciation of the power of the media, hungry for publicity and adulation, he was constantly in the news, whether celebrating with his royal English and Russian cousins or inaugurating local railroad stations and monuments. Articulate and garrulous, the kaiser broadcast remarks that became instant catchphrases, especially those that escaped the censorship of his handlers, such as his claim that “the ruler’s will is the public law” or his favorable comparison of German soldiers to “Huns.” His ubiquity earned him the name “Reise-Kaiser” (the traveling emperor). He was also impetuous, flighty, and hard to control—“Wilhelm der Plötzliche” (Wilhelm the Sudden). Even his aggressively upright…