Innholdsfortegnelse for April 18, 2019 i The New York Review of Books

NEAL ASCHERSON is the author of Black Sea, Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland, and the novel Death of the Fronsac. He is an Honorary Professor at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. G.W. BOWERSOCK is Professor Emeritus of Ancient History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His most recent book is The Crucible of Islam. EDWARD CHANCELLOR is the author of Devil Takes the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation and the editor of Capital Returns: Investing Through the Capital Cycle: A Money Manager’s Reports 2002–15. 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.…

The dirt track has been pounded by the sunfor these four months of drought.No horse would run here but the horse would runin barren laps of thoughtas, in my long anger, my thoughts have done, rounding the curve on old injusticesdown the straightaway of revenge,raising dust while the music of cicadasscreams like a rusty hinge,rises and fades away and again rises (reminding me of what Socrates saidabout those so thrilled by songthat they forgot to eat and drink, and diedwithout even knowing,and became cicadas): rises like the hard voices of the couple who have come hereto play out their last act,heedless and bickering in the noontime glarebeside leering herms and crackedsmall-bellied terracotta vases, but are just actors off-book, running lines. Soon theyare resting beneath the ilex,drinking cool water, laughing quietlyat…

Potosi The Silver City That Changed the World Kris Lane “Potosí is the stuff of myth and the fuel of enormous global changes. With wonderful quotes and poetic, evocative language, Kris Lane’s historical writing is outstanding.”—Steven Topik, editor of The Second Conquest of Latin America Ocean Outbreak Confronting the Rising Tide of Marine Disease Drew Harvell “Part memoir and part science exposé, Ocean Outbreak is a recipe for launching into the unknown, providing a road map showing how one person can marshal the world of science to win against a global peril.” —Steve Palumbi, author of The Evolution Explosion: How Humans Cause Rapid Evolutionary Change Creativity and Copyright Legal Essentials for Screenwriters and Creative Artists John L. Geiger and Howard Suber “A handy, user-friendly book for screenwriters who are looking…

In 1855 no one had yet heard anything like the raw, declamatory, and jubilant voice of the self-proclaimed “American, one of the roughs, a kosmos”—Walt Whitman, who in Leaves of Grass, his dazzling poetic debut, announced, “I celebrate myself,/And what I assume you shall assume,/For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” Whitman was unequivocally declaring his own independence from poetic conventions and niceties. Here was a poet of the people for the people, without pretension or pomp, who wrote verse that captured everyday speech, both its fluency and its clank. “The best writing,” Whitman would say, “has no lace on its sleeves.” In Walt Whitman Speaks: His Final Thoughts on Life, Writing, Spirituality, and the Promise of America, he again speaks to us, this time from…

“Jutel gives us enjoyable and accessible tools for thinking critically about the illness narratives that shape our lives.”–Martha Stoddard Holmes, California State University, San Marcos ISBN: 9781487522261 ISBN: 9781487500825 “This book turns thinking about the aging workforce on its head. It’s a must-read to tap the potential productivity of a truly intergenerational workforce, and to make companies more profitable.” –Ali Velshi, NBC News, and Co-anchor, Velshi & Ruhle, MSNBC ISBN: 9781487522902 “Any business leader who lacks the ideas, frameworks, and tools described in Design Works risks being irrelevant in the ultra-competitive business climate of the future.” –Tim Brown, Chief Executive Officer, IDEO ISBN: 9781487500962 “Brian Gunia is an expert on how we can get better at bargaining through bartering, and the studies and stories he shares in this engaging read…

Carter by David Schiff. Oxford University Press, 266 pp., $34.95 There is a fond belief that we glean otherworldly revelations from the late works of composers. We meditate upon the hymnlike final scores from the dying Beethoven and Schubert, are heartened by the brisk comic affirmations of Falstaff, Verdi’s farewell to opera, and marvel at the serene, luxuriant leave-taking in the Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss. In the case of Elliott Carter, however, mystical expectations are best set aside, even though he wrote more and later “late” music than anyone. He composed steadily in his own distinctive manner from his teen years until that day in November 2012 when, at the age of 103, he simply stopped. More than half of his 150- odd works—including his longest work for…

Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures by Adina Hoffman. Yale University Press, 245 pp., $26.00 In suburban homes of the late 1950s within commuting distance of Manhattan, it was not unusual to come upon a paperback copy of Ben Hecht’s A Child of the Century, a best-selling autobiography first published in 1954. As a child of the midcentury I was drawn to the title even if the book’s length (over six hundred pages of very small type) deterred any deeper acquaintance. Who was this child, and how could he carry the weight of a whole century? The paperback’s front cover described “a Bold, Buoyant Man With an Insatiable Lust for Life,” and the accompanying artwork jammed together images of a man in a rakishly tilted fedora with a phone to…

The Wall by John Lanchester. Norton, 254 pp., $25.95 “Political language,” George Orwell said, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” He might have added that literary language is often used for the same purpose. The verbally prodigious English writer John Lanchester is a case in point. His characters, Lanchester has said, are people “who can’t quite bring themselves to tell the truth about their own lives.” This is putting it mildly. Tarquin Winot, the gastronome-sociopath narrator of Lanchester’s very funny debut, The Debt to Pleasure (1996), will stop at nothing to prove that he and not his older brother, a world-famous conceptual artist, is the true genius in the family. The novel, whose principal debt is to Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, is written in the form…

Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind by Michael Massing. Harper, 987 pp., $45.00 Most people in the West have heard of Martin Luther. Every Protestant is indebted to him for the fundamentals of their faith, and more than 80 million of them—close to ten million in the US—identify specifically as Lutherans. Luther’s vernacular writings, above all his translation of the Bible, have a fair claim to have forged a single German language out of a multitude of local dialects. Desiderius Erasmus, by contrast, is now known mainly to scholars. Written almost exclusively in Latin, the international lingua franca of late-medieval Europe, the books that poured from the pen of this restlessly mobile citizen of the world were directed to the reform of his own era…

I Am God by Giacomo Sartori, translated from the Italian by Frederika Randall. Restless, 206 pp., $17.99 (paper) Cathleen Schine I Am God is an almost outrageously charming book. In the first of his seven novels to be published in English, Giacomo Sartori takes a simple, playful premise and sets the universe crazily spinning. The Italian writer has conjured up a delicious, comical stream of omni consciousness: a pensive diary by the original omniscient narrator, God. Sartori’s God, a being of authentic complexity and paradoxical humanity, of both other worldly dignity and satirical absurdity, is an irresistible character. He is also in love. Imagine how disconcerting this is for God. “The probability that my eye should come to rest on that particular girl is far less than the chances that…

The Privileged Poor How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students Anthony Abraham Jack “Challenges us to think carefully about the campus lives of poor students and the responsibility elite institutions have for not only their education but also their social and economic mobility.” —Washington Post In Search of Deeper Learning The Quest to Remake the American High School Jal Mehta & Sarah Fine “The best book on high school dynamics I have ever read.” —Jay Mathews, Washington Post American Sutra A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War Duncan Ryūken Williams “A searingly instructive story about America from which all Americans might learn.” —Smithsonian Belknap Press The Creativity Code Art and Innovation in the Age of AI Marcus du Sautoy “Fact-packed and funny, questioning what we mean…

Shortly after the success of The Art of the Deal (1987) made Donald Trump a supposed expert on negotiation, he lobbied the George H.W. Bush administration to put him in charge of arms reduction talks with the Soviet Union. The position went instead to Richard Burt, an experienced diplomat and arms control expert. When the two men met at a New York social event, Trump pulled Burt aside to tell him what he would have done—and what Burt should do—to start off the negotiations. Greet the Soviets warmly, he said. Let the delegation get seated and open their papers. Then stand up, put your knuckles on the table, lean over, say “Fuck you,” and walk out of the room. When I heard this story from Burt in 2016, it seemed…

OUTSIDERS Five Women Writers Who Changed the World Lyndall Gordon “ “Gordon seduces readers interested in all that these fascinating women had to off er.”—Publishers Weekly $29.95 hardcover/ebook LIFE AND DEATH IN RIKERS ISLAND Homer Venters, former Chief Medical Officer of NYC Jails Shining a light on the deadly health consequences of incarceration. “A crucially important book.”—The New Yorker $26.95 paperback/ebook BALLYHOO poems by Hastings Hensel “This book is a knockout, and one I will read over and over.”—Caki Wilkinson, author of The Wynona Stone Poems $19.95 paperback/ebook THE BACKWASH OF WAR An Extraordinary American Nurse in World War I Ellen N. La Motte edited with an introduction and biography by Cynthia Wachtell Banned in multiple countries for its frank depiction of the horrors of war, Ellen N. La Motte’s…

History of Violence by Édouard Louis, translated from the French by Lorin Stein. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 212 pp., $25.00 Who Killed My Father by Édouard Louis, translated from the French by Lorin Stein. New Directions, 87 pp., $15.95 The story begins late on Christmas Eve, 2012. Édouard is twenty years old, and he has left the apartment of friends in northeast Paris, where they have had a few bottles of wine. He takes a share-bike as far as the place de la République, and then, to clear his head, he decides to walk the rest of the way to his little studio near the Canal Saint-Martin. In the large square, under reconstruction at the time, a man about a decade older tries to pick him up. Édouard resists at…

John Law: A Scottish Adventurer of the Eighteenth Century by James Buchan. London: MacLehose, 513 pp., £30.00 In 1694 a young Scotsman convicted of murder in London fled to the Continent. Two decades later he turned up in Paris, where he founded a national bank and headed a company that incorporated all of France’s overseas trading monopolies and absorbed the country’s entire national debt. The bank’s new paper notes replaced the old currency of gold and silver. The company’s stock soared extravagantly in value. The erstwhile fugitive was appointed finance minister, becoming the most powerful subject in Europe and possibly the richest man who ever lived. Daniel Defoe, a sharp observer of stock promoters (or “projectors,” as they were commonly known), expressed incredulity: in order to rise in this world,…

D.R. BELL ELEOS A Book of Trials and Secrets by D. R. Bell “Bell masterfully combines his mystery story with an unflinching look at the 20th century’s bleakest tragedies. A beautiful … challengingly complex tale of the ramifications of history.” —Kirkus Reviews Free Amazon download April 11-15. 9781726626897 • Paper, $12.99, eBook, $4.99 • 451 Pages • Historical Fiction Available at Amazon • Author’s website: www.drbellbooks.com. PURPLE CLOTHESPIN PUBLISHING https://fb.me/sharonraphaelP.hD; (562) 287-2618 COMING OUT The Emergence of the Movement Lesbian by Sharon Raphael, Ph.D Dr. Raphael’s historical sociology study recounts the struggles of emerging lesbians in 1972 at LA’s first Gay Women’s Service Center 9781729660850 • Paper, $27.00 127 Pages • Nonfiction Available at Amazon and Purple Clothespin • Author’s website: https://FB.me/sharonraphaelP.hD. ACE BOWERS THE MINDSET My Journey From Janitor…

TERRY EAGLETON, Humour Written by an acknowledged master of comedy, this study reflects on the nature of humour and the functions it serves. Packed with illuminating ideas and a good many excellent jokes, Terry Eagleton critically examines various well-known theories of humour and its social and political evolution over the centuries. PHYLLIS ROSE, Alfred Stieglitz: Taking Pictures, Making Painters “No biographer has a sharper sense of focus for the competing narratives that underlie a marriage. This double portrait of Stieglitz and O’Keeffe is the work of a master.”—Judith Thurman, author of Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette ▪ Jewish Lives JOHN SEXTON, Standing for Reason: The University in a Dogmatic Age, FOREWORD BY GORDON BROWN ▪ “One of the leading educators of our time provides an incisive analysis…

The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century by Mark Lamster. Little, Brown, 508 pp., $35.00 1. As a young architecture writer I resolved to steer clear of all enterprises that involved Philip Johnson, convinced that this charming cultural corrupter, as I saw him, was the very antithesis of my socially conscious role model, the architecture critic Lewis Mumford. Avoidance of Johnson, however, was easier imagined than accomplished, since the first decades of my career—the 1970s and 1980s—coincided with the professional apogee of the man then reflexively called “the dean of American architects” or, less reverently, “the Godfather of American architecture” because of the powerful but largely hidden influence he wielded, not unlike that of a mafia don. He decided who got reputation-making exhibitions, conferred…

“A remarkable, erudite, and stylish book on an important and timely subject.”—Kieran Setiya, author of Midlife Cloth $29.95 “Everyone interested in understanding modern baseball needs to read this book.”—Dave Smith, founder of Retrosheet Cloth $27.95 “A thoughtful and superbly readable account of one of Indian democracy’s darkest episodes.”—Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University Cloth $29.95 “Terrifyingly brilliant and continuously surprising.”—Jeffrey C. Alexander, Yale University Cloth $18.95 “A meticulously researched, well-styled academic study showing Chaucer as the ‘consummate networker.’”—Kirkus Cloth $39.95 “Sweeping, original, and erudite.”—Darrin M. McMahon, author of Happiness: A History Cloth $29.95 “Hugely entertaining and irreverent.”—Adam Gopnik, New Yorker Cloth $24.95 “This superb and stylishly executed work does a splendid job of surveying the life of Patrick.”—Mark Williams, author of Ireland’s Immortals Cloth $27.95 “An important, inspired, and frequently riveting book.”—Emily…

America must welcome all—Chinese, Irish, German, pauper or not, criminal or not—all, all, without exceptions: become an asylum for all who choose to come. We may have drifted away from this principle temporarily but time will bring us back. The tide may rise and rise again and still again and again after that, but at last there is an ebb—the low water comes at last. Think of it—think of it: how little of the land of the United States is cultivated—how much of it is still utterly untilled. When you go West you sometimes travel whole days at lightning speed across vast spaces where not an acre is plowed, not a tree is touched, not a sign of a house is anywhere detected. America is not for special types, for…

There was a hum of fretwork guess-worka piecework of selves on the veranda where I askedmy mother how much did it cost to carry so many filamentstwo instead of one when smocked and behoovedwe left the hospital each with a differentkind of insomnia––––– a different kindof question and adifferent kind of mother torn under a glisteningyolk of sunthat put everything on the table whetherwe wished it or not In the late summer a kind of lull sulked aroundthe house not deliberately but everybody unconsciouslyslowed their blood assumed the right position even visitors–––––– children knew to play outdoors while adultscontinued to plait bread and vacuum When mulberries finished flexing their purplish seedsa more ancient time arrived and out of silence I rememberclimbing through a wall of thorny scrubto find a tree…