Innholdsfortegnelse for May 9, 2019 i The New York Review of Books

ALEX ABRAMOVICH is the author of Bullies: A Friendship. NATALIE ANGIER writes about science for The New York Times. She is the author of The Beauty of the Beastly: New Views on the Nature of Life, among other books. KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH teaches philosophy at NYU. His latest book, The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity, is based on his 2016 BBC Reith Lectures. LISA APPIGNANESI is Chair of the Royal Society of Literature. She is the author of Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors and Losing the Dead. Her most recent book is Everyday Madness. ANNE DIEBEL works as a private investigator in New York City. She was formerly the Robert L. Belknap Faculty Fellow at Columbia. J.H. ELLIOTT is Regius Professor Emeritus of…

The incredible true story of how an English gardener saved the Japanese cherry blossom tree from extinction “Engrossing…. A portrait of great charm and sophistication, rich in its natural and historical range, guaranteeing that you won’t look at cherry blossoms the same way again.” —The Guardian “Carlos is an inspiration to me. He’s the perfect spokesperson for the plants of the world.” —Jane Goodall “Absorbing…. Mlodinow skillfully weaves scientific findings with stories of people, events, and the natural world.” —The New York Times Book Review “The science behind addiction comes alive in its sorrow and grandeur. When you pick up this book get ready for an intense ride…. [Grisel] juxtaposes stark examples from her own tortured past, methodically connecting each experience to the hard science of addiction neurobiology.” — Dr.…

How easily it goes down intoHow softly its replacement comes Shifting color through a lineOf clouds far enough to be Unconcerned with those insideThe dome gone vulnerable Carnations brightest whereTheir last forms drain To the edges of what thinkingWould like to think it looks like Nearly nothing you can doAbout the stubborn air Spreading rust through peachToward repeat apocalypse Before the wholly blue hourDarkness will be freedom from It doesn’t have to be at allThe way it totally is But that’s tradition for youEvery day an open casket Your eyes are about to closeSo you can hear better The changing of the color guardThat they are and aren’t A fantasy of white in whichNothing’s much more than enough…

Ingrid D. Rowland Antonello da Messina an exhibition at the Galleria Regionale della Sicilia di Palazzo Abatellis, Palermo, December 14, 2018–February 10, 2019. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa. Rome: Mondomostre, 127 pp., €19.00 (paper) Antonello da Messina an exhibition at the Palazzo Reale, Milan, February 21–June 2, 2019. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Caterina Cardona and Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa. Milan: Skira, 299 pp., €40.00 In October 1608, the fractious painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio made a daring escape from a Maltese prison and set sail for the Sicilian port of Messina. Perhaps he chose Messina because he could count on a network of friends and protectors there, but perhaps, as the Italian art historian Mia Cinotti has suggested, he went for an entirely…

James Fenton Bouguereau and America an exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum, February 15–May 12, 2019; the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, June 22–September 22, 2019; and the San Diego Museum of Art, November 9, 2019–March 15, 2020. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Tanya Paul and Stanton Thomas. Milwaukee Art Museum/Memphis Brooks Museum of Art/Yale University Press, 191 pp., $50.00 Derided paintings of past centuries have a knack for hanging in there, in the teeth of critical disdain. Sir Edwin Landseer’s The Monarch of the Glen (1851), a portrait of a magnificent stag, much mocked as the staple of the Victorian parlor wall, turns up still as a label on a whiskey bottle. Bubbles (1886) by Sir John Everett Millais began as a meditation on a child’s view of…

Old fears in dead of nightlike lozengesstuck dryon the tongue.Wakened numbas Novocain. In dead of night askfor God’s sake whatdid you miss. You knowgoddamned well youhave missed whatthey hid from you. The lost, the loney.You knew them too late.Dying too soon.The young uncle you’d loved most.Killed himself to freehis spirit, trapped like a geniein a Coke bottle. Never knew why. Howwas a secret too whisperedin the cornstalks. Oh that was terrible! Just—terrible … Somethinglike that, in a family—you never forget.It’s the quietafter gunshots you remember. Misshapen ears of corn,wizened faces. By Novemberyou could see themseeing you along the rowsof stalks. You ran from the faces,hid your eyes. Gut-kick,spine-cold, sickwith fear of whathad no name.…

Kwame Anthony Appiah Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason by Justin E.H. Smith. Princeton University Press, 330 pp., $29.95 How enlightened was the Enlightenment? Not a few critics have seen it as profoundly benighted. For some, it was a seedbed for modern racism and imperialism; the light in the Enlightenment, one recent scholar has suggested, essentially meant “white.” Voltaire emphatically believed in the inherent inferiority of les Nègres, who belonged to a separate species, or at least breed, from Europeans—as different from Europeans, he said, as spaniels from greyhounds. Kant remarked, of something a Negro carpenter opined, that “the fact that he was black from head to toe was proof that what he said was stupid.” And David Hume wrote, in a notorious footnote, that he was…

Jed Perl Lincoln Kir stein’s Modern an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, March 17–June 15, 2019. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Samantha Friedman and Jodi Hauptman. Museum of Modern Art, 207 pp., $55.00 The Young and Evil an exhibition at the David Zwirner Gallery, New York City, February 21–April 13, 2019 1. You cannot take the full measure of American culture in the twentieth century until you have carefully considered the achievement of Lincoln Kir stein. This is no easy task, for Kir stein was a polymath whose activities—as institution builder, advocate for artists, and literary figure in his own right—were so various as to defy quick or easy definition. He is most often associated with George Balanchine, with whom he founded the School…

1 A is for Archive: WarholÕs World from A to Z by Matt Wrbican; Published in association with The Andy Warhol Museum 2 Wright and New York: The Making of AmericaÕs Architect by Anthony Alofsin 3 Renoir: The Body, The Senses edited by Esther Bell and George T. M. Shackelford; Distributed for the Clark Art Institute 4 Whistler in Watercolor: Lovely Little Games by Lee Glazer, Emily Jacobson, Blythe McCarthy, and Katherine Roeder; Distributed for Freer|Sackler, Smithsonian 5 The Young Victoria by Deirdre Murphy; Published in association with Historic Royal Palaces 6 The American Pre-Raphaelites: Radical Realists by Linda S. Ferber; Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington 7 The Rise of Everyday Design: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain and America by Monica Penick and…

David Salle Charline von Heyl: Snake Eyes an exhibition at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, June 22–September 23, 2018; the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium, October 14, 2018–January 13, 2019; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., November 8, 2018–April 21, 2019. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Dirk Luckow. London: Koenig, 240 pp., $95.00 A good painting focuses our attention in a matter of seconds—what is sometimes called wall power—and it also holds our gaze over time. It repays prolonged looking. A good painting appeals to both the eye and the mind, the one refreshing the other. There is no one thing or set of things that a painting must do. A good painting can look like anything at all, or like nothing we’ve seen before. All painting is, in a…

Paula Cooper Gallery, 524 W 26th Street, New York (212) 255-1105; www.paulacoopergallery.com Walid Raad April 13–May 18 521 W 21st Street David Novros May 11–June 15 524 W 26th Street 192 Books 192 Tenth Avenue, New York (212) 255-4022 www.192books.com Ann Beattie, “A Wonderful Stroke of Luck” Tuesday, April 23, 7pm Siri Hustvedt, “Memories of the Future” Tuesday, April 30, 7pm Rachel Kushner, “The Mars Room” Saturday, May 11, 5pm Marlborough Graphics 40 West 57th Street, New York 10019; (212) 541-4900 graphics@marlboroughgallery.com Monday-Saturday 10AM–6PM Michele Oka Doner Duress, 2019 Ink on Handmade Paper 80" x 55” Other work available by Oka Doner. Upstream Gallery, 8 Main Street, Hastings, NY Thursday–Sunday, 12:30–5:30 PM Daniel van Benthuysen Recent Paintings & Prints, May 2-26, 2019 Cityscapes and landscapes by this award-winning artist. Reception, Sun., May 5,…

Sanford Schwartz Moroni: The Riches of Renaissance Portraiture an exhibition at the Frick Collection, New York City, February 21–June 2, 2019. Catalog of the exhibition by Aimee Ng, Simone Facchinetti, and Arturo Galansino. Frick Collection/Scala, 244 pp., $65.00 (paper) The Frick has chosen a somewhat wrongheaded way of presenting the sixteenth-century Italian painter Giovanni Battista Moroni. The exhibition’s subtitle is “The Riches of Renaissance Portraiture,” which can be taken in two ways. The irrefutable meaning is that Moroni significantly added to the body of portraits that we have from the Renaissance. The second, and debatable, meaning of “riches” is that the artist’s pictures give a tour of the era’s taste for finery. The curators probably believe that Moroni, whose work is being given its long-overdue first museum show in New…

Lisa Appignanesi A Writer of Our Time: The Life and Work of John Berger by Joshua Sperling. Verso, 293 pp., $29.95 Landscapes: John Berger on Art edited and with an introduction by Tom Overton. Verso, 254 pp., $19.95 (paper) When Joshua Sperling’s biography of John Berger arrived at my door, I approached it with trepidation. I’d known Berger for more than forty years, and biographers, having amassed reams of information about a life, may render it in ways that make it unrecognizable to friends or family. Upon his death in January 2017, many of Berger’s British obituarists, on both the right and the left, engaged in settling decades-old political or art world scores. Berger had not only escaped the confines of his British island but he had had the audacity…

MEDICINE IN THE GRAY ZONE To the Editors: I was delighted to see that The New York Review and none other than the supremely talented Dr. Jerome Groopman took the time to review my book Ticker: The Quest to Create an Artificial Heart [NYR, November 22, 2018]. But I’d like to respond to several points in the review that draw heavily on “A Pioneering Heart Surgeon’s Secret History of Research Violations, Conflicts of Interest and Poor Outcomes,” a May 2018 article by Charles Ornstein of ProPublica and Mike Hixenbaugh of the Houston Chronicle. Dr. Groopman notes that Dr. Bud Frazier has denied the allegations in Ornstein and Hixenbaugh’s article. Indeed he has, with a libel suit filed last July that in December was allowed to go forward in court in…