Innholdsfortegnelse for May 23, 2019 i The New York Review of Books

Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election by Robert S. Mueller III. Two volumes, 448 pp., available at www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s long-awaited report, released to the public in a redacted version on April 18, lays out in meticulous detail both a blatantly illegal effort by Russia to throw the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump and repeated efforts by President Trump to end, limit, or impede Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference. Trump’s efforts included firing or attempting to fire those overseeing the investigation, directing subordinates to lie on his behalf, cajoling witnesses not to cooperate, and doctoring a public statement about a Trump Tower meeting between his son and closest advisers and a Russian lawyer offering compromising information on Hillary Clinton. Attorney General…

Walking Backwards: Poems 1966–2016 by John Koethe. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 366 pp., $40.00 “Major American poetry is the best philosophy ever written on this continent,” Marilynne Robinson once wrote. I wonder what John Koethe would say about that. Author of The Continuity of Wittgenstein’s Thought (1996) and Scepticism, Knowledge, and Forms of Reasoning (2005), Koethe was a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee until 2010. Yet he is better known for his eleven books of poetry, which have won him many honors, among them the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. A short book of essays, Poetry at One Remove (2000), makes a brief for the existence of overlapping epistemological aims in some poets (like Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, and…

The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age by Leo Damrosch. Yale University Press, 473 pp., $30.00 The Literary Club, known simply as “The Club,” was established in early 1764 after the portrait painter Joshua Reynolds became worried about his friend Samuel Johnson, who was sinking into a black depression. An old Oxford friend, William Adams, had visited Johnson the previous autumn and “found him in a deplorable state, sighing, groaning, talking to himself, and restlessly walking from room to room.” Johnson told Adams, “I would consent to have a limb amputated to recover my spirits.” An evening of talk with friends, Reynolds suggested, was a less drastic remedy. This was an age of clubs, when men met in inns, coffeehouses, and homes, sharing interests ranging from…

The Valley of the Fallen by Carlos Rojas, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman. Yale University Press, 296 pp., $26.00 An architectural folly of colossal proportions, combining the monumentalism of Albert Speer with the Catholic bombast of a narco graveyard, the Valley of the Fallen—a basilica, Benedictine abbey, and memorial surrounded by a three-thousand-acre national park near Madrid—aptly embodies many of the contradictions of historical memory in Spain. Planned as an homage to Nationalist soldiers who gave their lives in the “glorious crusade” to rescue Spain from a cabal of Marxists, Freemasons, and Jews, it is emblematic of the fascist ideal of unity by fiat: the bones of executed Republican soldiers mingle with those of their killers in its catacombs, and political prisoners participated in its construction as an…

“Magisterial.”—Joshua Yaffa, New Yorker “A Soviet War and Peace.”—Sheila Fitzpatrick, London Review of Books “Required reading for anybody who wants to understand today’s economy.”—Olivier Blanchard, former Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund “One of the deepest, most intimate examinations of small-town life ever undertaken.”—David Shribman, Globe and Mail “Muller delivers a riposte to bean counters everywhere with this trenchant study of our fixation with performance metrics.”—Barbara Kiser, Nature “Sherman offers something new and surprising: a look inside the 1 per cent’s minds. … She shifts our understanding of today’s dominant class.”—Simon Kuper, Financial Times “Beautifully and often wittily written, this is history that has some of the impact of a great work of dystopian science fiction.”—Tom Holland, BBC History Magazine “This powerful book should change the way we think…

ADDICTION PSYCHIATRY The American Opioid Epidemic: From Patient Care to Public Health Michael T. Compton, M.D., M.P.H., and Marc W. Manseau, M.D., M.P.H. A roster of brilliant clinicians and academicians, who offer insight into the myriad medical, legal, and socioeconomic facets of this growing problem. Pub Jan 2019. 6 x 9 in. 459 pp. American Psychiatric Publishing 978-1-61537-157-0 P/$65.00 AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist Nancy Goldstein Jackie Ormes (1911–1985) blazed a trail as a popular cartoonist with the major black newspapers of the day. Her cartoon characters delighted readers and spawned other products, including an elegant doll with a stylish wardrobe and “Torchy Togs” paper dolls. The biography, recognized as a “Best Book” by the Village Voice and with “Best Book” citations in three…

PEN STROKE PRESS www.judyvasos.com; (510) 482-4315 MY DEAR GOOD ROSI Letters from Nazi-Occupied Holland 1940-1943 by Judy Vasos Letters from two Jewish parents trying to flee the Nazis in Europe to their daughter, Rosi, in New York. They were arrested and murdered at Auschwitz. “A historically valuable and emotionally affecting collection of war letters.” —Kirkus Reviews 9780999742525 • Paper, $16.95 9780999742532 • eBook, $6.99 332 Pages • History/Biography and Autobiography/Jewish Available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Ingram Spark, and Independent Bookstores Author’s website: www.judyvasos.com. AKASHIC BOOKS www.AkashicBooks.com; (718) 643-9193 FLYING JENNY by Theasa Tuohy A clash between two pioneering women with very divergent views—a debutante stunt pilot and a NY tabloid reporter—leads to a cross-country chase, the 1929 Powder Puff Derby, and friendship. 9781617756214 • Paper, $15.95 271 Pages •…

Bloomberg by Bloomberg by Michael R. Bloomberg. Wiley, 244 pp., $27.95 From the Ground Up: A Journey to Reimagine the Promise of America by Howard Schultz, with Joanne Gordon. Random House, 352 pp., $28.00 Donald Trump, Michael Bloomberg, Howard Schultz: all three of these billionaire-politicians began their careers in that semicivilized field of aggression known as sales. Schultz sold Xerox copiers in midtown Manhattan, pounding pavements and making fifty cold calls a day. Bloomberg cut his teeth as a securities trader at the Wall Street firm of Salomon Brothers, where, as one of his former partners put it, you had to come to work “ready to bite the ass off a bear.” And Trump, of course, peddled lifestyle fantasies in the form of “prestige” real estate high in the sky.…

President Trump appears to be testing the American political system’s tolerance for soft dictatorship through the cavalier—and potentially illegal—use of presidential emergency powers. On February 15, after months of blustery threats, he declared a national emergency on the southern US border and dispatched the Army Corps of Engineers to administer the construction of a wall by private contractors in order to stop the flow of migrants and drugs into the country from Mexico. Trump issued the executive order because after a thirty-five-day government shutdown over funding for the border wall, Congress had just passed a spending bill that included only a fraction—$1.375 billion—of the $5.7 billion he wanted for the wall and specified that it be constructed of fencing rather than the steel he had demanded. The House and Senate…