Innholdsfortegnelse for June 6, 2019 i The New York Review of Books

Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century by George Packer. Knopf, 592 pp., $30.00 “Almost great” is George Packer’s measured judgment on the life and character of the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who was trying to broker an end to the war in Afghanistan when he died suddenly in 2010. Holbrooke left the war pretty much as he found it, and peace is no closer now, nearly a decade later, but that isn’t what explains the cruel precision of Packer’s judgment. It’s the man. Holbrooke had the serious intent, the energy, the friends, the wit, and even the luck needed to accomplish great things, but he fell short. Packer circles the question of why in his new biography, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of…

Churchill: Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts. Viking, 1,105 pp., $40.00 The Kremlin Letters: Stalin’s Wartime Correspondence with Churchill and Roosevelt edited by David Reynolds and Vladimir Pechatnov. Yale University Press, 660 pp., $35.00 Other colossi crumble or are dragged off their pedestals by angry students and dismissive dons, or you don’t notice them anymore because they are so sadly weathered. But Winston Churchill is still up there, if anything more firmly anchored as the years go by, glaring out at posterity with unquenched pugnacity. This miraculous preservation has not been an entirely natural process. Churchill laid the foundations of his own monument: five volumes on the Great War, then another six volumes on World War II, making good on his threat to the House of Commons in 1948 that…

Studio 105, Paris 1967 an album by the Don Cherry Trio. Hi Hat, £8.95 Home Boy, Sister Out an album by Don Cherry. We Want Sounds, €25.00 Brown Rice an album by Don Cherry. Verve/UMe, $19.98 The Codona Trilogy an album by Don Cherry, Naná Vasconcelos, and Collin Walcott. ECM, 3 CDs, €28.00 In 1978 the trumpeter Don Cherry was asked about his music in a documentary for Swedish television. “Well, for one thing,” he replied, “it’s actually not my music, because it’s a culmination of different experiences, different cultures, and different composers that involves the music that we play together.” This was far more radical than the declaration of self-determination that the alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman chose as the title of his 1961 album This Is Our Music, featuring…

Manny Farber: Paintings and Writings edited by Michael Almereyda, Jonathan Lethem, and Robert Polito. Hat and Beard, 273 pp., $60.00 One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, October 14, 2018–March 11, 2019. Catalog of the exhibition by Helen Molesworth. MOCA/DelMonico/Prestel, 279 pp., $60.00 In the early 1990s the French director Maurice Pialat made a strange, absorbing film that reimagined the last three months of Vincent van Gogh’s life. Rather than concentrate on his painting—only a few brief scenes show the artist at work—Pialat emphasized the grinding discomfort of his relationships, the luminous faces of his drinking and dancing companions, and the unglamorous business that went on around him as he was seeing a physician in Auvers-sur-Oise: the…

Manaku of Guler: The Life and Work of Another Great Indian Painter from a Small Hill State by B. N. Goswamy. Artibus Asiae/Niyogi Books, 512 pp., $95.00 Peacock in the Desert: The Royal Arts of Jodhpur, India an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, March 4–August 19, 2018; the Seattle Art Museum, October 18, 2018–January 21, 2019; and the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, March 9–September 2, 2019. Catalog of the exhibition by Karni Jasol. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 295 pp., $85.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) In the late 1820s a Mughal scholar named Khair ud-Din, who was working for the East India Company at its opium factory in Patna, began work on a monumental history. The Book of Cautionary Tales attempted to explain how a handful…

Belladonna by Daša Drndi?, translated from the Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth. New Directions, 378 pp., $19.95 (paper) EEG by Daša Drndi?, translated from the Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth. New Directions, 394 pp., $19.95 (paper) How can the contemporary novel speak the unspeakable? It’s an old question, a tired one perhaps, now that “the unspeakable” has come to encompass many forms of trauma that writers regularly speak about: self-harm, sexual abuse, genocide, fascism, climate change. Search for “speak the unspeakable” online, and the encyclopedic range of results, from the horrific (mass death) to the trivial (relationship advice) to the downright offensive (men’s rights forums, campus “free speech” controversies), makes it easy to start feeling cynical about how people deploy their memories for recognition. As the social theorist Zygmut Bauman observed, a…

The Global Age: Europe 1950–2017 by Ian Kershaw. Viking, 670 pp., $40.00 By the spring of 1952, the “iron curtain” that Winston Churchill had described as descending on the eastern half of Europe—“from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic”—already felt impenetrable, even permanent. In that year, Czech courts condemned to death Rudolf Slansky, the secretary-general of the Czech Communist Party, for alleged participation in a “Trotskyite-Titoist-Zionist” conspiracy. The East German Communist Party adop ted a new economic policy, the “Planned Construction of Socialism.” Harry Truman warned the US Congress of the “terrible threat of aggression” from the Soviet Union; across the Atlantic, the brand-new NATO alliance was preparing to accept a rearmed West Germany. But 1952 was also the moment when the concept of “the West”—the liberal…

Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age by Stephen R. Platt. Vintage, 556 pp., $17.00 (paper) For much of the 1700s, China’s Qing dynasty (1644–1912) governed fairly well, and many foreigners were impressed by the country’s social, economic, and cultural vitality. By 1850 a noticeably poorer and militarily weaker society was about to suffer thirty years of history’s bloodiest civil wars: above all the Taiping Rebellion (1851–1864), but also the Nian Rebellion (1853–1868), the Guizhou Miao Rebellion (1854–1873), the Panthay Rebellion (1855–1873), and the Northwest Muslim Rebellion (1862–1877), which all told may have taken as many as fifty million lives. (The Taiping alone probably took twenty million.) Yet the years between glory and desperation have been understudied. Indeed, Stephen Platt’s Imperial Twilight: The Opium…

Capernaum a film directed by Nadine Labaki There is a lexicon that comes with a particular upbringing and class privilege in the Middle East, and that casts a shadow over your life when you reach a threshold of intellectual maturity or awareness. It’s not easy to admit: that what are actually street-children we grew up calling beggars, or that the visa-sponsored Filipino maids were a modern-day form of slaves. But no matter how aware you become, it’s a reality that persists. Class privilege is passed from one generation to the next, in countries living under protracted dictatorships and with varied histories of casting off colonial rule and staking claim to rights and land. It is in some sense a revolt against these systems and inequalities that drives Nadine Labaki’s Cannes…

A version of this essay was delivered as the Robert B. Silvers Lecture at the New York Public Library on December 4, 2018. I sense some obligation to explain the title of this talk. The flimflam man currently occupying the White House has provoked such an increase in the amount of hate circulating in the world that sometimes it makes me dizzy, as if I were about to lose my balance and fall. He uses hatred and latent violence every time he feels the need to run from the taxman or the prosecutor. The three years since the last presidential campaign have been so filled with outrage and insult, it’s hard to remember that from the first day he stood on that escalator in his very own tower, there has…

The World Between Empires: Art and Identity in the Ancient Middle East an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, March 18–June 23, 2019. Catalog of the exhibition by Blair Fowlkes-Childs and Michael Seymour. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 310 pp., $65.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) The Iranian Expanse: Transforming Royal Identity Through Architecture, Landscape, and the Built Environment, 550 BCE–642 CE by Matthew P. Canepa. University of California Press, 494 pp., $95.00 The Last Pagan Emperor: Julian the Apostate and the War Against Christianity by H.C. Teitler. Oxford University Press, 271 pp., $29.95 The Metropolitan Museum has once again brought us back to the Middle East—to a cradle of civilization that, by a cruel turn of history, has become a scene of hatred, destruction, and coldblooded…

Orange World and Other Stories by Karen Russell. Knopf, 271 pp., $25.95 Karen Russell’s new collection, Orange World, contains eight stories whose weirdness rests largely in their premises. “Bog Girl: A Romance” is a love story about a teenage boy and the girlfriend he finds preserved in a peat bog; “The Tornado Auction” concerns storm ranchers who breed prize twisters, funnel clouds, dust devils, and waterspouts; “Madame Bovary’s Greyhound” focuses on the tragic heroine’s once-enthralled, now blasé canine, beset by a trickledown version of his owner’s sexual boredom. In capsule form, Russell’s stories pass among readers like gossip or jokes or memes; some of them have become famous for the kernel of tall tale or urban legend they contain. I don’t know how Russell, the author of two previous collections…

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It by Yascha Mounk. Harvard University Press, 393 pp., $29.95 How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Broadway, 302 pp., $15.00 (paper) The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder. Tim Duggan Books, 359 pp., $27.00 How Democracy Ends by David Runciman. Basic Books, 249 pp., $27.00 For the American right, Donald Trump’s inauguration as the forty-fifth president of the United States was a moment of political rebirth. Elements of American conservatism had long fostered a reactionary counterculture, which defined the push for civil rights as oppression, resisted the equality of women and the transgression of conventional heterosexual norms, pilloried the hegemony of the liberal media, and was suspicious of globalism and…