Innholdsfortegnelse for June 27, 2019 i The New York Review of Books

PETER ADAMSON teaches ancient and Arabic philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Medieval Philosophy, the fourth volume of his series of books based on his podcast A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, will be published in September. DAVID A. BELL is Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor of History at Princeton. His book Men on Horseback: Charisma and Power in the Age of Revolutions will be published next year. CHRISTOPHER BENFEY is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke. He is the author of Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay: Reflections on Art, Family, and Survival. ELAINE BLAIR is a regular contributor to The New York Review. CALEB CRAIN is the author of the novel Necessary Errors and the critical study American Sympathy. His second novel, Overthrow, will…

War over Peace One Hundred Years of Israel’s Militaristic Nationalism Uri Ben-Eliezer “Brilliantly demonstrates how the very cultural foundation of Israel has stood in the way of its pursuing peace. Israel’s leading sociologist of the military, Uri Ben-Eliezer, reveals the destructive effects of the country’s particular brand of nationalism and its penchant to solve political problems by military means.” —Joel Migdal, author of Shifting Sands: The United States in the Middle East Fruit from the Sands The Silk Road Origins of the Foods We Eat Robert N. Spengler III “Spengler takes the reader on a kaleidoscopic and dazzling journey: from the rice paddies of southern China, the stands of melon vendors at the bazaars in Samarkand, and the archaeological excavations in remote mountain regions of present-day Kazakhstan to the reader’s…

Empresses of China’s Forbidden City, 1644–1912 an exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, August 18, 2018–February 10, 2019; and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, D.C., March 30–June 23, 2019. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Daisy Yiyou Wang and Jan Stuart. Peabody Essex Museum/Freer Sackler, 261 pp., $60.00 (paper) (distributed by Yale University Press) An enormous portrait of the Chinese empress dowager Cixi, arguably the most powerful woman in Chinese history, stands in the entrance hall of the Sackler Gallery as an introduction to “Empresses of China’s Forbidden City, 1644–1912,” an exhibition of more than two hundred objects from the Palace Museum in Beijing that marks the fortieth anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the US and the People’s Republic of China. Painted by the…

Defending the Public’s Enemy The Life and Legacy of Ramsey Clark Lonnie T. Brown, Jr. “An intimate window into Ramsey Clark’s controversial career as it intersected and shaped twentieth-century political and legal history.” —Anthony Romero, Executive Director, ACLU Invisible Companions Encounters with Imaginary Friends, Gods, Ancestors, and Angels J. Bradley Wigger “Wigger’s intriguing research on young children’s imaginary friends leads us into deep consideration of our remarkable human capacity for social imagination.” —Peter Gray, author of Free to Learn The Chinese and the Iron Road Building the Transcontinental Railroad Edited by Gordon H. Chang and Shelley Fisher Fishkin “This book brings to life the stories of workers who defied incredible odds and gave their lives to unite these states into a nation.” —David Henry Hwang, playwright of The Dance and…

“Lauren Kessler avoids all the usual tropes in writing about prison, and has written a keenly observed and deeply felt narrative about what it means to be locked up for life. This book, so original and so compelling, took hold of me, and wouldn’t let me go. It was revelatory.” —Alex Kotlowitz, bestselling author of There Are No Children Here “Highlights the life of one of our most remarkable United States Senators, not just in Indiana but in the nation. Birch Bayh shows the dedication of a man to his state and country through more than 25 years of elected office.” —Geoffrey Paddock, author of Indiana Political Heroes “This is an extraordinary memoir, self-ironic and humane, dealing with one of the darkest chapters of twentieth-century history.” —Konrad H. Jarausch, author…

AVAILABLE NOW “I often found this book beguiling, and moving. He is ridiculous and brave, he never conflates sincerity with genuine candor, and he poses the kinds of questions that only ever bring trouble (and are the only kind worth reading about).” —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times “Shields wants to be unmasked, to be real even if that means appearing weak or ugly…. Shields’s brave honesty stands alone.” —Sibbie O’Sullivan, The Washington Post The Trouble with Men Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power David Shields 21st Century Essays Series AVAILABLE NOW “Her [Svoboda’s] meticulous and lyrical prose brings these stories to life in ways that are often stunning, deeply felt, and uniquely perceptive. Taken alone, these stories … provide their own vivid snapshots of lands and people…

In February 1945 Franklin Roosevelt, on his way home from the Yalta Conference—and just two months before his death—made a detour to Egypt to meet Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman al Saud, the founder of the modern Saudi state. Historians recall that the Saudi monarch brought aboard the USS Quincy live sheep for roasting on deck and his astrologer, while the American president introduced the seventy-year-old king to ice cream and movies. Yet their concerns were serious: the United States sought guaranteed access to the oil that had been discovered in the kingdom seven years earlier; Ibn Saud, as he was known, wanted protection from a challenge to his family’s rule that would be backed—in his imagination—by Britain. In the seventy-four years since it was conceived, the relationship between the United…

The Dictionary Wars: The American Fight Over the English Languageby Peter Martin.Princeton University Press, 358 pp., $29.95 Under certain circumstances, the question of whether a particular string of letters constitutes a word can assume a momentary prominence, with money or honor on the line. Passionate squabbles can erupt over a game of Scrabble or over how Jeff Bezos asserts his right to privacy. In his February online post accusing the National Enquirer of blackmail, the billionaire founder of Amazon used the doubtful word “complexifier,” twice, as in, “My ownership of the Washington Post is a complexifier for me.” Commentators were quick to point out that “complexifier” is indeed a word, although a verb, in French.1 Poor Bezos, they seemed to imply, deserved some linguistic latitude for having employed a combination…

The Ukrainian television series Servant of the People, which aired from 2015 until this year, is the story of Vasyl Holoborodko, a dedicated history teacher in his late thirties who lives with his parents. His father is a taxi driver, his mother a neurologist, and his sister a train conductor. This mixture of familial professions would be surprising in an American setting, but it is perfectly logical in Ukraine, where doctors in the public sector belong to the beleaguered lower-middle class, at best. (The average salary for a Ukrainian doctor is around $200 a month.) Vasyl is divorced, with a young son: his marriage was destroyed by money worries. His father tells him he’s wasting time by going to work, since unemployment payments are bigger than a teacher’s salary. The…

Japan Rearmed The Politics of Military Power Sheila A. Smith “Smith tells us why the Japanese public’s evolving attitude toward the use of military force is important to American security and the peace of northeast Asia. A mustread for U.S. policymakers responsible for Asia.” — J. Thomas Schieffer, former U.S. Ambassador to Japan Assembling the Dinosaur Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle Lukas Rieppel “Highly recommended as a stimulating account of science during the Gilded Age and beyond.” — Janet Browne, author of Charles Darwin: Voyaging The Thirty-Year Genocide Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894-1924 Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi “Offers a subtle diagnosis of why, at particular moments over a span of three decades, Ottoman rulers and their successors unleashed torrents of suffering.” —New York…

Exhalation by Ted Chiang. Knopf, 350 pp., $25.95 Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. Vintage, 281 pp., $16.00 (paper) What fiction is made out of is a bit of a mystery, but an old bromide has it that ideas should not be a major component. T. S. Eliot praised Henry James for not having any in his fiction, which seems to accord with James’s own understanding of his work. “Nothing is my last word about anything,” he once wrote to a critic who had upset him by construing a particular portrait in one of his tales as a general statement. Along similar lines, George Orwell praised Charles Dickens for being “a free intelligence” who, in Orwell’s estimation, “has no constructive suggestions, not even a clear grasp of…

Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin edited by Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder. Semiotext(e), 407 pp., $17.95 (paper; distributed by MIT Press) Andrea Dworkin found feminism in 1971, while she was on the run from her violent ex-husband, sleeping on friends’ floors and moving frequently to evade his stalking. She had married at twenty-two, to a fellow New Left countercultural activist from the Netherlands, and moved to Amsterdam to live with him. Soon after they married he began beating her. The first incident seemed like it must have been some kind of mistake. Domestic violence had not been a part of Dworkin’s childhood, and she knew nothing about it. “At the time, so far as I knew, I was the only person this had ever…

What is the proper function of governmentwhen people irritate uswith avocadoat every successive disaster? The only weekend uniformtotalizing the utopianism ofabsolute political freedomis looking young. Can I beat jet lag witha giant pretenseof grieffor being a human being on this earth? I had a baby months ago and I still feelunexpected post-Kantian affinitieswith the pelvic floorof economic success. What’s not to likeabout an instinct for self-preservationwhen you want to impresspeople who have died? Do I really needthe sensation of eating a caketo feel guiltyabout cancer? Isn’t everyone selfishabout getting laidin a world set free offemale breadwinners? Is it time to freeze yourlife-based teleologywith the porn you’re watchingabout under-eye circles? Renounce the material worldwith multiple careersin a complex economyof being agreeable. Doesn’t life requirehaving less sexwhen there are no victimsof good…

Sentence to Hope: A Sa‘dallah Wannous Reader translated from the Arabic and with an introduction by Robert Myers and Nada Saab.Yale University Press, 430 pp., $38.00 In the spring of 1967, Sa‘dallah Wannous, a young Syrian journalist and playwright, was studying theater at the Sorbonne in Paris. That June, after Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, it gained control of Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Sinai; about 100,000 Syrians were driven from the Golan Heights, which Israel still holds today. It is hard to overstate the psychic and political shock of this turn of events in Arab countries. “The defeat of 1967 was the defining moment of our history as a people and our personal history,” Wannous told his friend the filmmaker Omar Amiralay, who…

The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder: Labor’s Last Best Weaponby David Webber.Harvard University Press, 331 pp., $35.00 There has now been more than half a century of worsening economic inequality in America. Until the late 1960s, incomes had been growing more equal for nearly four decades: through the Great Depression and World War II and then the Korean War, through the placid Eisenhower years, even through most of the Vietnam War and the social turmoil of that time. Many thoughtful observers expected the trend to continue indefinitely. Ever greater equality was supposedly the hallmark of a maturing economy and an advancing democracy. But 1968 was the turning point. As the years passed, what at first seemed a statistical blip became a matter of curiosity among economists, and in time a…

To the Editors: Nicholas Guyatt’s review of my No Property in Man [NYR, June 6] charges that the book isn’t really a work of history at all but, at bottom, a political polemic disguised as history, an act of projection aimed at Bernie Sanders and Guyatt’s own “younger generation of scholars.” I can only conjecture why Guyatt, a former student in my Princeton graduate seminar, felt compelled to defame my professional integrity. On the level of historical scholarship, Guyatt’s constant distortion of the book’s evidence and contentions betrays a peculiar confusion in which historical dogma and its imperatives prevail over facts and reason. At every turn, Guyatt either garbles or corrupts my arguments. According to him, the book makes a “case for an antislavery Founding” and advances “a form of…

PAUL STARR, Entrenchment: Wealth, Power, and the Constitution of Democratic Societies “With the depth of historic and political insight he is celebrated for, Starr gives us a new and crucial lens through which to view what is happening in America—the entrenchment of great wealth through political power.”—Robert B. Reich, author of The Common Good and Saving Capitalism ANTHONY ALOFSIN, Wright and New York: The Making of America’s Architect “A watershed investigation of Wright’s life in the 1920s, when he landed, adrift, in New York. The city proved antagonistic, irresistibly so, and transformed him. Alofsin’s erudition, compelling prose, and first-rate detective work will alter how you perceive both Wright and Manhattan.”—Judith Dupré, author of Skyscrapers WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI, Charleston Fancy: Little Houses and Big Dreams in the Holy City “In this engaging…

CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU Emancipation After Hegel Achieving a Contradictory Revolution TODD MCGOWAN “This is the book we were waiting for … With Todd McGowan, the revolutionary Hegel is back—however, it is not the old Marxist Hegel but the Hegel AFTER Marx, the Hegel who makes us aware that revolution is an open and risked process which necessarily entails catastrophic failures…. Read this book … or ignore it at your own risk!” —Slavoj Žižek Time and the Generations Population Ethics for a Diminishing Planet PARTHA DASGUPTA “[A] wonderfully wide-ranging, brilliant, and generous book.” —Simon Blackburn, Trinity College, Cambridge Hot Carbon Carbon-14 and a Revolution in Science JOHN F. MARRA “With precision and verve, oceanographer John F. Marra profiles the most important isotope on earth.” —Science Magazine The Limits of Tolerance Enlightenment Values and…

The Clean Body A Modern History PETER WARD Cloth $37.95 368pp December 2019 “… a beautifully written tour de force, a wonderfully accessible book, and a joy to read.” –Brian Lewis, author of The Moral Mapping of Victorian and Edwardian London China’s Urban Future and the Quest for Stability EDITED BY REBECCA CLOTHEY AND RICHARDSON DILWORTH Paper $37.95 264pp This timely and concise collection dissects the resiliency of the social, economic, and political forces driving the urbanization of a modern superpower. Putin Kitsch in America ALISON ROWLEY Cloth $29.95 200pp September 2019 “… an engaging and extremely interesting book that is at times laugh-out-loud funny and occasionally disturbing. This is a work that ventures into an almost entirely novel field …” –Raul Robinson, University of Ottawa What Was History Painting…

Book of Beasts The Bestiary in the Medieval World Edited by Elizabeth Morrison With Larisa Grollemond With hundreds of color illustrations and contributions by leading scholars, this gorgeous volume celebrates the visual contributions of the bestiary and explores its widespread influence on medieval art and culture as well as on modern and contemporary art. J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM Hardcover $60.00 Looking at Jewelry A Guide to Terms, Styles, and Techniques Susanne Gänsicke and Yvonne J. Markowitz With a lively introduction that offers a cultural history of jewelry and its production, this accessible book offers concise explanations of key jewelry terms, styles, and techniques. J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM Paperback $19.95 Manet and Modern Beauty The Artist’s Last Years Edited by Scott Allan, Emily A. Beeny, and Gloria Groom This stunning examination…

freersackler.si.edu @freersackler #WhistlerattheFreer The Peacock Room in Blue and White In The Peacock Room in Blue and White, Kangxi porcelains in the Freer Gallery’s collection are juxtaposed with recently commissioned ceramics in a “Kangxi style” to reveal James McNeill Whistler’s aesthetic vision in the late 1870s. Whistler in Watercolor Whistler in Watercolor offers a rare look at the artist’s fragile paintings and recent research explores his materials, techniques, and artistic genius. The book Whistler in Watercolor: Lovely Little Games (288 pages, 260 full-color images) is now available. Freer|Sackler is grateful to the Henry Luce Foundation as the exhibition’s lead sponsor and to Jacqueline B. Mars as its lead patron. Support for the Freer|Sackler’s American art program is provided by the Lunder Foundation.…

The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages by François-Xavier Fauvelle, translated from the French by Troy Tice. Princeton University Press, 264 pp., $29.95 African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa by Michael A. Gomez. Princeton University Press, 505 pp., $45.00 African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic by Herman L. Bennett. University of Pennsylvania Press, 226 pp., $34.95 A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution by Toby Green. University of Chicago Press, 614 pp., $40.00 Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange Across Medieval Saharan Africa an exhibition at the Block Museum of Art, Evanston, Illinois, January 26–July 21, 2019; the Aga…

The Beginnings of Philosophy in Greeceby Maria Michela Sassi, translated from the Italian by Michele Asuni.Princeton University Press, 209 pp., $29.95 Philosophy was either born once, or born three times, or didn’t need to be born at all. The least plausible of these options is also the most widely believed: that all philosophy worthy of the name can be traced ultimately to a unique origin among the ancient Greeks. To see things in this way is to think like an Aristotelian. Aristotle’s unparalleled influence as a philosopher in his own right is matched by his influence as a historian of philosophy. It was he who surveyed earlier Greek thinkers and identified some of them—beginning with Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximines, all from the city of Miletus on the Mediterranean coast in…

THE VALUE OF A CELL To the Editors: I am not sure how your reviewer Gavin Francis took away from my book, The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease, the idea that the mini-vaccine factories known as WI-38 cells were “donated,” as he writes, for research [NYR, May 23]. The cells came from the lungs of an approximately seventeen-week fetus legally aborted in Sweden in 1962. The scientists who took the fetus, packed the lungs on ice and flew them to Philadelphia, and the scientist at the Wistar Institute who developed their cells, did not for a moment think to ask for permission from the woman who had the abortion, whom I call Mrs. X. Like the more famous Henrietta Lacks, Mrs. X’s opinion or…