Innholdsfortegnelse for August 15, 2019 i The New York Review of Books

This America: The Case for the Nationby Jill Lepore.Liveright, 150 pp., $16.95 This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifestoby Suketu Mehta.Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 306 pp., $27.00 A poignant quality of anachronism threatens these exigent, idealistic books by the writer-professors Jill Lepore and Suketu Mehta. The product of admirable research and serious reflection, they appear at a time when the very project of carefully acquiring and disseminating insights about the world, and the United States in particular, has been marginalized by the historic momentum of Republican authoritarianism. Presumably these manuscripts were completed by January 2019. Since then, things have moved at an extraordinary speed into extraordinary terrain. The House of Representatives, the FBI, the Department of Justice, the Office of Special Counsel, the Office of Legal Counsel, the United…

To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Cultureby Eleonory Gilburd.Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 458 pp., $35.00 A Ransomed Dissident: A Life in Art Under the Sovietsby Igor Golomstock, translated from the Russian by Sara Jolly and Boris Dralyuk.London: I. B. Tauris, 291 pp., £25.00 Ilya Ehrenburg considered himself an “average writer”: “I know that what I write today is necessary to people now, but tomorrow they won’t need it,” he told the art historian Igor Golomstock. His sentimental novella The Thaw, published in 1954, a year after Stalin’s death, gave its name to an era in Soviet history. Although his many books are now forgotten, Ehrenburg’s metaphor remains as useful for historians today as it was for people living in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and…

The Novel of Ferraraby Giorgio Bassani, translated from the Italian and with an introduction by Jamie McKendrick, with a foreword by André Aciman.Norton, 744 pp., $39.95 When Giorgio Bassani published his most commercially successful novel, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, in 1962, he had already won the prestigious Strega Prize for his collection Five Stories of Ferrara (1956), and served as an editor at two multilingual and far-reaching literary magazines as well as the legendary publishing house Feltrinelli. He could rightly place himself among the great Italian realist writers—Alberto Moravia, Cesare Pavese, Elsa Morante, and others—and was slowly achieving his life’s ambition: transmuting the vanished world of his youth, the intermingled Jewish and gentile communities in and around the northeast Italian town of Ferrara, into a literary monument. At the…

High and preposterous and separate—Lozenge of love!Medallionof art!—Philip Larkin First it was a heavenly body—a beacon, or a world, a place where no one could possibly go. Then, from 1969 to 1972, twelve people landed there in spaceships. On behalf of all humanity, they said. Is it time to go back? Moon fever is rising. The fiftieth anniversary of the first lunar landing has stirred dormant memories and produced a bounty of books, films, and exhibitions. Meanwhile, technocrat billionaires have helped catalyze a new moon race. Elon Musk is marketing moon trips to the superrich, and Jeff Bezos says we should colonize the moon to save the earth. China landed a robot called Jade Rabbit 2 on the far side in January, and India is trying to get a water-seeking…

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warmingby David Wallace-Wells.Tim Duggan, 310 pp., $27.00 Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?by Bill McKibben.Henry Holt, 291 pp., $28.00 Climate scientists’ worst-case scenarios back in 2007, the first year the Northwest Passage became navigable without an icebreaker (today, you can book a cruise through it), have all been overtaken by the unforeseen acceleration of events. No one imagined that twelve years later the United Nations would report that we have just twelve years left to avert global catastrophe, which would involve cutting fossil-fuel use nearly by half. Since 2007, the UN now says, we’ve done everything wrong. New coal plants built since the 2015 Paris climate agreement have already doubled the equivalent coal-energy output of Russia and Japan, and 260 more…

The Parisian, or Al-Barisiby Isabella Hammad.Grove, 566 pp., $27.00 In his meditation on the peculiar beauties and burdens of Palestinian life, After the Last Sky, Edward Said writes, “The striking thing about Palestinian prose and prose fiction is its formal instability.” While readers may be tempted to look for political messages, Said suggests that the real drama in this body of literature is the writers’ struggle to come up with a coherent form, “a narrative that might overcome the almost metaphysical impossibility of representing the present.” Representing the present is never easy—the lines begin streaking as soon as they’re laid down—but the Palestinian present is perhaps especially slippery, because its people live under such disparate conditions: occupation, exile, second-class citizenship, but also, in rare cases like Said’s, material comfort and…

Aniara: A Review of Man in Time and Spaceby Harry Martinson, adapted from the Swedish by Hugh MacDiarmid and Elspeth Harley Schubert.Knopf, 133 pp. (1963) Aniaraan opera by Karl-Birger Blomdahl Aniaraa film directed by Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja An immense and well-stocked spaceship sets out on what should be a routine voyage: shuttling eight thousand refugees to resettlement on Mars after Earth’s environment has been poisoned by a succession of nuclear wars. Early in the flight, the ship is bumped slightly off course after a near collision with an asteroid; its navigational equipment is damaged, and it will be unable to change direction. The passengers must resign themselves to years of continued existence as the ship proceeds inexorably into the empty regions beyond the solar system, heading for a…

In his only novel, Seventy-Two Virgins, published in 2004, Boris Johnson uses a strange word. The hero, like Johnson himself at the time, is a backbench Conservative member of the House of Commons. Roger Barlow is, indeed, a somewhat unflattering self-portrait—he bicycles to Westminster, he is unfaithful to his wife, he is flippantly racist and politically opportunistic, and he is famously disheveled: In the fond imagination of one Commons secretary who crossed his path he had the air of a man who had just burst through a hedge after running through a garden having climbed down a drainpipe on being surprised in the wrong marital bed.1 Barlow, throughout the novel, is in constant fear that his political career is about to be ended by a tabloid scandal. In a moment…

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Presentby David Treuer.Riverhead, 512 pp., $28.00 In 1881 Helen Hunt Jackson, a member of that era’s East Coast liberal elite, shook up her world with her book A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government’s Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes. Much of it is about massacres of Indians. As Bishop H. B. Whipple wrote in the introduction, “We have not a hundred miles between the Atlantic and Pacific which has not been the scene of an Indian massacre.” Jackson revived memories of horrors that had been almost forgotten and are barely remembered today—the killing of peaceful Moravian Indians at what is now Gnadenhutten, Ohio, or the wiping out of a small tribe of Christian…

Sarah Lucas: Au Naturelan exhibition at the New Museum, New York City, September 26, 2018–January 20, 2019; and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, June 9–September 1, 2019.Catalog of the exhibition edited by Massimiliano Gioni and Margot Norton.Phaidon/New Museum, 239 pp., $79.95 The art of the British sculptor Sarah Lucas seems to operate on a sliding scale between anger and whimsy. At one end are works like Receptacle of Lurid Things (1991), a life-size flesh-colored wax cast of what we assume to be a middle finger—raised at the art audience? At patriarchy? At everyone?—and at the other is Sex Baby Bed Base (2000), a mattress spring frame from which Lucas has hung (on a wire clothes hanger) a small sleeveless T-shirt, the fabric sliced in front to admit a couple of…

There is no plausible reason for the United States to go to war with Iran, although the Trump administration appears to be preparing to do so. In mid-May, the Pentagon presented the White House with plans for deploying up to 120,000 troops to the Middle East to respond to Iranian attacks on US forces or the acceleration of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. To be sure, the Iranian government is guilty of genuine transgressions against American interests and values. It backs Syria’s brutal dictator, Bashar al-Assad. It undermines the security of Israel by organizing and sustaining Shia militias in Syria, supporting the Palestinian extremist group Hamas, and arming the Lebanese Shia militia Hezbollah. By serving as Iran’s proxy on Israel’s border, Hezbollah exposes Lebanon—long a fragile state—to the risk of Israeli…

Alarums and Excursions: Improvising Politics on the European Stageby Luuk van Middelaar, translated from the Dutch by Liz Waters.Agenda, 301 pp., $35.00 How to Democratize Europeby Stéphanie Hennette, Thomas Piketty, Guillaume Sacriste, and Antoine Vauchez, translated from the French by Paul Dermine, Marc LePain, and Patrick Camiller.Harvard University Press, 209 pp., $24.95 For many who look at Europe from afar, its politics seem interesting only when conceived as a Trumpian spectacle: strongman blowhards attacking hollow liberal elites, a migration crisis at the border, a seemingly unstoppable right-wing international at the gates of power in capitals across the continent. In the months leading up to the elections for the European Parliament in late May, this was the narrative that purported to explain the stakes of the vote. “The European Union, a…

In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern Englandby Keith Thomas.Brandeis University Press, 356 pp., $95.00; $45.00 (paper) “Civility,” Keith Thomas notes in this absorbing book, “was (and is) a slippery and unstable word.” “Civil” and “civilian” evoke the social life of a people not under military rule, the world of the civitas—the organized community—the only place, according to Aristotle and Cicero, where the good life is possible. While “courtesy” relates to the values of the court, “civility,” Thomas writes, is “the virtue of citizens”: in his Dictionary (1755), Samuel Johnson defined it as both “politeness” and “the state of being civilized.” Thomas explores the understanding and use of the term in England from 1500 to 1800, when it referred both to manners in daily life and manners…