Innholdsfortegnelse for September 26, 2019 i The New York Review of Books

JOHN BANVILLE’s latest novel is Mrs. Osmond. CHRISTOPHER R. BROWNING is Frank Porter Graham Professor of History Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His most recent book is Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp. MICHAEL CHABON lives and works in Berkeley and Los Angeles. SARAH CHURCHWELL is a Professor of American literature and humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. Her book Behold America: The Entangled History of “America First” and “The American Dream” was published last year. J.M. COETZEE is Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide. He is the author of seventeen works of fiction, as well as numerous works of criticism and translation. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. MARTIN FILLER’s most recent book…

“In Fabulous Monsters, Alberto Manguel argues that imaginary characters portray our own lives. Yes, we say, this is how we are, this is what we do to one another, this is true. That, perhaps, is where literature can help most.”—Salman Rushdie “Perceptive and fair-minded.”—Jonathan Rose, Wall Street Journal ■ “Besides being approachably succinct, Avineri’s sympathetic account is distinguished by its appearance in the highly regarded Jewish Lives series.”—James Miller, New York Times ■ Jewish Lives “If you combine the pleasures of a seductive novel, discovering a real American heroine, and learning the multiracial history of this country that wasn’t in our textbooks, you will have an idea of the great gift that Adele Logan Alexander has given us.”—Gloria Steinem “This clear-eyed, sobering book narrates a history of whistle-blowing, from the…

CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU Social Media and the Public Interest Media Regulation in the Disinformation Age PHILIP M. NAPOLI “This book is bold, clear, and necessary. Readers of this book will gain a deep historical understanding of the complex relationship among social media platforms, news producers, citizens, and the state.” Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy “Drawing on the history of U.S. media regulation, Napoli off ers an insightful framework for reimagining how social media can serve the public interest.”—danah boyd, author of It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens The Story of the Dinosaurs in 25 Discoveries Amazing Fossils and the People Who Found Them DONALD R. PROTHERO “[Prothero] delivers another winning popular science book…. dinosaur buffs will be delighted, fascinated, and entertained.”—Publishers Weekly…

“A marvelous book that finally does justice to its majestic subject. Thomas Campanella knows Brooklyn, inside and out.” —Phillip Lopate, editor of Writing New York Cloth $35.00 “Combining sharp analytical insight with vivid interviews, Indebted transforms our understanding of college finances.” —Viviana A. Zelizer, Princeton University, author of Economic Lives Cloth $29.95 “Entertaining and profound…. Schneider offers sophisticated insights on what is perhaps the number one long-term challenge confronting humanity.” —Martin Rees, author of On the Future Cloth $24.95 “This is essential reading for activists, scholars, and everyone else interested in human rights.” —Lynn Hunt, author of Inventing Human Rights Cloth $35.00 Human Rights and Crimes against Humanity “This Land Is Our Land is moving, unsettling, and, ultimately, inspiring—a profound meditation for our heedless era.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize–winning author…

ISBN: 9781487522131 “A timely and hugely valuable resource for global health practitioners…” – Muhammad Pate, Duke University ISBN: 9781442626645 “Duty and Choice is a collection of the highest quality and will be eagerly received by the field.” – Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant, Queen’s University ISBN: 9781487504694 “Well informed, sympathetic but not sentimental, a book that allows us to see the past in the present.” – Ivan Krastev, Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, Austria ISBN: 9781487520281 “…Benoit paints a compelling portrait of an exhilarating fashion era…” – Jeanne Beker, Journalist, Author, and Style Editor ISBN: 9781487523565 “…Course Correction is the only recent [book] that turns anew to the reasons universities exist and the prerequisites for their success.” – Peter MacKinnon, President Emeritus, University of Saskatchewan, Officer of the Order of Canada ISBN: 9781487504021…

Goodbye, My Havana The Life and Times of a Gringa in Revolutionary Cuba Anna Veltfort “Both historically important and utterly engaging. Veltfort’s early life is portrayed in exquisite, uncompromising, and impeccably researched detail.” —Justin Hall, editor of No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics REDWOOD & PRESS Crisis! When Political Parties Lose the Consent to Rule Cedric de Leon “A compelling narrative that serves as a resource to anyone wishing to understand and end the crisis of confidence that has gripped American politics.” —Jim McGovern, United States Congressman Iran Reframed Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic Narges Bajoghli “A must-read on Iran’s media landscape and paramount for anyone who wants to understand Iran as it really is. Gripping and provocative.” —Negar Mottahedeh, author of Whisper Tapes: Kate Millett…

An in-depth look at working men and women in America, the challenges they face, and how they can be re-empowered. “Riveting…. Deeply inspiring and profoundly important.”— Robert B. Reich, former Secretary of Labor One of The Marshall Project’s Best Criminal Justice Books of the Year “Riveting…. An intriguing and sometimes disturbing deep dive into some powerful social dilemmas.” —Los Angeles Times “Vivid storytelling…. During this period of deepening racial division, there is the possibility of redemption.” —The Washington Post A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year “Indispensable…. Bold and ultimately persuasive…. Exquisitely well timed.” —The New York Times Book Review A landmark revisionist history that illuminates China’s central role in the ideological battles of the twentieth century. “A masterful corrective…. Eloquent, engrossing, intelligent.”—Evan Osnos, National Book Award-winning author of…

The Unnamable Present by Roberto Calasso, translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 193 pp., $26.00 The title of this slim book, the ninth part of Robert Calasso’s vast, ongoing project, is taken from the first volume of the series, The Ruin of Kasch, published in Italian—as La Rovina di Kasch—in 1983. The relevant passage goes, in part: “For those of us living at this moment, the most exact and most acute sensation is one of not knowing where we are treading from day to day…. We are living in the ‘unnamable present.’” Yet from the perspective of now, as we reel in mounting bewilderment from one jolting instance of political and social bizarrerie to the next, the world as it was in 1983 seems as…

Tom Veilleux Gallery, 97A Exchange Street, Suite 302, Portland, ME 04101; tomveilleux.com; (207)828-0784; info@tomveilleux.com Monday–Friday by appointment ROCKWELL KENT (1882-1971) Woman Reading Cover Design for Demcourier 8” x 5 ¼” ink and crayon on paper Demcourier was published by the Demco Library Supplies company in the late 1930’s. We are always interested in purchasing original works of art by Rockwell Kent. Also currently available, works by: George Bellows • Guy Pene du Bois Gertrude Fiske • Leon Kroll Max Kuehne • Robert Laurent Elie Nadelman • Pablo Picasso • Marguerite Zorach • William Zorach Prince Street Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, New York, NY Grant Drumheller, Paintings September 3–28, Opening September 5, 5–8 PM The City and the Sea With illustrated catalog and essay by Michael Taav. "Each piece in…

THE RESEARCH AND ACADEMIC PROGRAM AT THE CLARK ART INSTITUTE ANNOUNCES ITS FALL AND SPRING FELLOWS FOR 2019–2020 Carlos Basualdo Philadelphia Museum of Art Class of 1974 Curatorial Fellow Jiat-Hwee Chang National University of Singapore Manton Fellow Adrienne Childs Independent Scholar Clark Curatorial Fellow Christa Clarke Independent Scholar Clark Curatorial Fellow Brigid Doherty Princeton University Holly Fellow Natasha Eaton University College London Manton Fellow Susan Gagliardi Emory University Mellon Network Fellow Julie Harris Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership Center for Spain in America Fellow Matthew Hunter McGill University Florence Gould Foundation Fellow Lisa Lee Emory University Clark Fellow Neeraja Poddar The City Palace Museum, Udaipur Clark Curatorial Fellow Kirsten Scheid American University of Beirut Clark/Oakley Humanities Fellow Jared Sexton University of California, Irvine Beinecke Fellow For more information,…

RAINBOW FOUNTAIN PENS FOR EVERYDAY Color coding is an old-school method that’s a proven way to increase productivity. Colors help organize and prioritize a To Do list and can indicate what needs to be done sooner rather than later. But this set of eight pens isn’t only a tool for efficiency—using them is lots of fun. Journaling, writing thank you notes and gift cards—what can’t be improved by a rainbow assortment of 8 fountain pens? And we admit it: we had low expectations for plastic fountain pens, but we were far more than “pleasantly surprised”: these pens are impressive. They’re chic but eminently affordable. Most important for what is first and foremost a tool to be used every day—beautifully engineered: the soft matte barrel is comfortable to hold, the pens…

NOW IN PAPERBACK IJEOMA OLUO SO YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT RACE “With her bold combination of directness and empathy, Oluo offers us a reset, a starting point, a clear way forward.”—dream hampton, filmmaker, writer, activist, and executive producer of Surviving R.Kelly “Oluo is the smartest, most courageous and electrifying young writer on race relations today—the voice of our times. Let her be your guidepost.”—Robin Diangelo, author of White Fragility “Oluo’s mandate is clear and powerful: change will not come unless we are brave enough to name and remove the many forces at work strangling freedom.”—Darnell L.Moore, author of No Ashes in the Fire sealpress.com…

Race After Technology Ruha Benjamin “Brilliant, beautifully argued, engagingly written, and groundbreaking.” Imani Perry, Princeton University Paperback | 304 pages | 978-1-5095-2640-6 | $19.95 Why Cities Look the Way They Do Richard J. Williams “Using our eyes to understand the DNA of cities is the important contribution of Williams’s book. Read it and look around you with heightened vision!” Richard Burdett, LSE Paperback | 256 pages | 978-0-7456-9181-7 | $24.95 Troublemakers A Philosophy of Puer Robustus Dieter Thomä “A masterpiece … The scholarship is astonishing, the insights acute and important, and the pleasure of reading it constant.” Robert Pippin, University of Chicago Hardback | 480 pages | 978-1-5095-2558-4 | $45.00 Lineages of Modernity A History of Humanity from the Stone Age to Homo Americanus Emmanuel Todd “In Lineages of Modernity,…

Lorna Simpson came to prominence in the 1980s with her pioneering approach to conceptual photography. Over the course of three decades, Ms. Simpson has emerged as a leading voice in a generation of American artists questioning constructed historical narratives. Mary Beard is one of the great public intellectuals of our time. A distinguished Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Newnham College, Mary’s prodigious talents and fearless, rigorous contributions to many fields of public discourse have been recognized worldwide. Ed Ruscha works in diverse media with humor and wit, oscillating between sign and substance, locating the sublime in landscapes both natural and artificial. After five decades, he continues to influence contemporary artists worldwide. The J. Paul Getty Medal Getty Trust is honored to present the J.…

The pictorial equivalent of jazz. Here, the visionary photographer Roy DeCarava turns his gaze on legendary jazz icons Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, and Billie Holiday, among many others. Conceived, designed, written, and made as an artist maquette by DeCarava in the early 1960s, this new edition of the sound i saw includes new scholarship by art historian Sherry Turner DeCarava and cultural essayist Radiclani Clytus. Co-published by First Print Press and David Zwirner Books Available at davidzwirnerbooks.com…

The Cosmopolitan Tradition A Noble but Flawed Ideal Martha C. Nussbaum Belknap Press “A timely and insightful analysis of ethical dilemmas.” — Kirkus Reviews The Will of the People The Revolutionary Birth of America T. H. Breen Belknap Press “The American Revolution involved not simply the wisdom of a few great men but, more important, the passions, fears, and religiosity of ordinary people. This is the sensible point of this important and lucidly written book.” — Gordon S. Wood Talk Radio’s America How an Industry Took Over a Political Party That Took Over the United States Brian Rosenwald “A cogent, well-researched, and entertaining explanation of how Donald Trump was elected president… This is the book that provides proper context for the greatest election upset in modern American history.” — Michael…

Toward a Global Middle Ages Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts Edited by Bryan C. Keene Featuring essays, case studies, and numerous color illustrations, this wideranging and provocative collection provides an important, overdue look at book arts around the world, highlighting the interconnected global history of humanity. J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM Paperback $60.00 Tremaine Houses One Family’s Patronage of Domestic Architecture in Midcentury America Volker M. Welter This volume analyzes the extraordinary patronage that the Tremaine family sustained for nearly four decades, during which they partnered with some of the era’s most notable architects including Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Oscar Niemeyer. GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE Hardcover $55.00 Out of Bounds The Collected Writings of Marcia Tucker Edited by Lisa Phillips, Johanna Burton, and Alicia Ritson, with Kate Wiener Assembling…

Little Boy by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Doubleday, 179 pp., $24.00 Ferlinghetti’s Greatest Poems edited by Nancy J. Peters. New Directions, 144 pp., $16.95 Writing Across the Landscape: Travel Journals 1960–2010 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, edited by Giada Diano and Matthew Gleeson. Liveright, 464 pp., $22.95 (paper) Near the end of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s autobiographical novel, Little Boy, the narrator is people-watching at a café in his adopted hometown of San Francisco: “everyone on their portable universes their handheld computers and nobody talking to anyone else.” Why are we here, he wonders, and what are we supposed to be doing on earth? But this is a quaintly existential question coming from a man who piloted a submarine chaser in the Normandy invasion on D-Day; witnessed the aftermath of the atomic payload on Nagasaki; wrote…

Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima, translated from the Japanese by Geraldine Harcourt. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 183 pp., $24.00 Child of Fortune by Yuko Tsushima, translated from the Japanese by Geraldine Harcourt. London: Penguin, 160 pp., £8.99 Woman Running in the Mountains by Yuko Tsushima, translated from the Japanese by Geraldine Harcourt. Pantheon, 275 pp. (1991) In 1948, when Yuko Tsushima was just over a year old, her father, the novelist and lifelong enfant terrible Osamu Dazai, and his mistress, Tomie Yamazaki, committed suicide by throwing themselves into a Tokyo canal. It was Dazai’s fifth documented attempt; a previous suicide pact resulted in the death of a young waitress he’d just met and Dazai’s rescue by a fishing boat. His work and life were steeped in the despair of…

How the Classics Made Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate. Princeton University Press, 361 pp., $24.95 At some point in antiquity, perhaps the second or third century AD, a Greek author whose name is now lost wrote a novel, conventionally known as the History of Apollonius of Tyre. The original Greek text is lost, but in late antiquity another unknown party translated it into Latin. Somewhere along the way the text was abbreviated, producing various loose ends and illogicalities. It was also Christianized, though not very thoroughly; in the extant version, a temple of Diana coexists cheerfully with references to a singular deity. The work has features characteristic of other surviving Greek novels (separated lovers, shipwrecks, a wicked stepmother, pirates, apparent death and false burial, a happy ending), along with a more…

Journeys: A Poet’s Diary by A.K. Ramanujan, edited by Krishna Ramanujan and Guillermo Rodríguez. Gurgaon: Hamish Hamilton/Penguin, 351 pp., ?599 The Interior Landscape: Classical Tamil Love Poems edited and translated from the Tamil by A.K. Ramanujan. New York Review Books, 115 pp., $16.00 (paper) Poetry, A.K. Ramanujan used to say, can never be heard, only overheard. His own poems were often like eavesdropping on a rich, frequently sad, very private conversation, with several disparate and incongruous voices. And while Ramanujan honed his poems to something approaching perfection, with each syllable accounted for, in some sense they are like his diary notes to himself, light with ellipses, thus not quite finished. In one such note, he writes on November 9, 1979: “Maybe publish a journal of ideas, a writer’s notebook with…

Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life an exhibition at Tate Modern, London, July 11, 2019–January 6, 2020. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Mark Godfrey. Tate, 239 pp., $24.99 (paper) Olafur Eliasson: Experience edited by Anna Engberg-Pedersen, with an essay by Michelle Kuo. Phaidon, 423 pp., $85.00 Studio Olafur Eliasson: The Kitchen by Olafur Eliasson, with a preface by Alice Waters. Phaidon, 364 pp., $49.95 No one who saw it has ever forgotten it: a fat yellow sun hanging inside the colossal Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern gallery, glowing through clouds of swirling mist. Olafur Eliasson’s The weather project, which opened in October 2003, was a magical microclimate created at a moment when weather was on everyone’s mind: a hellishly overheated summer—an early harbinger of the ominous climatic changes to…

The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years by Justice John Paul Stevens. Little, Brown, 549 pp., $35.00 The inspiring legacy of Justice John Paul Stevens—including both the brilliance of his mind and the humaneness of his character—are well represented in his last book, The Making of a Justice, published just two months before his death this past July at age ninetynine. But if, as seems likely, the US Supreme Court is poised to embark on a voyage of regression, the book makes for wistful reading as well. For Stevens was a throwback to the postwar liberal Republican appointees (for example, Chief Justice Earl Warren and Justice William Brennan) who did so much to transform the Supreme Court, for a time, into an engine of social progress.…

The Drama of Celebrity by Sharon Marcus. Princeton University Press, 318 pp., $29.95 Celebrity: A History of Fame by Susan J. Douglas and Andrea McDonnell. New York University Press, 313 pp., $25.00 (paper) Playing to the Gods: Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, and the Rivalry That Changed Acting Forever by Peter Rader. Simon and Schuster, 277 pp., $26.00 Celebrity culture is not new, even if it often feels that way. Henry James greatly admired Sarah Bernhardt when he first saw her on the Parisian stage in 1876, but what he witnessed when she arrived in London three years later was “the success of a celebrity, pure and simple”—a success that in James’s eyes had very little to do with her gifts as an artist. “It would require some ingenuity,” he wrote,…

1. An easy way to measure how much and how swiftly Britain has changed in the age of Brexit is to compare the Britain of 2019 with the image the country projected of itself seven years ago. The last time that pre-Brexit Britain showed itself to the world, the last time it thought hard about its identity, even its own meaning as a country, was on a warm summer’s evening in 2012 when, under the guiding hand of the movie director Danny Boyle, London staged the opening ceremony of that year’s Olympic Games. It was a spectacular show, of course, but it was also packed with unexpected oddities and comic eccentricities: children bounced on giant beds, Mr. Bean performed a one-note solo on an electric keyboard. It won immediate and…

Coventry: Essays by Rachel Cusk. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 248 pp., $27.00 Rachel Cusk is fascinated by silence. About five years ago she announced that she had given up on fiction. A prolific writer, she had by then published seven much-praised novels and three memoirs but, she explained, she was done with both genres. The immediate cause of her writing malaise—what she called her “creative death”—was her painful separation and divorce from the father of her two children, and the response to the book that she wrote about it. Aftermath was published in 2012, and Cusk’s exploration of her anguish—her insomnia, her inability to eat, her depression, as well as her reflections on the gender divisions within marriage—proved enormously controversial. The book was praised by readers and reviewers for its…

Gropius: The Man Who Built the Bauhaus by Fiona MacCarthy. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 547 pp., $35.00 The Bauhaus and Harvard an exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, February 8–July 28, 2019 Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago by Hans M. Wingler. MIT Press, 658 pp., $100.00 1. Whatever else one might think of Walter Gropius—the pioneering German architect who founded the Bauhaus a century ago this year and thereby earned an irrevocable place in the pantheon of Modernism—it is hard not to be impressed by his most salient talent: survival. He escaped misfortunes that included being buried alive for three days while a front-line officer in World War I; the narcissistic manipulations of his first wife, Alma Mahler; the barbarism of Hitler, which imperiled his more sympathetic second…

Today I am getting my instructions.I am getting them from something holy.A tall thing in a nest.In a clearing.There is a little dread no memory and everything’s looking forsigns. We don’t knowif this is the way forward or the wayback. Do you? Is it a hundred yards or a million years. A small coniferappears to be laughing.Wind would be nice butit’s only us shaking.Listen up it says. Loosen up. It’s all going to beok. Going to be fine. Give me your hand. What is this youare giving me, where areyour hands, what can yougrip. The thing I am asking for, it is not made ofwords. No. It is not made ofdata. No.Let’s get the map I say. Let’sbrowse through. Over here famine over hereswitchbacks over here to the best of…

DEAD RABBITS LLC www.deadrabbitsbooks.com EMERALD CITY by Brian Birnbaum “Though this nimble and virtuosic novel tracks everything from the long shadow of addiction to the unique pressures of college athletics, Emerald City is, at its heart, an intensely moving story about family.”—Gabe Habash, Author of Stephen Florida 9781950122004 • Paper, $18.99 410 Pages • Literary Fiction Available at Amazon and Ingram Spark Author’s website: www.briansbirnbaum.com. GORDON WOODSIDE EDITIONS WILLIAM INGHAM:CONFIGURATION OF FORCES By Matthew Kangas This lavishly illustrated volume by art critic Matthew Kangas is the first full-length study of Ingham’s art. It brings to a wider audience the Seattle-born artist’s highly gestural, vividly colored abstract painting that has developed gradually since his 1978 debut in Seattle’s Pioneer Square art quarter 02959823837 • Special Edition: Hardbound with dust-jacket, signed by…

Monday, September 23, 2019 David Zwirner, 519 West 19th Street, New York Doors open at 6pm • Talk begins at 6:30pm • The event is free and open to the public. RSVP to NYRB@davidzwirner.com is required. David Zwirner Books and The New York Review of Books are pleased to announce POWER/CULTURE, a four-part series of public talks that will bring together leading writers, artists, and thinkers to explore the role of power within the cultural sphere. The talks will examine the shifting power of the critic, the public, the patron, and the artist, both historically and within today’s cultural landscape. Hosted by Lucas Zwirner, head of content of David Zwirner, and Daniel Mendelsohn, editor-at-large of The New York Review of Books, the talks will take place at David Zwirner’s New…

HERDER IN THE BALANCE To the Editors: I was very surprised to find in Professor Appiah’s “Dialectics of Enlightenment” [NYR, May 9] a number of strange misconceptions, if not actual distortions, both of my own work The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition (Yale University Press, 2009) and of the history and nature of the Enlightenment more broadly. My book indeed argues that the French-Kantian Enlightenment paved the way to liberalism and democracy, and it also makes the argument that Herder was the antithesis of Kant, Rousseau, and Voltaire, an antirationalist who despised the concepts of secular natural law and natural rights, and the founder of organic nationalism and the intellectual father of the Balkanization of Europe. But I have never suggested, as Appiah wrongly assumes, that the Counter-Enlightenment, “exemplified by Edmund Burke and…