Innholdsfortegnelse for October 10, 2019 i The New York Review of Books

CHRISTOPHER DE BELLAIGUE’s latest book is The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle Between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times. HELEN EPSTEIN is Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Global Public Health at Bard. She is the author of Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda, and the War on Terror and The Invisible Cure: Why We Are Losing the Fight Against AIDS in Africa. She has served as a consultant for numerous organizations, including UNICEF, the World Bank, and Human Rights Watch. COLIN GRANT is the author of several books, including Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey and His Dream of Mother Africa. His latest book, Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation, is published in October. EDWARD HIRSCH is the author of nine books of poems, including,…

“This wonderful work provocatively considers what women gain and lose in becoming ‘market-ready’ for evangelical communities.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review Cloth $29.95 “This anthology is a revelation. It might change perceptions of Shakespeare’s plays and reopen the challenging, central question of why they have had such a long and robust afterlife.”—Douglas Lanier, author of Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture Paper $19.95 | Cloth $85.00 “A lyrical and learned introduction to one of modern Italy’s essential poets.”—Jonathan Galassi Paper $19.95 | Cloth $55.00 The Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation “A fascinating and important book, written in an engaging style and packed with intriguing examples.”—Diane Coyle, University of Cambridge Cloth $27.95 “A very readable companion to this important Buddhist scripture that throws light on the fascination the text has held for generations…

Mathias Goeritz: Modernist Art and Architecture in Cold War Mexico by Jennifer Josten. Yale University Press, 339 pp., $65.00 Gyorgy Kepes: Undreaming the Bauhaus by John R. Blakinger. MIT Press, 486 pp., $55.00 Among the many artists, architects, and designers who embraced modernism’s utopian hopes, the ravages of World War II precipitated a reevaluation that led as often to retreat as to reengagement. Mathias Goeritz and Gyorgy Kepes, creative spirits born in the Old World who made names for themselves in the New World, were among the optimists who wagered that the visionary ambitions of the pre-war avant-garde could still be embraced in an increasingly routinized and standardized postwar world. The strikingly handsome and stylishly informal Goeritz courted controversy with dramatic sculptural and architectural projects in Mexico, where he lived…

LITERARY HOLIDAY CARDS EDWARD GOREY DRAGON AND MAN EXCHANGE GIFTS HOLIDAY CARDS ’Tis the season to be thoughtful and loyal, generous and kind: everything this drawing suggests. We’ve been waiting for more than a year for these cards to become available, and here they are at last. Inside message: “Season’s Greetings” Twelve 5" x 7" cards with envelopes, printed on recycled paper. #05-HC232 • $16.95 EDWARD GOREY TINSEL DANCE HOLIDAY CARDS “Ettie Lou Stooper does a tinsel dance at a tree-trimming party in Gumsville, Nebraska, Christmas Eve, 1923” is the caption on this very Gorey holiday card. The card was originally published in 1981 in a limited edition of 450 copies “to be used as a holiday greeting by the artist and publisher. None are for sale.” Lucky for us,…

Homeland by Fernando Aramburu, translated from the Spanish by Alfred MacAdam. Pantheon, 590 pp., $29.95 Everyone is captive in Fernando Aramburu’s novel Homeland. People yearn for freedom and independence, and find only entrapment and incarceration. It is also a novel packed with accidents and illnesses. One woman is paralyzed by a stroke. One suffers urinary incontinence. Another faces an unwanted pregnancy. Four cancers are reported, three car crashes. A boy’s face is disfigured. A beloved cat is flattened. One young man passes out from the pain of kidney stones. Another is operated on for hemorrhoids. Three people consider suicide, while a fourth does indeed shoot himself. Not surprisingly, the dominant emotion is fear; the quality most in demand is courage. To complicate it all, there is the armed struggle for…

To the Editors: On July 24, 2019, the US Department of Agriculture proposed a rule that would end the policy called “Categorical Eligibility” by which households receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) are automatically eligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). If the rule is finalized, over 3.5 million people will lose food stamps. Nearly three fourths of the households slated to lose benefits live in poverty, and almost half of them include an elderly person. As medical students we condemn this rule, and we’ve written a petition, endorsed by more than seven hundred medical trainees at over fifty medical schools and residency programs, to broadcast our opposition. The rule is a blatant attack on poor people. It would be detrimental to the health and well-being of our…

THE FIRST CELL And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last “An elegantly conceived, powerfully written, and far-reaching book that will change the conversation around cancer for decades to come.”—SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE “A passion project, a personal story, a scientific proposal, and quite simply one of the most compelling books you’ll read. By the end you’ll want to sign on to her revolution.”—SHERRY TURKLE “When the history of cancer is eventually written, Azra Raza’s book will be one of the touchstones that illuminated the path to victory.”—AMANDA FOREMAN basicbooks.com…

ON SALE OCTOBER 1 “You can hear the crackle of heat and the roar of a powerful fire burning through these pages. Young angry women, brokenhearted mothers, and men who are lost to themselves and others struggle in the world of Driving in Cars with Homeless Men.” —MIN JIN LEE, 2019 Drue Heinz judge and author of Pachinko “This is one architecturally stunning, linguistically dazzling, hyper-intelligent, heartexpanding debut.” —PAM HOUSTON, author of Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country “Kate Wisel is a fearless writer…. The gritty lyricism of her voice makes me think of punk rock and blown mufflers and creaky bedsprings flavored with cigarette ash, red bull-and-vodka, gum stuck to the bottom of a Doc Marten, a little bit of Denis Johnson mixed up with a Janis Joplin howl.”…

Human Hours by Catherine Barnett. Graywolf, 95 pp., $16.00 (paper) Three Poems by Hannah Sullivan. Faber and Faber, 73 pp., $14.00 (paper) Catherine Barnett’s third collection, Human Hours, is full of questions: many have to do with where we might live, and with whom, while we still can. Barnett asks, in “Accursed Questions, iv,” one of four prose poems that are scattered through the book and sprayed with queries like buckshot, “But who dreamed up this experiment? Are we in it or are we conducting it?” This suggestion of doubling holds true for much of Human Hours; the self is seen from the outside in a number of ways, the primary one being comic. Barnett refers to her “inner clown” in “O Esperanza!,” and in another poem to “clown class.”…

We have the White Louse. His name is Donal Dump. He is the Resident, and he heads the Dump maladministration, squillionaires and a sprain-surgeon, a Cabinet of all the talons. They call him a racial spigot. He sees it as he calls it, which makes him spigot. He squitters Twitter on the shitter, and we titter after. He only squeaks for us. He is our mouthsqueeze. He has a background in constriction. Bill the Wall! Bill the Wall! He owes the Dump Hotel, wright here in De-Cease. He is a self-dealing man who once in his youth wore out the uniform. Then bone spurts struck, and he invalidated to the venereal front. A ployboy and a much-married man and father to the fair Larissa-without-portfolio who he’d love to give one…

I put down my prayer bookand sifted through a waveof fresh mournersgathering at a nearby grave.I didn’t stop to askwho’d died, I didn’t waitfor the eight pallbearerslurching toward uswith a casket in their hands,I didn’t even pause to wonderabout a young womanlifting her veiland applying lipstickunder a long-limbed sycamoreby the side of the road.For once, I didn’t look back.The dying goes on, it never stops,there was a new processionof black sedanswinding down the lane,but I didn’t hesitateto step around themon my mission to leavethese hallowed grounds.I felt so liberatedI couldn’t help wavingto a group of teenagersblasting musicand drinking beer in the parking lotbehind the chapel.…

Christian Marclay, 48 War Movies, 2019, Single-channel video installation Paula Cooper Gallery 524 W 26th Street, New York (212) 255-1105 www.paulacoopergallery.com Christian Marclay Through October 19, 524 W 26 Amy O’Neill: THE ZOO REVOLUTION Through October 12, 521 W 21 Veronica Ryan: The Weather Inside Through October 12, 521 W 21 Liz Glynn Through October 12, 529 W 21 192 Books 192 Tenth Avenue, New York (212) 255-4022; www.192books.com James Meyer The Art of Return: The Sixties and Contemporary Culture Tuesday, October 1, 7PM Eric Karpeles Józef Czapski: An Apprenticeship of Looking Thursday, October 17, 7PM Swann Auction Galleries, 104 East 25th Street, New York, NY 10010 (212) 254-4710; swanngalleries.com Upcoming Auction: Classic & Contemporary Photographs, October 17. Preview October 12–17 Portraiture forms the foundation of the sale with Irving Penn’s platinum-palladium print Cuzco…

Helmholtz: A Life in Science by David Cahan. University of Chicago Press, 937 pp., $55.00 In academic scientific biography, it’s the biggest names that justify the biggest books. It helps if the subject is reckoned to have “made the modern world.” Darwin’s modernity-making idea was evolution by natural selection, and Janet Browne’s magnificent two-volume biography accordingly weighed in at 1,200 pages. Newton’s world-changing discoveries included calculus, the laws of motion, the inverse-square law of gravitational attraction, and the compound nature of white light, which Richard Westfall treated (along with much else) in 908 pages. Albrecht Fölsing did Einstein (special and general relativity) in 928 pages. But academic gigantism has now become epidemic, lowering the reputational bar for the biographical door-stopper. Daniel Todes took 860 pages to write his outstanding life…