Innholdsfortegnelse for November 7, 2019 i The New York Review of Books

ELAINE BLAIR is a regular contributor to The New York Review. G.W. BOWERSOCK is Professor Emeritus of Ancient History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His latest book is The Crucible of Islam. LOUISE GLÜCK’s most recent books are American Originality: Essays on Poetry and the poetry collection Faithful and Virtuous Night, which won the National Book Award. MICHAEL GORRA is the author of The Bells in Their Silence: Travels Through Germany and The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War, which will be published next year. He teaches English at Smith. LINDA GREENHOUSE teaches at Yale Law School. Her most recent book is Just a Journalist: On the Press, Life, and the Spaces Between, a memoir. JOSHUA HAMMER is a former Newsweek Bureau Chief and Correspondent-at-Large in Africa…

Foursome: Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, Paul Strand, Rebecca Salsbury by Carolyn Burke. Knopf, 419 pp., $30.00 Alfred Stieglitz: Taking Pictures, Making Painters by Phyllis Rose. Yale University Press, 259 pp., $26.00 In 1973 Georgia O’Keeffe accepted a young poet’s help organizing her library at her house in Abiquiu, New Mexico. For seven years, C. S. Merrill spent her weekends with the great painter, who was in her eighties, cranky, and nearly blind, but still a formidable figure, attracting acolytes and interviewers and painting with help from assistants. The younger woman rarely asked questions—“if I wanted to last there,” she was advised, “I must consider it like a medieval court and keep a very formal relationship with Miss O’Keeffe”—but sometimes O’Keeffe would reminisce about her artistic beginnings in New York. She…

How to Grow a Human Adventures in How We Are Made and Who We Are Philip Ball “A deeply engaging crash course. Ball’s sense of wonder at biological processes is palpable. This awe evokes some much-needed humility. It is a book that requires us to reflect on our biases and preconceived ideas.”—Nature Cloth $25.00 Volcanoes and Wine From Pompeii to Napa Charles Frankel Frankel takes us across the stunning and dangerous world of volcanic wines. He details each volcano’s most famous eruptions, the grapes that grow in its soils, and the people who make their homes on its slopes, adapting to an ever menacing landscape. Cloth $27.50 Remarkable Trees Christina Harrison and Tony Kirkham “Truly wonderful. This beautifully illustrated book reveals just how much these useful, fascinating, dangerous yet beautiful…

BODLEIAN LIBRARY SILK CHIFFON SCARF This 71" x 22" silk chiffon scarf features an artful montage of Victorian and Edwardian girls’ books with enchanting period titles, collated by the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The spines, covers, and typefaces of these vintage books are delightful period pieces, as are the titles (which may bring to mind a certain person or two): The Girl Who Lost Things, Queen of the Dormitory, The Madcap of the School, The Worst Girl in the School, A Girl of Distinction, A Ripping Girl, A Girl of High Adventure, No Ordinary Girl, The Lady of the Hundred Dresses, and more. #05-FCBLS • $95 SHAKESPEARE LOVE SILK CHIFFON SCARF This 71" x 22" silk chiffon scarf incorporates favorite love quotations from Shakespeare, along with stylized illustrations of flowers mentioned…

1. Publication Title: The New York Review of Books 2. Publication No. 535-450 ISSN No. 0028-7504 3. Filing Date: October 4, 2019 4. Issue Frequency: Monthly in January, July, August, and September; semi-monthly in February, March, April, May, June, October, November, and December. 5. Number of Issues Published Annually: 20 6. Annual Subscription Price: $89.95 7. Complete Mailing Address of Known Office of Publication: 435 Hudson St., Suite 300, New York, NY 10014-3994 8. Complete Mailing Address of Headquarters of General Business Office of Publisher: 435 Hudson St., Suite 300, New York, NY 10014-3994 9. Full Names and Complete Addresses of Publisher, Editor, and Managing Editor: Publisher: Rea S. Hederman, 435 Hudson St., Suite 300, New York, NY 10014-3994 Editor: Emily Greenhouse, Gabriel Winslow-Yost 10. Owner NYREV, Inc., 435 Hudson…

THE FIRST CONCENTRATION CAMPS To the Editors: In her interesting review of Daniel Okrent’s The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America [NYR, September 26], Sarah Churchwell writes that “the term ‘concentration camps’… was previously used to describe the camps set up during the Boer War for forcibly displaced Africans whose rights the state did not wish to recognize. Their high concentration of people within small enclosures led to their name: an estimated 115,000 Africans were interned in sixty-six camps, some 20,000 to 50,000 of whom are estimated to have died.… The term ‘concentration camps’ was also used as early as 1897 by the American press to describe the internment camps, with their ‘concentration of misery,’…

BRENDAN SIMMS HITLER A Global Biography “Enthralling and enlightening. Revisionist history at its best.”—VICTOR DAVIS HANSON, author of The Second World Wars “Certain to spark passionate debate… Simms challenges some of our longstanding ideas about the man who ruled Nazi Germany.”—FINANCIAL TIMES “Brendan Simms has a bold hypothesis and he argues it with exceptional eloquence and force. This fascinating book will force us to rethink the strategy of the Second World War in a way that none other has.”—ELIOT A. COHEN, Johns Hopkins University basicbooks.com…

The beautiful golden days when you were soon to be dyingbut could still enter into random conversations with strangers,random but also deliberate, so impressions of the worldwere still forming and changing you,and the city was at its most radiant, uncrowded in summerthough by then everything was happening more slowly—boutiques, restaurants, a little wine shop with a striped awning,once a cat was sleeping in the doorway;it was cool there, in the shadows, and I thoughtI would like to sleep like that again, to have in my mindnot one thought. And later we would eat polpo and saganaki,the waiter cutting leaves of oregano into a saucer of oil—What was it, six o’clock? So when we left it was still lightand everything could be seen for what it was,and then you got in…

An Afro-Cuban plea guards over heart& head, that old rugged cross-treeof the South in the tropical air of Cuba, but it would take years in Madrid,then Matisse, & a daily dreamingof Paris before Wifredo Lam painted himself in a floral kimono,echoes of war tangled in his brushes,before he could bring himself to half-see those watchful polymorphic figuresin gouache on Kraft paper gluedto cloth canvas smooth as second skin. He said, “When I am not asleep, I dream.”The land grew whole by brushstrokes,an uproar of growth pruned back to vantage point, the first time I facedThe Jungle, big as a double doorto a secret realm. I close my eyes to step into vegetable silence, livingdesigns triangulated, into a kingdomof spirit totems in bamboo, sugarcane, tobacco leaves, & double-headed limbogrowing one with…

Edited and with an introduction by Geoff Dyer Paperback • 512 pages • $19.95 On sale November 12th The Bad Side of Books is the November selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club. To join, visit www.nyrb.com or call 1–800–354–0050 Available in bookstores, call (646) 215-2500, or visit www.nyrb.com “It is high time that Lawrence’s non-fiction had another airing.… For anyone who hasn’t read any Lawrence, I would readily recommend it as a good place to start. It presents Lawrence as diverse, brilliant, and strange. He was all these things.”—Catherine Brown, Prospect Magazine You could describe D.H. Lawrence as the great multi-instrumentalist among the great writers of the twentieth century. He was a brilliant, endlessly controversial novelist who transformed, for better and for worse, the way we write about sex…

Becoming Beauvoir: A Life by Kate Kirkpatrick. Bloomsbury Academic, 476 pp., $28.00 Diary of a Philosophy Student, Volume 2, 1928–29 by Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Barbara Klaw, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, Margaret A. Simons, and Marybeth Timmermann, and translated from the French by Barbara Klaw. University of Illinois Press, 374 pp., $48.00 The second wave of the American feminist movement produced a lot of books. The Feminine Mystique, Sexual Politics, The Dialectic of Sex—best seller followed best seller, each looking at how some combination of custom, law, and centuries-old ideologies led to the gendered divisions of labor and status that obtained in the US in the Sixties and Seventies: women concentrated in low-paying jobs or unpaid volunteer work, responsible for housework and childcare, largely absent from government and…

Never a Lovely So Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren by Colin Asher. Norton, 543 pp., $39.95 Nelson Algren arrived in Hollywood on January 26, 1955. He had spent the previous year rewriting a book he couldn’t stomach and running from a wife he didn’t love. He was agonized by the State Department’s refusal to issue him a passport—they distrusted his leftist political views—and he had wandered from state to state, from bus stop to cheap motel, desperate to find a place where he might be at peace to write the way he wanted to. He knew Hollywood was no place for authors of distinction but couldn’t argue with a thousand a week. He was soon in the company of the Austro-Hungarian director Otto Preminger, who had bought…

Henrik Ibsen: The Man and the Mask by Ivo de Figueiredo, translated from the Norwegian by Robert Ferguson. Yale University Press, 694 pp., $40.00 Henrik Ibsen’s last play, When We Dead Awaken (1899), opens on a late summer morning at a seaside hotel. The famous sculptor Arnold Rubek and his young wife, Maja, newly returned to Norway after many years abroad, are sitting on the lawn in a pair of wicker chairs, drinking champagne and seltzer and reading the newspaper. After some lighthearted conversation about the surroundings, Maja asks Rubek if he is happy to be home again. He’s not sure. “Perhaps I’ve been away too long,” he says. He grows irritable, they begin to argue, and soon Maja is complaining about Rubek’s restlessness. “You can’t find peace anywhere,” she…