Innholdsfortegnelse for December 5, 2019 i The New York Review of Books

DAVID BROMWICH is Sterling Professor of English at Yale. He is the author, most recently, of American Breakdown: The Trump Years and How They Befell Us. ANDREA COHEN’s sixth collection of poems, Nightshade, was published this year. EAMON DUFFY is Emeritus Professor of the History of Christianity at Cambridge. His book Royal Books and Holy Bones: Essays in Medieval Christianity was published last year. MARTIN FILLER’s latest book is Makers of Modern Architecture, Volume III: From Antoni Gaudí to Maya Lin, a collection of his writing on architecture in these pages. RUTH FRANKLIN’s most recent book, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography. DAVID GRAEBER is a Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and the author, most recently,…

You marveled at the vein in the marble.The moment’s slight pulse when you approached.His blood murmured when you neared, so Ibelieved, and still do. When I returned toit, you were gone in the other countryof my head that will never, like him, age.Long was I able to stare at the vein.The giant must’ve just laughed and mocked him.Then he imagined the giant’s fall, and hearda restless quiet as far as Sokho.He thought of the river near the vineyard,its broad dreaming-stone. He knew it no more.The animals looked inconsolable.They knew their boy was lost to become king.I was supposed to photograph you both;but the stone sank in me and I didn’t;my eyes going between David’s and your eyesas the army, scattered, pushed us apart,the tumult blotted out what I shoutedto you,…

Herman Melville: Complete Poems edited by Hershel Parker. Library of America, 990 pp., $45.00 When he was twenty-six, Herman Melville published a lightly fictionalized account of his adventures in the South Seas as a young crewmember of a New England whaling ship. Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life became a sensational best seller in England and the United States. Between that prosperous beginning and the end of his career as a novelist eleven years later, he published Omoo (further tales of the South Seas), Mardi (an unwieldy allegory), Redburn (based on his youth), White-Jacket (drawing on his experience on a Navy frigate), Moby-Dick (an encyclopedic novel of whaling), Pierre (a darkly Gothic family saga), Israel Potter (a picaresque novel of Revolutionary times), and The Confidence-Man (a sardonic satire). As his…

Selected Writings by Alexander von Humboldt, edited and with an introduction by Andrea Wulf. Everyman’s Library, 792 pp., $32.00 Alexander von Humboldt: How the Most Famous Scientist of the Romantic Age Found the Soul of Nature by Maren Meinhardt. BlueBridge, 274 pp., $24.95 Humboldt’s Mexico: In the Footsteps of the Illustrious German Scientific Traveller by Myron Echenberg. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 236 pp., $39.95 Alexander von Humboldt was born in 1769, the same year as Napoleon, to whom he was formally introduced in October 1804, after his return from five years of intrepid exploration in the Spanish Americas, and whose elaborate coronation as emperor he observed in Paris two months later. Fearing that he still looked a bit rough (“It won’t do to look as though one had gone to the…

The Evenings: A Winter’s Tale by Gerard Reve, translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett. London: Pushkin, 317 pp., $14.95 (paper) Childhood: Two Novellas by Gerard Reve, translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett. London: Pushkin, 155 pp., $22.00 In 1947 the Dutch writer Gerard Reve published The Evenings, which would become the most famous post-war novel in the Netherlands. This plotless story is, depending on your viewpoint, either a deeply cynical or a very funny description of the last ten days of 1946, as seen through the eyes of the young office clerk Frits van Egters. He spends his days, evenings, and nights in Amsterdam doing nothing but working, ruthlessly observing his family and friends, sleeping, reflecting on his dreams, and talking to a stuffed rabbit. Despite being set…

A. K. SANDOVAL-STRAUSZ BARRIO AMERICA How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City “A path-breaking book. Challenging previous histories of the urban crisis, Barrio America excites the imagination and forces all of us to rethink the rampant xenophobia of our day.”—RAMÓN A. GUTIÉRRE Z, University of Chicago “Barrio America tells the untold story of a powerful force in revitalizing America’s cities: Latin American immigrants. Instead of erecting walls to limit immigration, America should open its arms to those whose talent, hard work, and ambition contribute so very much to our economy and our great cities.”—RICHARD FLORIDA, author of The Rise of the Creative Class “Barrio America is as illuminative as it is necessary, upending longstanding misconceptions about urban renewal and migration.”—CRISTINA GARCÍA, author of Dreaming in Cuban basicbooks.com…

Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America by James Poniewozik. Liveright, 325 pp., $27.95 Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matt Taibbi. OR Books, 294 pp., $24.95 James Poniewozik is the chief television critic of The New York Times, and his new book, Audience of One, tells a double story: the rise of Donald Trump and the rise of television. Poniewozik wants to show us that TV has everything to do with the formation of Trump’s character—his manners, his place in the commercial culture, his ability to track and manipulate popular sentiment and opinion. It seems a reasonable hypothesis. How good is the evidence? Trump entered the presidency, says Poniewozik, backed by “a four-decades-long TV performance.” That is not quite true.…

The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator by Timothy C. Winegard. Dutton, 485 pp., $28.00 If Alexander the Great hadn’t died of malaria in the sumpy outskirts of Babylon, on his way westward toward Arabia and North Africa (and Gibraltar and Europe?) in 323 BCE, the Western world and its history might look much different. That’s just a mote of what you’ll learn from Timothy C. Winegard’s The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator. If the Visigoth king Alaric hadn’t succumbed to malarial fever in the autumn of 410 CE, after sacking the city of Rome but not gaining control of Italy, who knows? If the Holy Roman Emperor Otto II hadn’t croaked suddenly at age twenty-eight of the same inescapable ailment, just short of consolidating…

Memory Palaces: Inside the Collection of Audrey B. Heckler an exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum, New York City, September 17, 2019–January 26, 2020 The Hidden Art: 20th- and 21st-Century Self-Taught Artists from the Audrey B. Heckler Collection by Valérie Rousseau with Jane Kallir, Anne-Imelda Radice, and others. American Folk Art Museum/Skira Rizzoli, 272 pages, $50.00 There are two stories, one might say, being told at the American Folk Art Museum’s current show “Memory Palaces: Inside the Collection of Audrey B. Heckler.” The first and more clear-cut is that the exhibition gives us a chance to see what must be one of the most discerning and wide-ranging collections of self-taught, or outsider, art in this country. There are top-notch works here by artists of varying degrees of recognition, many…

Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi, translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth. Catapult, 243 pp., $16.95 (paper) In an engrossing book published last spring called Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, the Australian writer Jane Alison makes a trenchant observation about the “dramatic arc” long considered the foundation for plot. Swelling to a climax and then deflating, it resembles nothing so much as a phallus: “Bit masculo-sexual, no?” Alison’s book offers alternative possibilities for fiction based on patterns found in nature, such as the spirals of fiddlehead ferns, seashells, or whirlpools; the meandering path of a river; the radiating shape of a flower; the self-replication of trees or clouds; or the cells in a honeycomb. These structures aren’t necessarily feminine—as it happens, Alison’s investigation of them is inspired…

It’s the eleventhhour on the eleventhfloor. We chose thisapartment (if notthis hour) for the light,though my father could,from any height, lookback. Below are oaksand magnolias and trackson which freight and passengertrains pass, and my fatherknows the difference bythe blowing of their horns,both of which he prefers,he says, to that other onehe’s hearing, by which hemeans Gabriel’s, disguisedas tinnitus. He’s remembering also,since it’s fall, the shofar HerbKarp blew for the new year—a sorrowing sound, healways said, especially ifyou were a ram. Thatday we moved himfrom the splitlevel to the eleventhfloor, we brought a fewphotographs and chairs,lamps to see thedark with, spoons,a cup. It was a kindof sky burial. Hehas his pocket comb.He has his wristwatchwith the busted strap,he has his walletwith a dollar. He’s gettingsmaller and smaller, his vastpast vaster. Looking…

Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts: Twelve Journeys into the Medieval World by Christopher de Hamel. Penguin, 632 pp., $45.00; $25.00 (paper) The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript from Genocide to Justice by Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh. Stanford University Press, 402 pp., $30.00 Toward a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World Through Illuminated Manuscripts edited by Bryan C. Keene. J. Paul Getty Museum, 285 pp., $60.00 (paper) Manuscript 286 in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, is a superficially unexciting volume, measuring ten and a half inches tall, eight and a half inches wide, and three inches thick, in an austerely plain modern binding. Produced in Italy toward the end of the sixth century, its 530 pages contain the text of the four New Testament Gospels in Latin,…

VIOLENCE & THE INUIT To the Editors In “The Highest Suicide Rate in the World” [NYR, October 10], Helen Epstein concluded that “traditional Inuit society was remarkably peaceful and free of discord among them.” This is a mischaracterization of Inuit ethnography. Jean Briggs, whose monograph Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family Epstein discussed at length, wrote: Readers of Canadian Inuit ethnography, my own Never in Anger (1970) in particular, have sometimes concluded that Inuit are always and everywhere pacific. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Murder was known in many—perhaps all—Inuit societies, and in some it seems to have been a very frequent occurrence (e.g., Rasmussen 1932: 17). Feuding was an obligation in some societies (e.g., Oswalt 1967: 184–185; Spencer 1959: 71) and there were cases in…