Innholdsfortegnelse for January 16, 2020 i The New York Review of Books

Nightmares in the Dream Sanctuary War and the Animated Film Donna Kornhaber “Extraordinarily engaging, psychologically penetrating, and intellectually absorbing. In short, this is a new classic of topical film studies and the literature of art and war.”—Booklist Cloth $35.00 The Ruins Lesson Meaning and Material in Western Culture Susan Stewart “The book explores the varied, volatile forms in which we imagine and remember and care for, or fail to care for, the made and given world. That care shows itself in Stewart’s own quality of attention, the range of her curiosity, the depth of her scholarship, the risk of her thought.”—Kenneth Gross, University of Rochester Cloth $35.00 Dark Lens Imaging Germany, 1945 Françoise Meltzer “Meltzer’s Dark Lens is based around a couple of dozen snaps which her mother took of…

To Calais, in Ordinary Time by James Meek. Edinburgh: Canongate, 392 pp., £18.99 The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner. New York Review Books, 399 pp., $16.95 (paper) It is 1348. Berna has stolen a book from her father’s library, and now she is getting the gardener to cut her a rose from the grounds of their manor house in Gloucestershire. These crimes, she explains to her cousin Pogge, are nothing compared to the one she had been planning, which was to take her own life by throwing herself into the moat. “Your moat’s not profound enough for drownage,” her cousin points out drily. And anyway, she has a new plan, to which the book and the rose are accessories. Her father is forcing Berna, who is fifteen,…

Rachel Harrison Life Hack an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, October 25, 2019–January 12, 2020. Catalog of the exhibition by Elisabeth Sussman and David Joselit, with contributions by Johanna Burton, Darby English, Maggie Nelson, and Alexander Nemerov. Whitney Museum of American Art, 279 pp., $65.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) We’re all stylists now. Stylists are the people who accessorize a fashion shoot. They source the shoes, jewelry, scarves, etc. that enliven the image and help viewers project themselves into the scene. If there is to be a prop—a bicycle, a vintage car, or maybe a pony—that too is the stylist’s job. Stylists mix up visual cues in order to announce the newness of the designer’s or editor’s vision. They are interpreters, and the…

Grinnell: America’s Environmental Pioneer and His Restless Drive to Save the West by John Taliaferro. Liveright, 606 pp., $35.00 Natural Rivals: John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the Creation of America’s Public Lands by John Clayton. Pegasus, 276 pp., $27.95 The right-wing effort to privatize or obliterate many of the institutions of our public life—from public education to public broadcasting to public libraries to public health care—includes, not surprisingly, an unrelenting attack on a particularly distinctive tradition: the vast complex of public lands that date back more than a century and constitute an essential part of our national character. Donald Trump dramatically shrank the size of two newly created national monuments (Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah) to allow more oil and gas drilling; his administration has also opened the…

Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome by Guy de la Bédoyère. Yale University Press, 385 pp., $35.00 For ninety-nine years a single family ruled Rome. Five of its members in turn controlled the government and the army. But this was not a monarchy: none ruled by right, and the institutions of the old Roman republic remained in place—the consuls, the Senate, even the elections. This peculiar regime owed its origins to one remarkable man. Gaius Octavius Thurinus was just a teenager when he abandoned the quiet life of the Roman landed gentry in 44 BCE to take up arms against the assassins of his great-uncle Julius Caesar, who had adopted him in his will. For the next thirteen years he fought Caesar’s enemies and then his own. He took advantage of…

A CURRENT LISTING Swann Auction Galleries, 104 East 25th Street, New York, NY 10010 (212) 254-4710; swanngalleries.com Upcoming Auction: African-American Art from the Johnson Publishing Company, January 30. Preview January 25–30. A auction of fine artworks from the collection of the Johnson Publishing Company, a great institution of American publishing and an icon of African-American culture, features paintings, sculpture and works on paper from diverse periods, with 75 artists included. Highlights include Richmond Barthé’s The Negro Looks Ahead, 1940, and Elizabeth Catlett’s Sister, 1973, two important bronze sculptures. Significant abstraction includes Upper Egypt, by Kenneth Victor Young, 1971, Red Berries, by Thomas Sills, 1959, and Azo, by Frances Sprout, 1971. Also available is a suite of seven C-print photographs with etched text on glass, by Carrie Mae Weems, 1996, commissioned…

The Storyteller Essays by Walter Benjamin, edited and with an introduction by Samuel Titan and translated from the German by Tess Lewis. New York Review Books, 109 pp., $15.95 (paper) Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov,” rich in aphorism and vatic utterance, has for many years been a point of reference I return to when thinking about narrative and why its various forms play such an important part in our lives. Like all of Benjamin’s work, the essay stands in dialogue with a number of other texts that had talismanic value for him: not only by the author ostensibly under discussion, the nineteenth-century Russian novelist and short-story writer Leskov, but also Georg Lukács, Paul Valéry, Ernst Bloch, and Johann Peter Hebel. So it…

DAVID W. BLIGHT is Sterling Professor of American History at Yale. His biography of Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom, received the Pulitzer Prize for history. PETER BROOKS has written several books on narrative and the novel, including Reading for the Plot. A new book, Balzac’s Lives, will be published next fall. He is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale. ROBYN CRESWELL is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale. He is the author of City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut. FREEMAN DYSON is Professor of Physics Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. MERVE EMRE is Associate Professor of English Literature at Oxford and a Fellow of Worcester College. Her latest book is The Ferrante Letters: An Exercise in Collective Thinking. NOAH FELDMAN is the…

Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler by Cate Haste. Basic Books, 351 pp., $32.00 Like the stories of most notorious women, Alma Mahler’s is one of sex and power. She had a liking and a talent for both. Trailing a legacy of innuendo, anecdotes, and off-color jokes, she steers any biographer, however serious, to the enjoyable, lascivious path of the gossipy celebrity biography—but with better gossip and much better celebrities. She married or had affairs with so many important figures of early modernism that she has become, herself, a figure in the history of twentieth-century music (through her relationship with Gustav Mahler), art (Oskar Kokoschka), architecture (Walter Gropius), and literature (Franz Werfel). Born in Vienna in 1879, during the last hurrah of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, she died in New…

The moon was Chanel,show-offy in purity, an also-ran or might-have-been.The air chewed twigs from the bare trees,gorging on unkempt gardens.The healthy cold proved Prussian,stringent about lavatories and honor. I saw the afternoondarkly, the gloaming soonafter dawn, each day spentbefore its hand left its pants pocket. Those longafternoons of summer, the sunbarely ducking under the horizonbefore bobbing up, well, that was being young.So much to look forward to,the body waiting to angle its desires.Winter, that was another thing.…

The Organs of Sense by Adam Ehrlich Sachs. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 227 pp., $26.00 The German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the main character of Adam Sachs’s debut novel, The Organs of Sense, had a minor obsession with telescopes. His hero was Johannes Kepler, the mathematician who had invented the refracting astronomical telescope in 1611. “Kepler, thanks to the force of his genius, has discovered a telescope whose glasses are convex,” Leibniz announced in a letter to a friend in 1679. Kepler’s glasses were “far more excellent than others”—more durable than the silver mirror in Isaac Newton’s reflecting telescope, more powerful than the concave eyepiece Galileo Galilei gazed through, in which the evening star appeared only thirty times bigger than it did to the naked eye. Elsewhere, Leibniz rebuffed René…

De Gaulle by Julian Jackson. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 887 pp., $39.95 French president Charles de Gaulle’s press conferences in the 1960s were early masterpieces of live television. Towering above the journalists crammed beneath his rostrum—he was six foot four inches tall—he would invite question after question before ignoring them all to embark on one of his renowned tours d’horizon. A contemporary cartoon from Le Figaro shows him, glasses in hand. “I believe I heard,” he is saying, “from the back of the room, someone failing to ask me the question that I will now answer.” The capacious double-breasted suits underlined how far he, and France, had come since that glorious summer in 1944 when a younger, trimmer General de Gaulle in belted uniform had pronounced Paris liberated from the…

VALENTINE’S DAY 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 in his works (wildflowers, the Tudor rose, sprigs of berries, and bees). The quotations are printed in a subtle pale gray calligraphic font on the palest of pale yellow backgrounds. #05-24249 • $95 SHAKESPEARE SONNET 116 MÖBIUS BRACELET Several lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 are engraved on this sterling silver möbius bracelet: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove. O no! It is an ever-fixed mark, that looks on tempests and is never shaken; it is the star to every wand’ring bark,…

NOT SO GLORIOUS To the Editors: Robert Kuttner is only half right when he says, “But the bloodless Glorious Revolution went beyond those concessions and began the tradition of constitutional democracy” [“Blaming Liberalism,” NYR, November 21, 2019]. The Glorious Revolution may have begun the tradition of constitutional democracy, but it was far from bloodless. Parliament’s choice for king, William of Orange, and the Stuart claimant, King James II, fought a vicious war in Ireland to decide who would rule England. The war lasted from 1689 to 1691, and the consequences still reverberate in Ireland and the United Kingdom. John K. Collins Winnipeg, Canada CORRECTIONS In Eamon Duffy’s “Sacred Glamour” [NYR, December 5, 2019], Pope John Paul II’s visit to Canterbury Cathedral should have been dated 1982, not 1979. In Joan…

Mourning becomes Joe Biden. “I have found over the years,” he writes in his recent best-selling memoir Promise Me, Dad, “that, although it brought back my own vivid memories of sad times, my presence almost always brought some solace to people who have suffered sudden and unexpected loss.… When I talk to people in mourning, they know I speak from experience.” The most moving thing in that book is not even Biden’s restrained and heartbreaking account of the slow death of his beloved son Beau. It is the two brief appearances of Wei Tang Liu, whose son, Wenjian Liu, was one of two police officers murdered in New York City on the Saturday before Christmas 2014. Biden visited the family home in Brooklyn to pay his respects. The father, an…

Some people despise doing laundry, but I don’t mind it, and I think we can all agree it feels so good to engage in something you don’t mind. To have a neutral feeling. My only two childhood memories are hearing the song EVERYBODY’S WORKING FOR THE WEEKEND and seeing the bumper sticker THE LABOR MOVEMENT: THE FOLKS WHO BROUGHT YOU THE WEEKEND. I gathered the weekend is the portion of life that is understood to matter. Now that I’m grown, I know that just means sex. THE LABOR MOVEMENT: THE FOLKS WHO BROUGHT YOU SEX. Though of course there are other things to be enjoyed. I DON’T WANT TO BE PITIED said my neighbor, after explaining to me she hated her children—not children in general, just her own. Her idea…

THE SINCLAIR PRESS TheSinclairPress@gmx.com HEROIC SICK PEOPLE The Automobile and an American Town in the 20th Century by David Ball Terrifying, and real! The most destructive, dangerous, and wasteful device ever invented under the banner of progress takes over a city, a state, America. 9781513652993 • Paper, $21.00 514 Pages • History Available at Amazon. EYEWEAR PUBLISHING LTD store.eyewearpublishing.com; info@eyewearpublishing.com A WOUNDED DEER LEAPS HIGHEST by C.P. Mangel “An impressive segregation tale—not comforting by a long shot but true to its era and an intriguing experiment in textual form.”—Kirkus Reviews (Starred review) 9781912477258 • Paper, $23.00 664 Pages • Fiction Available at Small Press Distribution Author’s website: www.cpmangel.net. BAD SEED by Rick Lieberman "Expertly researched, Bad Seed reveals the haunting details about the mechanics of genetically modified foods. Compulsively readable,…